Classic Rock Canon - The Beatles

When discussing classic rock, or rock/pop music in general, The Beatles are an unavoidable feature. If popular music is a planet, The Beatles are a moon. There is no group more significant to our modern conception of rock and roll; the very name has become something of a logo for the genre as a whole.

This all makes them an extraordinarily boring subject to discuss, mainly because there is very little left to discuss. I'm willing to bet that every music critic/journalist active in the past thirty years has written at least one article/review/blog post that referenced the Fab Four, and at least half of them have probably reviewed a Beatles album or discussed their history. The well is dry.

There are still a few things I consider worthy of consideration though.

- Unlike every other band I can think of (especially for the era in question) every song The Beatles put to record has a reasonable chance of being played on a radio station (with a few exceptions ["Wild Honey Pie", "Revolution 9", etc, etc]). They are one of the scant few exceptions to the "one/two a day" rule I mentioned in my introduction to this subject.
- The modern conception of twee music can be traced back to a single song, "Yesterday". That song is the blueprint for every Jason Mraz song you will ever hear.
- Similarly, punk music can be traced back to "Revolution", as well as a number of other 60s groups (that I'll cover later in the Apocrypha). The Beatles were one of the first mainstream groups to make significant use of audio distortion.
- Studio experimentation was brought to the forefront. People will argue that Pink Floyd did it better, but The Beatles sold more records with it. Among other things, this means that Autotune can be traced back to John complaining about how terrible his voice was.
- They would have never existed without Jayne Mansfield (more on that later).

Genre Dictionary - Twee As Fuck

EDIT: Changed title from "Fuck Twee" to the above in order to keep up my formatting. My sentiments, however, remain unchanged.

People who love/enjoy/appreciate the current trend of indie/twee music will often cite its ‘happiness’ as a reason for their own adoration. This is happiness in contrast with the ‘anger’ or ‘sorrow’ or ‘threatening atmosphere’ of rock music. Twee music is constructed from the same cookie cutter as dance music, except that dance music occasionally pushed some kind of boundary (see: Michael Jackson, Madonna, or even Lady Gaga) while twee seems content to wallow in its kiddie pool, dressed up in second-hand clothes and making ‘cute’ little remarks. It’s that cuteness that really gets me; that insistence that being random and silly is somehow preferable to acting like you have some semblance of dignity/class. I can see a fat man dancing (poorly) outside a window and it somehow seems like the perfect simile to use. The only people that find these twee-as-fuck nitwits cute or funny are people with similar outlooks on life. Everyone else (myself very obviously included) simply see an insufferable git prancing about as if their Target-bought shirt with a ‘clever’ slogan is somehow original, despite the fact that 10,000 copies of the exact same thing have been sold nation-wide.

More interesting to me is the supposedly negative aspect of rock music. Somehow, the passion embodied by such music is labeled as a bad thing. I’m the first to admit that sometimes things can get out of hand (as in gangster rap) put decided that anger and sorrow are somehow cliché and overplayed is a bit presumptuous. For better or worse, art can contain/represent emotions across the entire spectrum. Rap ranges from the cheerful and silly (“Birthday Party” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five) to the embittered and inward looking (“Message” by… Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five). Neither end of the spectrum is necessarily bad, but only one of the songs above is considered a hip-hop classic (hint: it isn’t the song with kazoo).

“But wait,” you might say, “’not necessarily bad’? Aren’t you contradicting yourself?” Of course not. I hate twee music because of how it deliberately scorns any emotion deeper than insufferable cheerfulness. I’d call it Mary Poppins music, but even that movie had a range of emotion (compare “Spoonful of Sugar” to “Chim Chim Chiree”) while twee music, as I said before, wallows. It’s a matter of execution; the darker emotions are seen equally in punk and emo, but I only like the former because the latter often gets a bit too cliché for my tastes. Same thing with black metal compared to classic metal; it’s a matter of degree. I’m not saying people who prefer the overblown, in your face emotion of, say, Linkin Park have bad taste. I’m implying it.

It’s a matter of degree and also one of ego. The perception that twee music is fundamentally better than darker music is absurd; mainly because (as I addressed above) other genres are far from homogenous. Hell, singular artists/bands aren’t homogenous (“Folsom Prison Blues” vs. “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog”; “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” vs. “I Got You (I Feel Good)”; “Love Me Tender” vs. “Jailhouse Rock”; etc.) so how could their respective genres be that way? There’s no use/point/need for a genre devoted to silly clichés. That’s what the radio is for.

PS: Fuck Jason Mraz