Rainard Jalen

But the Beatles were a pop band. Sgt Pepper onwards is also pop, albeit a more sophisticated type than what appeared on say Please Please Me --> Beatles For Sale. Pop simply means that the music is more focused on melody and hooks, and on creating enjoyable, catchy vocal/instrumental arrangements. About 97% of the Beatles' discography is precisely like this. It varies simply in levels of sophistication and depth of ideas and concepts. That this is the case does not detract at all from the excellence of this band and fans should not feel they need to avoid admitting it.

Saying that music is "just pop" is completely meaningless. "Pop" is as legitimate a format of music as is metal or hard rock or jazz or rap or soul or funk or punk or anything else. Saying that the Beatles were "just pop" is about as insulting and meaningful as saying that Mozart was "just classical" or that Nas is "just rap". Which, needless to say, is not very much at all.

Far as the early Beatles stuff went, of course John and Paul wanted to write it. They weren't even interested in having a free reign in those days. Paul for example wrote Love Me Do years before The Beatles even formed. Every stage of their careers was a part of their development as songwriters, and the signs of development are present all the time: "childish love songs" might be a way of describing the first two albums, but they're already by-and-large well away from that and much changed & expanded as early as Hard Days Night, 1964! But even then, their earliest stuff is always great. There's a good reason why they became so popular from Please Please Me onwards, and it's because those early hits were incredible, brilliant pop and people just fell in love with them straight away. The albums are consistently good too with very little filler. Loz, most detractors haven't even listened to any of the early albums and they know it full well! Even many serious Beatles fans have never bothered listening to the first 2 albums and probably skipped Beatles For Sale too, to say nothing of the haters.

"Childish love songs" does not describe the majority of the Beatles' early stuff any more than "mystical bollocks" describes the later stuff. It doesn't even describe a quarter of it. The majority of the album material is not really like that at all, there's a lot more variety, sophistication and abstraction going on than that. Hell, a significant bunch of the later songs are simply stories and character portraits. Drug-induced visions etc make up very very little of the Beatles' later lyrical material. But then I guess one'd have to have spent enough time with the albums to know that.

Sonically, the band were always astounding in their diversity and trial-n-error experimentation even early on. The influences are extremely wide and diverse, one needs only to pick out one of the early non-LP singles to see that. 1964, John's riff-driven I Feel Fine as the A-Side and Paul's Little Richard-inspired She's A Woman as the B-Side. They were always playing around in ways that most other acts were not - so many things were attempted early on it's hard to summarize. But again, one'd have to care enough about that sort of music and spend enough time with the early material to come across all this.