Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

The Beatles

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Nov 19, 2020
5 min read

Table of contents

What's so great about The Beatles and their works? / What should a rapper know about why The Beatles were so successful?

Summary

Their popularity coincided with the teenage years of the Baby Boomers, giving them more potential fans than earlier successes like Elvis

  • The idea here is that the difference in attention The Beatles have received over the years relative to other successful artists may be at least partially explained by the greater number of fans they had purely as a result of the timing of their success relative to the Baby Boom.
  • Once it became an international phenomenon in 1964, Beatlemania surpassed in intensity and reach any previous examples of fan worship, including those afforded Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. One factor in this development may have been the post–World War II baby boom, which gave the Beatles a larger audience of young fans than Sinatra and Presley had a decade earlier. (Source)

They wrote their own songs (both lyrics and accompaniment), which led them to gradually put more of their unique personality into their music

  • A lot of groups and solo artists have writers writing their songs, which seems to often lead to generic-sounding music.  Whereas, with Paul and John, they had very distinct personalities that became clear in their songs over time.

They are a group where each musician was able to take control of individual songs, leading to a greater variety of styles

  • John Lennon and Paul McCartney each went on to be extremely successful solo artists.

The group incorporated more musical influences than other artists

  • Paul McCartney in an interview with Howard Stern on why he thinks The Beatles was a better group than The Rolling Stones: "They are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences." (Source)

They often use harmony in their singing, and they do it better than other groups that used it

  • Their harmonies involve more than one person singing the lyrics, not just "ooooo" and "aaaahhhh".
    • If you listen to The Beach Boys, they use a lot of harmony, but it's just one person singing the lyrics and the others are going "aaaaaahhhhh" and "oooooooooo".  But with the Beatles you'd have at least John and Paul singing the lyrics together if they were going to be using harmony.
  • There's generally still a primary singer, so it doesn't sound impersonal.
    • If you listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, there's not really one prominent voice, so it sounds a bit more impersonal than when you're listening to a Beatles song and there's a primary singer.
    • A possible slight exception to this is The Beatles' "Because", even there though I would say John's and Paul's voices are a bit more prominent, it's not like you have four voices that are all given equal volume.
  • It seems their style of harmony was influenced by The Everly Brothers.

They had a great behind-the-scenes team helping them to create their music

They had a great producer/arranger
  • George Martin (producer at EMI)
  • He agreed to sign them after hearing their Decca demo.
    • After another meeting with Epstein on 9 May at EMI Studios in London, Martin was impressed by Epstein's enthusiasm and agreed to sign the unknown Beatles to a recording contract, without having met them or seen them play live. (Source)
  • This seems to be a case of 'talented person recognizes other talented people and joins them'.
  • He added the fancy-sounding orchestral accompaniments, which was one of the things that set the Beatles apart from other bands.
    • Martin's formal musical expertise helped fill the gaps between the Beatles' unrefined talent and the sound which distinguished them from other groups, which eventually made them successful. Most of the Beatles' orchestral arrangements and instrumentation were written or performed by Martin, as well as frequent keyboard parts on the early records, in collaboration with the less musically experienced band. It was Martin's idea to score a string quartet accompaniment for "Yesterday" against McCartney's initial reluctance. Martin played the song in the style of Bach to show McCartney the voicings that were available. Another example is the song "Penny Lane", which featured a piccolo trumpet solo that was requested by McCartney after hearing the instrument on a BBC broadcast. McCartney hummed the melody that he wanted, and Martin notated it for David Mason, the classically trained trumpeter. (Source)
They had a great manager
  • Brian Epstein
  • He pursued them after hearing them perform live.
  • This seems to be a case of 'talented person recognizes other talented people and joins them'.

Speculative: They were well-educated / well-read / broadly knowledgeable

  • This is speculation on my part but I suspect the Beatles' education maybe developed the habit of looking in a variety of places for ideas, rather than simply copying what's currently popular.

John Lennon used a lot of LSD

  • This is just speculation on my part but it could explain his very different sound, like how it might explain Jimi Hendrix's different sound.

They helped to redefine the album as something more than just a few hits padded out with "filler"

They were primary innovators of the modern music video

Links to discussions of the subject

  • Quora - Why are The Beatles considered the best music artists of all time?
    • Lance LaSalle
      • The Beatles were able to put out more good music in less time because they had two great songwriters.
        • "There are other bands who have dual singer-songwriters (or even more) who managed to keep it together for several years, but it was crucial in the sixties because it meant that, at a time when bands were putting out two or three albums per year, they had a greater good song to filler ratio. Bands like the Byrds or the Kinks that made equally good albums from 65 on were not able to put out as much music as the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys slowed down after 65 to one album a year or so, too."
      • TODO: Go through the rest of his post and the other answers

Why did the Beatles break up?

  • This is a great article on the subject: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why-the-beatles-broke-up-113403/
    • Summary: Once they became successful, they each became less willing to compromise and wanted to do things their own way.  But especially John Lennon, who always had a strong personality, and his behavior was possibly exacerbated by his drug use (lots of LSD and later heroin).  And their manager Brian Epstein died of an accidental drug overdose in 1967, and he'd apparently been a force keeping them together.


Follow me on Twitter