:: Why The Beatles Are Underrated

by guest parishioner David Hepworth

In the course of our forty-year love affair with The Beatles, something was lost. Their craft became obscured by their artistry, their artistry disappeared into their significance and their significance was eventually folded inside their legend. The result is that they are underrated for the work they did and overrated, if anything, for what it all meant.

Louis Menand's Iron Law Of Stardom holds that no show business career can be sustained longer than three years. After that time creativity is exhausted and public affection begins to flag. He defends his theory against Beatles exceptionalists by pointing out that they actually had a six-year career divided into two; three years as cheery moptops immediately followed by three years as psychedelic adventurers.

It's the second period that tends to impress us now. That's the one focused on by critics in the rock monthlies or people of Noel Gallagher's generation. It's not a complete surprise. There's a perceptible stylistic link between the White Album and, say, Paul Weller. A few years ago an Oasis-loving friend of mine decided to buy a Beatles record to see what the fuss was about. He bought *Let It Be*and was disappointed. He admitted later that he'd actually bought that one because the cover showed them looking most like his idea of a modern rock band. Like my friend, a lot of people are only comfortable with the idea of the Beatles when they appear to be serious, edgy, hip and of today.

While that second three-year career is not without its delights the first period was actually when their collective genius was operating at full tilt. To fully appreciate it from the vantage point of 2009 we have to shrug off our infatuation with fashionable gloom and shed the illusion that true artists are all complex and impenetrable. We must accept the fact that the greatest pop group of them all didn't consider it beneath them to make their records for 14 year old girls. When they made their classic records the false opposition between rock and pop hadn't yet been invented. This wall between the two has been the refuge of scoundrels and snobs ever since. To appreciate why we still underrate The Beatles you have to shrug off that prejudice and travel back to 1963 when they were far from a done deal.

There were things the Beatles did first. They took the previously separate skills of songwriting, arrangement, A&R, backing instruments and production and conflated them into the one skill; creating great records. Nobody had done that before.

The records were often better than the songs deserved. The Beatles weren't great songwriters like Cole Porter was a great songwriter. Many of their lyrics are banal in the extreme. They were only interested in writing the songs insofar as songs were a vital ingredient of great records.

They combined the qualities of a good vocal group with the skills of a capable instrumental group. The fusing of two previously separate competences created a new musical shorthand and explains why they sometimes seemed to be putting more into the record than there was room for.

When their chance came they were ready. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book *Outliers* they had 10,000 hours of live experience behind them before they saw the inside of a recording studio.

They were the epitome of a group. Groupness is not about having the people best qualified to discharge a certain role in a group. It resides in how well those people make up *that* group. Lennon's jibe about Ringo not even being the best drummer in The Beatles was off the point. Even if Ringo was not the best drummer in the Beatles he was certainly the best drummer *for* the Beatles. Then there was Lennon and McCartney; two lost boys who somehow transformed their antipathy into a creative dividend. Unlike most partnerships where creative tension is allegedly at work they managed to avoid discouraging each other. While clearly capable of loathing from time to time, it was the contributions each made to the other's ideas that struck the sparks.

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