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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

I was a teenager in the 1980s. For some reason, the Beatles were never on the radio (at least not the stations I listened to). So, I grew up not really familiar with the Beatles music. I watched the documentary and was surprised by how enjoyable a lot of their music is. I was also surprised at how very little I recognized. You would think that with such a popular band I would have heard their music at least occasionally over the past 50 years.

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I grew up with their albums (my hippy mom had a few from their psychedelic period, my step father had some of their last few).

If you listen to the albums, not what the DJ's spin in the radio, you got a much richer tapestry of songs, maybe a greater respect for their creativity, inventiveness.

As an example, people unfamiliar with the Beatles complete catalog have of late been flipping over "Tomorrow Never Knows" [1] (from 1966!) and overlooked gems like [2] "Hey Bulldog".

And some people thought they were just "Yesterday" and "Yellow Submarine"....

[1] https://youtu.be/pHNbHn3i9S4

[2] https://youtu.be/M4vbJQ-MrKo

I love tomorrow never knows, the bass and drums are just unbelievably tight, and I don't have any idea how they were able to do all that creative sampling stuff using magnetic tape.

There was a technical constraint: you pretty much always listened to the whole side of an album so heard a bunch of songs. With many bands there were clunkers and fillers but surprisingly, as noted by the article, there were fewer — barely any, really — such in the Beatles œvre.

I only knew them through Red and Blue albums and somehow it created one vision of the beatles that is split from reality. So much I don't want to watch Jackson's movie.

Good stuff is good stuff.

I was surprised how 2000s kids enjoyed Michael Jackson's music, even those without parents feeding it to them before.

There were quite a few deep cuts and some of their influences there that unless one listened to every Beatles record and saw their interviews one might not recognize, only the big hits got airplay on genre stations (some pop, some classic rock, some countdown best of) 10-20 years later. I'm about the same age but had all their albums. The last few albums had eclectic mix of songs compared to earlier pop hits centered albums.

I listened to everything by the Beatles that I could get my hands on to make a playlist for my wife. The theme was "Beatles-adjacent but as good or better". The Beatles finally clicked for me.

I still ultimately prefer The Monkees.

Sometimes an artist is so influential that to go back to discover them for the first time, from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche ... when in fact they invented the cliches. Right?

I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.

I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.

[1] https://youtu.be/43OVNx4EXQg

True, but there's also the tendency of people to look at a fairly rich period of change and wrongly attribute the new ideas to just one or two popular people/groups. This happens a lot with the Beatles (you even get extreme ideas like the Beatles creating the genre of rock) but it's not uncommon with other bands from the 60's either (Velvet Underground, to name one prominent example).

If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.

I don't know: fuzz bass, guitar feedback, orchestral pieces in a rock song, the "concept album", reverse guitars/vocals, countless other studio tricks. I read Geoff Emrick's book "Here, There and Everywhere" and he goes into great detail on the new ground the Beatles forged.

Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.

The thing is, people tend to exaggerate how many of these the Beatles actually were first with. For example, here's fuzz bass from 1961[1], and another instrumental from 1961 with a lot of fuzz[2]. Both by Grady Martin, who's hardly a household name.

There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2WBBcH6OPU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6MNGHeEuI

It is true but consider also that whoever made the first song with a new tech which became popular actually was the first to truly make it work well enough to make it popular.

> from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche

That was my joke about Shakespeare in the root comment: his expressions are so commonly quoted that they have become cliche.

I was a teen in the 80s too. I was exposed to the Beatles via italo-disco and Stars on 45:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Uabw_Uhcc

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