Meet the Beatles Again

 

A new box is coming in November featuring seven U.S. Beatles albums all released in 1964. Check out the video above if you're interested.

I am interested. I will always be interested.

Here's why.

Two conversations took place this week. One was with my friend Michael, as we discussed, yet again, new music versus old, good versus bad, and why we need to stop comparing everything to The Beatles.

Michael: “Saying it isn’t as good as the Beatles is not a useful metric for music, at least not for me."

I agree. But our conversation was more than that.

Me: "Music of the last 25 years simply isn't as good as it was between 1955-1995, and I included the 90's just to be nice." 

People seem to get very defensive about music in the last 25 years. Everyone always needs to point out the 10-20 solid artists they love, which is great.

"Have you heard so and so?"

Maybe the metric shouldn't be "as good as The Beatles" but instead "here's some music that isn't awful." The bar is so low, people glom onto anything that doesn't outright suck. That's worse than comparing artists to The Beatles or Aretha or the Stones. It's delusional. 

It's not about enjoying pop music. It's about recognizing the difference between well made records and poorly made records. You can love both. Just stop trying to sell mediocre as exceptional and maybe people will stop bringing up The Beatles and the Stones.

The other conversation was with a few strangers on social media, after I saw this pretty unfunny meme posted. (Sorry for the blurry pic. Enlarge if you need to.)

I understand the joke there, it's just really poor execution. But more important is that there are people, and I use that term loosely, on social media, who claim to love music but think this meme is an accurate description of The Beatles. A few too many think this is how The Beatles sound- a goofy, love sick boy band who took drugs a few years after they began and started writing psychedelic gibberish. Okay, that's not completely untrue. But you probably shouldn't be waxing Liverpool after admitting to only "knowing a few Beatles songs," one of which is "Imagine."

Right now, the fanatics are up to 75 pages of discussion on the Steve Hoffman forum about this new Beatles box, ruminating over mixes and other minutiae. I love these guys. That's what music should do to you. 

As press time, there are the cynics calling this $300 box a cash grab, though you don't have to buy the set. You could buy the records individually at $30 a pop. I don't think it's a cash grab. Multiple color variants, with a different bonus track for each country and alternate art are all cash grabs. A new way of hearing great music is not a cash grab. For some, like those social media Beatles mockers, this could be the very first time they experience this amazing music. Though, my gut feeling is that they couldn't care less.

There needs to be a middle ground, somewhere between "all new music sucks because it isn't as good as The Beatles" and "Just listen to any old crap and let the kids have fun." I do believe the less the younger generation pays attention to musical history, the worse music is going to get. 

I once said this to a customer many years ago. He laughed in my face, but then a few days later, came back to apologize, saying, "The more I thought about what you said, the more it made sense." I believe the subject was Jessica Simpson and her new CD which I thought was crap.

I said, "If you bring home a new puppy and it pees on the couch, you need to stop him. If you coddle him, and just chalk it up to the pup's inexperience, he'll continue to pee on the couch. No one got angry, so the puppy thinks it's okay."