Quote:
Originally Posted by Pow R. Toc H.
It seems quite obvious that I have an objection to the claim considering I quoted the entire post and then called you a moron.
To say that the beatles' early work is not historically significant from a musical or cultural stand point is completely ludicrous.
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Yes, obviously that is what you think. Merely saying it is "ludicrous" though is completely useless and does not constitute discussing the matter, which is what I had asked you to do. It is not surprising that you were unwilling to oblige, as I doubt you have much more to add than insults.
Hard Day's Night and Help! contain virtually no musical innovation nor were at all influential to rock'n'roll at large. At most, you could put a case forward for the more famous worldwide singles being of a degree of importance and influence - that would be hard to deny. As for the albums as a whole, though, then no, not at all, and there is
no ground for claiming otherwise - something made implicitly evident by the point that you had nothing to back up your response. I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't even listened to the HDN soundtrack. It contains some of the most insipid stuff the Beatles ever recorded on it. There's a very good reason why the first Beatles album that is really widely spoken of in sparkling terms is Rubber Soul.
As for coming from a "cultural" standpoint, then that wasn't what we were discussing. Whether or not the albums were of any cultural significance is a silly thing to bring into a discussion like this. It's possible to say something is culturally significant merely because it sells well and is listened to widely across a population. In that sense, of course those albums were culturally significant, in much the same way that Nickelback's All The Right Reasons is of cultural "importance".
But above all, your mistake is the point that you fail to recognize that the LP was not a dominant format in the first half of the 1960s. They were put together quite haphazardly and with little concern for any notion of stylistic or conceptual unity. Singles were the main format back then, so when bands were mentioned, dedicated music fans and people in general didn't think of "that great album", but rather associated the band with a particular song or set of songs instead.
In sum, undoubtedly, the Beatles early "work" (in the sense of the singles) was in a number of ways musically influential and thus of importance. The LPs though were not, and no amount of name calling or I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I's is going to change that.
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Originally Posted by boo boo
It was a bit of a patch job, not much care went into the production of it. But c'mon. Two of Us, Across the Universe, Let it Be, Don't Let Me Down, I Me Mind and Long and Winding Road are all great songs, the only other song I don't like at all is For You Blue, and just about every other Beatles album has a worse song than that.
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I would like Let It Be more if THAT song (bolded) was on it, as that is genuinely an awesome, awesome track. But it was kept as a non-album B-side.
My feeling is that neither Let It Be nor Yellow Submarine should really be considered Beatles studio albums. Yellow Submarine was yet another movie soundtrack that contained only five new Beatles songs, two of which were by Harrison and one of which ("...Pepper Land") hardly counts. Almost all of Side 2 was written exclusively by George Martin. As for Let It Be, then it was released after the Beatles broke up and probably would never have been if they stuck together. Assuming that they had little part in planning or compiling it in 1970, I think it can be viewed as more of a compilation of material from those particular recording sessions.