My friend Zin queried "Still, I often wonder why The Beatles continue on as such an incredibly popular band?"
To which I responded:
Possibly because the Beatles, more than any other artist from the first part of rock and roll history, had a career arc that was long enough that contained enough stylistic development to make them a major starting point in modern music; everyone else got cut off short by circumstance, coincidence, not to menion plane crashes.
They defined the modern rock band as a self-contained unit that did it all: wrote the songs, played the instruments, did all the vocals, worked in audio pre- and post-production roles, took over artistic control over album art and publicity, founded their own record label, and starred in their own movies and promotional films.
In addition, they changed the focus of pop artists from the 45 rpm single to the 33 1/3 'Long Player' album by refusing to view the LP as merely the repository for a pair of recent hit singles and a bunch of substandard filler material, which is what you get with most albums prior to the mid-Sixties and is also the reason why most groups recorded prior to that time are best represented by greatest hits compiliations rather than individual albums ( I.e., albums like Sgt. Peppers or Dark Side Of The Moon are works conceived in toto and experienced by their audience as a solid listening experience; you heard these records all the way through rather than as a one song hit single on the radio; the albums of Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Coasters were collections of individual recordings that just happened to end up on the same LP together, rather than being assembled as a coherent song cycle )
Add to this the formidible production talents of George Martin and audio engineering skills of people like Geoff Emerick and Alan Parsons and their willingness to spend the time and money it took to realize the Beatles' sonic 'vision,' and you've got records that just SOUND better than many of their contemporaries' records. And the fact that most of this stuff was done on 8 tracks or less is pretty amazing, too.
Of course, this also means that we get to BLAME the Beatles for all the bad, bloated, bombastic "concept album" crap that's come down the corporate chute in the last 30 years, too. There's a direct line of descent from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" to Meatloaf's "Bat Out Of Hell," and not all of us are willing to forgive them for starting pop culture down THAT road. Or to put it another way: 45's had their virtues, one of which was they were SHORT.
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