I love those lines! The performance is just as amazing; the way he draws out "tax deductible charity organizations" is one of the best moments on HW61...but you're right from your side and I'm right from mine.

:laughing:

You need to stop stealing all of your opinions from Blender and Paste magazine.

I was speaking purely of lyrical content, I love the song but someone had said if you took away Dylan's lyrics you wouldn't have anything that could stand on it's own but lets face it Dylan wrote some pretty crap lyrics in some pretty amazing songs.

I assumed it was a jab at me. Its not trolling, Boo boo discredits an entire aspect of musical appreciation and I'm the one whose trolling.

The problem with you Ethan is if it doesn't adhere to whatever fickle fad you're following on a given day you make catty remarks about it.

Explain to me how 3 foolish icons in a row is any retort. This is no different than Mr. Dave asking for paragraphs from jibber in the Corp thread. The only difference here is that I don't have breasts. Give it a rest.

As for the Dylan lyrics, I don't see how those are bad, its more for aural acrobatics than it is supposed to be some monument to good writing. The words have purpose, its just a musical one.

Well I'm never dumb enough to base my entire musical opinion on how much soul something has and how much soul another poster has. Which is sad seeing as thats basically what your argument boils down to. I Wanna Hold Your hand touches me more than Sympathy for the fucking Devil ever will and it's one of the Beatles worst songs. See how that works? Now I could turn around and say because you disagree you have no soul but does that prove anything?

See I never said the lyrics didn't fit the song or anything even you admit it's not a 'monument to good writing' which is what I'm getting at.

Its not an aspect of musical appreciation. Its a bull**** card used by music critics. People like music for a variety of reasons, how much they enjoy it, how they connect with the lyrics or just how much talent goes into the musicianship and composition. Or in my case, just the pleasure of the way it sounds, melodically and sonically. Liking music because it has "feeling" is just bullcrap. Its complete subjective made up state of mind foolishness. You interpet something as having feeling and you base that on what? Probably nothing. I guess you measure it by how often the singer screams or curses, or writes about relationships, or how much the guitarist does windmill strums and scissor kicks, and then you think that makes an objective opinion? That you can write off a whole genre like progressive rock based on a reason as stupid and senseless as it has no feeling?

Yeah, I just don't like you.

God, you make it sound as if I'm attacking them. I'm not! You simply don't get it. The point is, they didn't invent any of the subgenres epitomized by those kinds of songs: they were not the firsts of their kind. Other artists had been being far more audacious for ages.

1966: Beatles come out with the Brill Building-inspired Revolver, the most sophisticatedly poppy album they ever managed, getting further away from rock'n'roll than they had ever been previously. Meanwhile, what was going on elsewhere? The Blues Magoos and the 13th Floor Elevators were pioneering psychedelic experimentation on a grand scale, Frank Zappa was debuting with the groundbreaking concept album Freak Out!, the Fugs and the Seeds were playing around with avant-garde inspired freeform jams, the Yardbirds were out with Roger The Engineer, the list goes on and on... - ROCK music was being born!

How so? The White Album is explicitly derivative and isn't trying to cover that up. It's a parody album. It takes and mocks every style there was in existence. From the first song and onwards (Back In The U.S.S.R.: a Beach Boys parody).

This isn't a discussion about originality, it's a discussion about innovation. The Beatles were not and were never musical innovators. They were pop geniuses, and followers of the pack when it came to their own experimentation. End of story.

The Beatles are one of the most cited influences on the development of progressive rock.

Yes, and that was all going on around the same time. That dosen't strip The Beatles of any originality, they had that to spare. OMG they took ideas from other bands?

Because thats unacceptable. Sure its not at all common for all bands to do that. Surely it isn't.

You take ideas from your influences, thats normal for any artist. The Beatles took their influences ranging from rock n roll to pop to psychedelic rock and made something out of it.

Sgt Peppers and Magical Mystery Tour may have taken ideas from the psychedelic rock movement, but the end result was not psychedelic rock, it was something different. Those albums along with Freak Out, Days of Future Past and Tommy really laid out the blueprints for the genre of prog.


And that on its own, is an original idea.

I'm afraid you're wrong. I would cite a lot of examples but I'm about to leave soon, maybe later.

That they are frequently "cited" doesn't make it true that they were particularly significant to either its existence or its development.

Am I criticizing them for that?

Again, I wasn't criticizing them for it.

Fine. Who are you arguing with anyway? Me, or somebody else? I wasn't disputing any of that.

Not really - parody had become a rock form much earlier, what with The Fugs and Mothers Of Invention etc. in 1966.

If I need to state the case a bit clearer, then I will. The point here is that The Beatles were not in any way shape or form the be all and end all of music in the 1960s and had very little in terms of pioneering musical invention compared to the likes of the big players in the underground. They were a great band, yes, but a truly cutting edge one, no WAY. Anybody who claims otherwise is in a state of denial.

And it is in that sense - the sense of claiming they were the greatest musical innovators of the rock era and the be all and end all of 60s music - that they are overrated. Such claims are so far from the truth, they're almost criminal. The great sonic revolutions were happening in entirely different corners of the map; compared to the underground creative standard of 67-69, the Beatles sound retro.

Who else sounded like the Beatles?