Right on, Burnsville Brave: what ever happened to choice and fair competition?
Aw c'mon...lots and lots of people, including musicians, find the Beatles largely inartistic, tired and often uncreative. Sure John Lennon was the real thing, and there are great Beatles songs, but they were still the first and biggest modern pop stars, a species that music would have been better off without.
And in any case what does this have to do with what sort of computer you want to use?? Do you value the opinions of MR posters that much??
And there it is...the final word on popularity vs quality. While some bands/products/services are great DESPITE mass popularity, don't try and deny that many, many stupid Beatles songs were just popular because they were the Beatles.
Many many stupid Beatles songs? What is your basis for that exactly? Even if we're just talking about their #1 singles, I'd be hard pressed to identify more than a handful of them as "stupid". What does that even mean? At most I can point to their early hit singles like "She Loves You" and "From Me to You" and "Love Me Do", which although not "stupid", were certainly much more simplistic boy/girl love songs when compared to their later work. But even those I don't think I would describe as "stupid".
Looking at most of their hit songs, I think they were hits a) because they were the Beatles, so they inherently did get more attention because the band became so popular and b) because they were genuinely good songs. Even the more simplistic songs they did later (from a content perspective) like Paperback Writer and Hello Goodbye were still pretty complex musically.
Of course, looking at just the hit songs ignores some of the importance of their albums as a whole, especially looking at Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album (as much as this album had problems brought about by the tensions within the band at this point, it still has some real gems in it), Let it Be and Abbey Road.
Anyway, "lots and lots of people, including musicians, find the Beatles to be largely inartistic, tired and often uncreative"? Really? Lots of them? What do you find inartistic, tired and uncreative in Rubber Soul, or Sgt. Pepper's, or Abbey Road, or Revolver? What do those lots of people find in those albums that justifies that?
I don't know, maybe we're talking cross-purposes. There's no doubt the Beatles were popular, had an immense impact on most of the world's teenagers, and are still heard everywhere. But if anyone's suggesting that in the evolution from tribal drums to today's music the Beatles played an important, revolutionary role I would have to disagree strongly. Any part they played was no more important than, say, Ricky Nelson or Roy Orbison's part.
Oh come on. No more important than Ricky Nelson or Roy Orbison's part?
I think this is really stretching things. The important evolution can be seen in the Beatles themselves, from their beginning to their end, and it's reflected in the rest of the music industry as well (as well as in competing bands, like the Beach Boys). When the Beatles started out, pop music WAS a lot simpler, relatively speaking. Listen to the pop music of the 50's and early 60's, and you'll find that both musically and content-wise, it was generally much simpler, much more focused on boy/girl love songs, etc. This is reflected in almost all the Beatles early songs.
But if you look at their evolution through the 60's, to the point that they were releasing albums like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, Abbey Road, etc. the change is really pretty dramatic. And those albums they released had an enormous impact on their contemporaries, as well as people growing up at the time listening to those albums. If you were solely going to go by influence, the influence the Beatles had on subsequent musicians is immeasurable.
I'm not saying that the Beatles were the only band to be involved in this change, as there were many (not to mention the influence of people like Bob Dylan, etc.). But to say that they had no more impact than Roy Orbison or Ricky Nelson seems to require ignoring a lot.
Because I do love Paul, Ringo, John and George except they and their familes really don't need to be any richer.
