It's a really interesting piece but I feel the need to question the premise that there's a "wrong" or "right" with art criticism, as if the purpose of a critique is to reveal to the reader the true state of an artwork — as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion.
I realize that "getting it wrong" could be a shorthand for "being so different from the historical majority opinion" but the piece doesn't seem to approach things that way.
It's significant in a way because I think over time majority opinions have a way of stifling minority perspectives on things that are most popularly seen as "great art". I don't mean to sound contrarian, I'm just suggesting that maybe consensus about a given work isn't quite what it seems all the time, that there are social pressures and dynamics at play that sometimes distort how people might consciously consider a piece versus how they might react to it completely independently without labels.
I also think it points to other things, like art perception being contextually dependent. People change and their tastes change — it doesn't mean one perspective is invalid, just that it was occuring in a different time.
Of course, sometimes people just don't fully appreciate something because it's new and are looking at it with a certain lack of imagination. But I also sometimes think we look back at the past as if it were preordained, more so than how we see the future.
One of the first things I do when I'm considering a piece of media is I read the negative reviews. Finding out the reasons why someone doesn't like something is a good way to see if you'd like it yourself. For instance, most of the time I'm going to enjoy a film that gets dinged for being "confusing" than I am for one that gets dinged for being "bland." Others might find the opposite to be true.
It's not that I'm necessarily going to agree with the negative reviews. But I definitely find them much more useful.
It's a sad state of affairs when we're told that there's only one correct opinion about a particular piece of media and dissenting views are "wrong." We lose the deep insight that comes from looking at who likes and dislikes a piece and why. And it's hard to truly like something when liking it is presented as the only correct choice from the start.
I do this for everything. Negative or low score reviews for products on Amazon are the most useful for deciding whether something might not meet my needs.
I've tried this for books and ended up not reading any books. Well articulated reviewers always seem to find pretty damn good reasons to dislike any book. Buying on recommendation has worked ok, I still end up buying a few that I can't get into, but at least I find some to read.
It's important to evaluate the negative reviews for yourself. Often enough they'll complain about things that won't bother me or aren't relevant to the product itself or what I need it for. The frequency is also an important data point. If a single review out of 1000 says that it broke after a day, it has far less weight than if 10 or 50 reviews complain about quality.
> Some people just have bad luck or like to complain a lot.
But this is exactly what you look for. How many of the bad reviews are people who seem like they whine a lot, how many are just unlucky, how many have seemingly reasonable complaints, etc.
How dumb are the bad reviews? If most are just stupid, it’s probably a good product, if you can find at least one review that really seems like it was by a real person with a real issue, it’s an indicator that some of the reviews are at least real.
Yeah, but my issue is I find products, almost all having quite a few bad reviews that all seem real and about serious issues, and then I end up only getting a cheap item because if it sucks at least I didn’t spend much.
I've had this issue too, actually. I think choosing a cheap version is a perfectly valid solution. Either the cheap item meets your needs or you notice things that bother you and that experience can inform your next purchase.
In some cases, I've instead decided that a completely different kind of product can fill the same need in a better way.
I've also personally seen a pattern in low score reviews on Amazon or other shopping sites where the person leaving the low score just simply didn't understand how to use the item properly, in some cases this is a majority of the bad reviews.
Another is when they had a problem with something external to the item itself such as shipping.
One time I was reading reviews of teapots on another company's (not Amazon) website. They seemed like really well-made beautiful porcelain teapots, and I couldn't figure out why there were so many people leaving disappointed reviews about the teapots cracking. Eventually after noticing certain details and reading certain reviews, I realized the reviews were all from people who had been using the teapots to boil water, as if they were kettles. Suddenly these comments went from reviews of the teapots to an index of how many people don't understand the difference between a teapot and kettle.
I feel like there's a big gap in retail websites for reviews that encourage more back and forth between the reviewer and reviewee and maybe some independent arbitration to draw this stuff out.
Something like a cross between an issue tracker and a lightweight court of law.
If Amazon were whacked around the head with an antitrust stick like Microsoft was in 2001, this is the kind of innovation that might actually flourish from newer startups.
This works for technology or products as well. The first thing I do when evaluating a framework is googling the phrase "technologyXY is terrible" and see what comes up.
Interestingly, I don't think I really found dislike counts to be very useful, though I do go for negative reviews on books first.
Negative reviews tend to be a bit more articulate and specific about what they didn't like, and why they didn't like it. Pain points tend to stand out a lot more than positive things, especially if you go into an experience with the expectation that you'll enjoy it.
That said, there's also plenty of occasions where I've found nothing useful in the negative reviews, but found some positive reviews compelling enough to try a book.
Movies, TV shows and music I tend to ignore specific reviews altogether, and just go by the description and overall positive/negative average from ratings. There are so many more dimensions that short form reviews generally aren't useful at all.
I wonder how useful it would be for a dislike button to require a brief statement explaining why. I'm not a fan of dislike/downvote buttons in general because there are so many different reasons why something could be perceived as negative, and what might be considered negative by one person might be a positive for somebody else. It just feels like noise to me.
Eh, tbh dislikes on YouTube were more of a popularity contest for the outrage du jour or a sign that some streamer told his followers to brigade something.
Given the gigabytes of data that just viewing the content generates for them, I'm sure they could correlate those actions. But given it took them many months to deal with extremely obvious comment spam... I have low expectations.
I distinguish between criticism and reviewing, where criticism is, ultimately, about putting a work in context, and reviewing is about telling someone whether a work is likely to be worth their time. Both can be done in the same piece, of course, and the longer reviews include some aspects of criticism at least to the extent of an after-action report: This work was good/bad, so let's explore what worked/didn't work to contribute to that, which is done in the context of the general language of whatever medium the work is in.
On the other hand, reviews don't need to do that, and the shorter ones don't, and criticism certainly doesn't need to engage with the question of whether a piece of media is at all enjoyable.
So a review can be right or wrong from my perspective based on how well it reflects my tastes.
Yes exactly. Proper criticism tries to leave preferences out and instead investigate the context of a piece and how it influences other work, how the work was influenced by the context in which it was created.
Look at a piece like Picasso’s Guernica [1] without any context and in all likelihood you’ll consider it an ugly, confusing mess. But then if you take some time to read the history [2] and it completely changes how you look at the work.
That's an important point. I don't believe reviews should leave out preferences. They should be explicit, yet distanced enough. I judge games through the reviews based on how I've contextualized a reviewer's likes and dislikes. My favorite reviewers might not like a game, but admit that the things that bother them might not bother somebody else and they point out things that might appeal to people with different preferences.
I think it's important to make a distinction between criticism as a formal, academic discipline and reviews which are meant to give practical advice about whether or not a particular work is worth the consumer's time.
The part that particularly seems closed-minded now is not seeing how others might appreciate new music that you personally didn't like.
A music critic can't just say "I didn't care for it" and move on - or rather, they could, but then they wouldn't write the article.
I think the lesson here is more for the editors: maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece? Or maybe we get a better picture now that aggregate ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes) are widespread?
> maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece
Objectivity in journalism may not exist, but most poor quality journalism I find is directly correlated to how big a fanboy that person is about the particular subject.
You need intelligence when approaching criticism far more than reverence, is I guess what I'm saying. If someone can intelligently relate to me specifically why they might not like the Beatles, or specific song, in a way that I can understand, I would consider that person more trustworthy than the alternative.
But that relies on me, or rather the reader/audience, to be open and receptive to challenging opinions.
You still need to be in the know to review it properly tho and that often is married with being the fan of the thing.
That happens more in video games reviews than in movies but often reviewer reviews some title in niche genre well but it isn't anything worth attention for actual fan because it doesn't do anything special over different games in the title or is outright going backward.
But the "omni-reviewer" that reviews everything that comes their way won't know that, they play say RTS or some strategy game once every 3 years so anything that seems pretty competent gets a good score even if compared to the peers in the genre it might be weak. Ability to communicate flaws doesn't help here really that much if reviewer by nature of their generalism doesn't even have point of comparison.
> they play say RTS or some strategy game once every 3 years so anything that seems pretty competent gets a good score even if compared to the peers in the genre it might be weak.
That's not how it is at all for games, though, is it? I mean, there are very few niche genres that gamers (even if they aren't reviewers) haven't tried.
A games reviewer will at least have already played the most popular games for each of the popular genres. You will find it hard to find a games reviewer who hasn't played the top RTS games, the top FPS games, the top Mobile games, the top RPG games, etc.
> That happens more in video games reviews than in movies but often reviewer reviews some title in niche genre well but it isn't anything worth attention for actual fan because it doesn't do anything special over different games in the title or is outright going backward.
But niche genres don't do well anyway. If the game is not a side-scroller, a platformer, a dungeon crawler, an RTS, an FPS, a point-and-click, an ARPG, a hidden object game, an RPG ... what exactly is it[1]?
If the game doesn't fall neatly into a genre, then it's not going to do well anyway, because ordinary players won't be able to review just like the reviewer won't be able to review it - what exactly do they compare it to?
[1] This is one of the problems that plagued Brigador, which didn't neatly fit into a genre and was a failure.
Well, okay, but here's my personal experience. When I created a Mastodon account, I decided to use it to post mini-reviews of accordion-related music from YouTube. (Because I play accordion and I'm interested in hearing unfamiliar kinds of music.)
I look around on YouTube for recordings I like. There are lots of recordings I don't like for whatever reason. I don't post them. Why bother?
So, nowadays, I'm not sure why anyone should spend time reviewing music they don't like. At all. What's the point? The slush pile is vast. Make the best collection you can of stuff you like. If other people find it good then maybe they'll start to trust your judgement.
Admittedly, I have a tiny audience, a newspaper is a little different, and sometimes people like to read a good takedown. But it seems unnecessary?
If something is extremely popular but you perceive something wrong about it of course that's a good reason to write about it.
At the same time many critics seem to just try to put artists down because that makes it seem the critic is above the artist because he can see the wrongness in the artist. Critics are wannabe artists.
> I don't see any upside in trying to tell people that some music they love is crap.
I guess it's just the wrongheaded logic of criticism: The critic must prove they are doing their job. They are "critics", right? Therefore they must criticize. :-)
>Or maybe we get a better picture now that aggregate ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes) are widespread?
Funny enough we are actually took a step BACK from marketwide aggregated ratings in recent years.
Using RT as an example, they changed their system in recent years so their shareholders had more control over the ratings, who can rate them and what is said.
They basically shifted from a simple internet movie rating site to slowly becoming another Hollywood mouthpiece with their selection of pro-Hollywood narrative critics and making it harder for normal people to raise opinions, we seem to be reverting back to the status quo.
The wide disparity the frequently exists between critics and audience reviews on RT always stood out to me as interesting- I frequently found that the wider the gap, the more likely I was to agree with the audience rating.
It'd be a shame if the audience rating became less reliable in that regard.
> Or maybe we get a better picture now that aggregate ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes) are widespread?
RT is not such a good example - didn't they recently start weighting reviews (viewer reviews count less and less)?
I think Metacritic still allows you to see the viewer reviews independently of the critic reviews. I remember using Metacritic in the past, and my general experience was that any movie with:
1. High reviews from the critics but low reviews from the viewers = probably trash, expect to be assaulted with some deeper meaning or message which is completely out of context.
2. Low reviews from critics but high reviews from viewers = Probably good entertainment, bring the popcorn but don't expect a deep message from the movie.
> as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion
Well if you're a critic you're supposed to have an informed opinion, something that is not just your personal, knee-jerk reaction but a well thought-out intellectual construction that explains what's good and what's less good and why.
Otherwise what's the point? I can get an opinion from any patron at any bar, or from dogs even.
The decision what is good art and what is not is a decision indivdiuals and/or groups within society take. Those indivdiuals/groups might not necessarily be in total overlap with each other. You might e.g. have particular sub-groups who enjoy noise music, something the majority of people wouldn't even call music. That sub group might consider a overwhelming fraction of popular music bad music. Similar a particular country fan might consider rap and techno not music at all, or bad music while they like their own thing very much.
Sometimes (often?) these critiques contain an element of social or cultural connotation as well. Techno definitly is hedonistic, rap and hiphop are connected to certain demographics and classes within society, as where the Beatles. That means a criticism should always also be seen in that light: Who criticizes whom from what standpoint? If that country fan dislikes the latest and harshest noise rock release that might be a good guide for fellow country music afficionados, but someone who likes noise rock might rather take that negative review as a compliment. Both sides could try to use the border they draw towards the other as cultural capital within their own ingroups.
That means when the Beatles became popular a lot of the criticism they got was also criticism the old generations had towards the younger generations. It was not only about the music, it was also about who decides what good music is.
Today (thankfully) we live in times where objectively good art is revealed as the delussional idea it always was.
I mostly agree and welcome your point, but as a footnote, I feel what complicates things is that music (like all art) is both a technical craft which can be rated somewhat objectively in terms of technical merit, while also being subjective in "judging" its cultural significance, evocative nature etc etc.
Not just that. Where the music comes from is also important. For example, a traditionally masculine music genre being suddenly performed by a woman, and performed well, will stick out. See Queen Latifah as an example.
History may judge your condescension to GPT-3 unkindly. It was, by any objective measure, the greatest AI development since GPT-2. Itself a landmark achievement.
A completely alternate explanation that I don't quite believe but can't pass up mentioning:
Perhaps the Beatles really weren't that great, but were massively popular for reasons other than master craftsmanship.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and few now dare voice a dissenting opinion.
(My own personal opinion is that they were great songwriters who never bothered to tighten up their production and performance chops. I disliked them on first listen, then gave The White Album very close attention twenty or thirty times, and that's where I landed.)
I became a teenager right airline the time Napster showed up and could download anything I wanted. I had a music collection in the 10s of gigabytes, and I’d never heard of the Beatles except in passing. Certainly nobody was pushing me to like them.
Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band absolutely blew my teenage mind. I listened to it over and over again. Truly a unique and incredible album.
My uncle grew up when it was brand new and relayed a similar story years after I’d come across them independently. His friend said “check out the Beatles!” And he said “that band with I wanna hold your hand? That’s a girlie band!” But took his friends advice, then proceeded to go home and listen to Sergeant Peppers a dozen times in amazement.
Maybe I could chalk it up to some unrealized bias but it sure seemed like genuinely interesting and good music to me.
Conversely, I recognize exactly one song from the White Album, and couldn’t sing a line from any of them.
Agreed, just my personal opinion I went through Beatles, Abba and Queen discography in recent years and honestly Beatles were the most underwhelming (for this 80s kid), Queen being good but not that great for my taste and Abba being by far my favorite on completely different level than the other two. I know it's probably not fair since music advanced over years, but if I had to choose only band I'd be forced to listen in deserted island from Beatles era it would still be Rolling stones or Beach boys rather than Beatles.
I'm listening every day 80s radio during lunch and dinner with my kids and think 80s/90s was peak music, 70s was pretty great and it went really quick downhill in 00s.
Interesting perspective. I will say that at dance clubs music stopped advancing at early 00s. Aside from hip hop that seems to be peak dance music (hip hop has pushed forward a bit since but not enough). This is to the point that clubs that normally cater to those in their early 20s now play music that was made before some of those clients were born as opposed to even one track from the last decade.
I now old and past 40, but would say it depends on the clubs.
There is still quite a lot of new electronic stuff worth listening to. Lots of it is derivative, but that has always been true for most pop music styles.
Whatever one may think about it, stuff like barker, raim, empty set, Laurel Halo, all sound very much post 90ies (the period I was a teenager, and started to listen to tons of electronic music).
I'm not saying I agree 100% but there's definitely something there. I was surprised when out of nowhere Justin Bieber coopted into a world wide hit in a genre that was in the clubs when I frequented them a full decade earlier (with Despacito). I'm not sure things like that would happen, it used to be that genres basically went out of style every 10 years or so.
That said, I wouldn't say things are standing still either in club music. I don't pretend to have been to a club in the past 5 years or so, but even though they played roughly the same genres there's definitely a difference in depth between the acts we danced to in the 00s and acts like Major Lazer and The Weeknd.
Maybe the genres are just sticking around longer and go through subtler changes. If you let teenage me hear Despacito I would've liked it but wouldn't be surprised. Major Lazer though would've blown my mind.
As someone who was out dancing at a club a few weeks ago, one mostly frequented by people in their early 20s, the playlist consisted entirely (not mostly), but Lil Jon, Lil Wayne, Missy Elliot, Ludacris, Usher, 50 Cent, etc. I knew all the lyrics and so did my date. Not so for any of the rest of the people. This has been my experience in the past 5 years of going out dancing at different clubs in the US Northeast.
There is this strange phenomenon where once something gets anointed as "a classic", people treat it as immune to criticism, and even consider not appreciating it as a sign of poor character.
Aside from the raw popularity of the Beetles, there's been all these books, documentaries, and academic work. It's put them into a category like Shakespeare.
And yet, here we are, and folks are criticizing them.
It's actually a national pastime, taking potshots at golden idols. The fact that folks don't do it much to the Beatles must mean, what? That folks probably like them?
To my mind, the best songs written by The Beatles are their later songs, written when the Beatlemania has receded. To me, they progressed from being a typical pop band to producing much more interesting and artful stuff. But likely for many at the time they digressed from producing vibrant pop hits like Hard Day's Night to inane psychedelic experiments.
The Beatles were a really, really good pop band - much better than typical.
Can't Buy Me Love, Hard Day's Night, Help!, Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Yesterday, Nowhere Man are mid-career Beatles, 1964-66. Most charting bands don't produce memorable pop songs like this over and over.
And then they made the more ambitious albums.
McCartney proved again later that he is an outstanding pop musician. Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, etc.
Exactly. It's not that critics weren't able to recognize the genius of The Beatles, it's that they weren't obligated to assume it's there.
They could see clearly about how they actually felt when hearing the music; they could see without the mist of the mythology that now influences us to see The Beatles as revolutionary.
They were allowed to point to Motown and say "this has better songwriting", or early Pink Floyd and say "this is more experimental/adventurous", and they wouldn't have to factor in things like 'influence' when evaluating how they actually felt when listening to the music.
> Perhaps the Beatles really weren't that great...
That's exactly what I think... The Beatles were my parents' generation, not mine but I heard them a lot. I'm listening to music from that era: but that'd be, say and YMMW, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, ...
I always looked at the Beatles as the commercial, pop, easy, and a bit "cheesy" band of their time.
The Beatles are still catchy more than half a century later but, yeah, even if it's an unpopular opinion it's just, to me, mass produced pop that's not particularly deep.
Production was done in 60s Britain—still recovering from WWII. With two tracks most of the time. Only around Abbey Road time, do the albums sounds decent by modern standards despite millions focused on remastering. Apparently they/studio finally bought better equipment in that time frame.
Performance, well the guys were in their early twenties. Let's see what anyone else accomplished at that age. There are certainly better soloists on each instrument, but virtuosity is not enough to make compelling music.
I think that's missing the point. My understanding, though I wasn't there, is that the Beatles basically defined what they did. They're no longer the best example of what they did, but that's because so many have built on what they created. At the time, there was nobody to compare them to. Their contribution is huge in musical history. When a sound is so common, it's hard to think what it might have felt like when it was rare.
> At the time, there was nobody to compare them to.
Why do you assume this? When Sgt. Peppers came out in 1967 -- which we now mythologize as a revolutionary step -- that same year you had equally adventurous records by Pink Floyd, The Byrds, Love, Cream, The Doors, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the 13th Floor Elevators, and on and on.
If you draw yourself back to the early 60s, then there's still nothing about their music that other artists weren't making. If you want to say that they made the "rock band" thing happen, then that's highly debatable because there were an absolute plethora of garage rock (and surf rock) bands around at the time, and I'm sure they were compared endlessly to The Beach Boys. But even if they did make the "rock band" thing happen, that's a result of their popularity at the time and not necessarily whether their music was particularly unique.
80’s kid here. I never liked any Beatles songs. Not a single one. And “classic rock” from the 60’s and 70’s is my go-to genre. I always assumed their recognition was more historical. They kicked off the pop band phenomenon as we know it today, and the base rhythms of their songs were no doubt influential. But I’ve never felt that their actual songs were very good. Many of them are downright corny and cringe by the time I listened to them.
> Fast-forward a handful of decades, and few now dare voice a dissenting opinion.
There are (mostly young) people who have started doing it, maybe in connection with a recent post in here which was talking about the lack of a counter-culture (counter to that post, we still seem to have one).
They're seen as precursors of today's "pop optimism", granted, not as commercialised yet as today's pop, but definitely the most worthy predecessors. In today's gloomy and uncertain age that commercialised pop optimism doesn't sit well.
> They're seen as precursors of today's "pop optimism", granted, not as commercialised yet as today's pop, but definitely the most worthy predecessors. In today's gloomy and uncertain age that commercialised pop optimism doesn't sit well.
Funny, that reminds me how some 17/18 or so years ago at school some classmate told me that the music collection on my MP3 player wasn't bad, but somewhat a bit "too happy", or some words to that effect :-) – and I did like the Beatles already back then (though at that point I didn't yet have their complete albums) and still like them.
That's how I sorta feel about Stevie Ray Vaughan. Take any individual song and it's great. Texas Flood, for example, was wonderful. Take his songs as a unit and he's repetitive as hell in his guitar solos. But then pair him with another blues legend like Albert King where he's not just mailing it in and suddenly he's great again.
I think SRV had massive talent but a limited imagination when left to his own devices.
"Great" is subjective. I'm sure there are many people that don't like the Beatles today, just as there were in the 1960s. Among the younger people I work with (<30 years old) many don't even know any Beatles songs FWIW. I think the Beatles were great but then there are other artists that I don't really like at all that are also considered great.
I have not heard a single Beatles song that made me want to listen to it again or sing along or hum the melody. I am almost 37, and think The Rolling Stones, Guns and Roses, Def Leopard, Led Zeppelin, and Tom Petty are fantastic.
Technically that doesn't mean they were bad at the time, that just aged much worse than the other bands you mention, so depends whether you rate them in context of their era or in present day, some things age bad, some age good.
Funnily enough I share same sentiment about Beatles as about Citizen Kane, I forced myself to watch it together with Casablanca and few other "classics" and it's horrible movie by nowadays standards and I'd say you don't need to see it even once unless you are really movie nerd.
Back in the day it was revolutionary and important I guess, but by nowadays standards it's utterly mediocre movie despite people praising it as something amazing, but to be fair I don't think I'd find movie from CK era which I'd like while I have no problem to find better artists from Beatles era whose music I enjoy much more and like them even nowadays compared to present day music.
And one more unpopular opinion from someone who experienced jail like environment I think even recent highly rated Shawshank redemption while very good and enjoyable movie is romantic unrealistic fairy tale (for women) and I'd rather recommend everyone to watch Das Experiment to see more realistic display of prison I can sign, yet I've of them is rated asking best movies in history and the other is pretty much unknown.
It maybe says something profound about the nature and universality of music vs the relative recency of movies as an art form. Music can be understood and enjoyed more universally. We can listen to music in languages we don’t know and thing it’s great. We can rarely watch a movie without any cultural context and enjoy it. Also movies as an art form have had to evolve fast over their short life, but music has existed for millennia. As a result perhaps old movies age out much quicker because movies need context but music can transcend time and context more easily.
I was a sixth grader living in Detroit when the British music invasion began. There was a lot of great rock on Detroit radio (entirely AM) at the time along with a fair amount of blues late at night.
In our school there was a huge amount of buzz about the Beatles before anyone had heard them. There were plenty of cynical kids who didn't buy the hype. But once we heard them and later watched them on the Ed Sullivan show there was near consensus among my peers that they were terrific.
For me it was the first time that I felt something truly changed everything. In time I came to become a bigger fan of the Rolling Stones because of the blues influence. But no one at the time was the least bit critical in the least about the Beatles. In time their new albums were eagerly anticipated. I still look at music as before the Beatles and after the Beatles.
Opinions are just that, and cannot be wrong. It is possible to not enjoy the Beatles at all, it's even possible to do so while recognizing what they did for music overall.
I do think the Beatles were (and still are) a little bit overrated.[0] My own feelings are that Sergeant Pepper is the only solidly-good album they released and for the rest, about half the tracks are good and worth listening to today, with the other half being anywhere from bad to dull.
The Beatles were very much an experimental and influential band and deserve recognition as such. Sometimes experiments end up as duds, and well, those are the tracks that don't get played on radio or movies these days :)
[0] Conversely, for 1960s music, I think The Doors are probably underrated, with a much higher hit-to-miss ratio than the Beatles. Well, I'll just continue to enjoy them both in healthy amounts.
I enjoyed your opinion but disagree with it. I like the Doors but the Beatles had a greater range of styles, and I think that has helped with longevity.
I also really like revolver, abbey road, the white album. Not every track, but more than half of each. So I guess we just like different music.
The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra.”
I actually agree with that. I find Sgt. Pepper's to be harsh and gimmicky in production (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty).
I appreciate their contribution to change in music, but not so much their actual sound. Sometimes I enjoy covers more, like Fiona Apple's Across the Universe. I don't know if that speaks to my sound preference or simply when I was coming of age.
Similarity, I never really liked Nirvana that much, but they certainly changed the sound of popular music. In both cases, was it really the band, or did they simply become the havee of change that was already happening?
Either way, you'll always get reviews that seem laughable in hindsight because significant change fundamentally creates a sense of culture shock.
> (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty)
It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound. Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material. When stereo was new, there was a tendency to overdo it, and that's what happened with stereo mixes of The Beatles: the older ones sound terrible and are not representative of what the band intended.
You'll often find the hardcore fans adamant that the songs must always be listened to in the original mono mixes, and this is a large reason why.
> It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound.
That's not quite right. First of all, Abbey Road was done fully in stereo right from the start, with the band's full creative input. Secondly, all the previous studio albums were all released both in mono and stereo versions right from the start, so contemporary stereo mixes were done for all previous albums, too.
What's true though is that after their first albums, once the Beatles started getting personally involved with the mixing sessions, they usually only bothered attending the sessions for the mono mixes and left the stereo mixing to George Martin and whoever the respective recording engineer at the time was, right up until around the time of the White Album, where they finally started getting slightly more involved with the stereo mixes, too. (And then like I mentioned Abbey Road was only done in stereo.)
The stereo versions of their first two albums were also hamstrung by only having two-track recordings to work with, so even beyond the initial tendency to treat stereo as a gimmicky novelty there wasn't much that could have been done beyond panning the vocals to one side and the instrumental backing to the other side, anyway. (Which is indeed an argument for preferring the mono editions of those albums, unless you need a Karaoke version of those songs :-) )
> Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material.
The only case where that is sort of true is with Help! and Rubber Soul, which were remixed in the 80s for their CD re-release, and where that remix has mostly supplanted the original stereo mixes. (Though at least those remixes were done by George Martin, too, and not somebody else random.)
Beyond that, there are also the recent remixes of the subsequent albums, though at least for now those are being offered as additional versions, with the original mixes still being available, too.
The article isn't about how The Beatles got bad reviews, but how Sgt Pepper was bad. I think that's borne out in history. The only populist song (to some degree) is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
> The reviewer admits that the Beatles were once good in the past
Sgt Pepper was a concept album that didn't work, but was released on momentum based on a previous track record.
I don't know about populist but it's also got "With a Little help From my Friends" and "When I'm Sixty-Four" which are both very well known.
And then "A Day in the Life":
> It remains one of the most celebrated songs in music history, appearing on many lists of the greatest songs of all time, and being commonly appraised as the Beatles' finest song. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Quote from computer pioneer Howard Aiken.)
If something is truly new, and truly valuable, with an emphasis on "truly" for both parts,it will be different enough that the conventional wisdom will reject it, but it will win in the long tun. That's because it isn't obvious in the current context; if it was, someone would already be doing it. Because it's not obvious, when people are first exposed to it, their immediate instinct is that it is worthless because non-mainstream things usually are, and it's easier to reject all non-mainstream things then to delve deeply enough into each one to actually understand whether it has value or not. In fact, there just isn't enough time to do so, and because it means overriding deep, long-held assumptions, it can be extraordinarily difficult.
It's the same in the tech business as it is in art.
An anecdote from my personal experience: When, in the mid-90's web sites had to try to actively sell their advertising space in order to get ad revenues, which made it virtually impossible for small sites to get those revenues, I had the idea of ads being distributed through hubs and targetted by tracking people using what are now called "tracking cookies"[1]. I presented the idea to the guy who had been on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine and called the best VC around a few months before, and who was heavily invested in traditional advertising, he said:
"I don't see how there's much money to be made here."
(To be fair, Ollie Curme at Battery Ventures did get it when I showed it to him.)
I think something similar is happening here on HN now with respect to a knee-jerk, snobby rejection of the potential of blockchain by people who have no idea what's being built or what it can enable, especially with respect to potential uses of zero-knowledge proofs in a blockchain context, but see the scams that have been happening which make it especially easy to feel safe in being rejecting.
Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles.
These reviewers were working from a larger picture than "is this a good item purely against the backdrop of pop/rock albums?"
Note that the reviewer mostly focused on the lack of content.
He didn't say that The Beatles couldn't sing well, or play instruments. Nothing of the sort. And he praised the production.
Today we understand that rock doesn't need content. It needs good sound, good vibe, skillful execution. Those kinds of stylistic elements are the content. You (mostly) don't go to rock for intellectual content, like intricate counterpoint, labyrinthine key changes or elaborate lyrics.
> Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles.
I often think it might be the opposite. A lot of the overly effusive praise for the Beatles seems to come from people who aren't very familiar with what was happening with music at the time, and act as if the Beatles single-handedly created modern rock (you get some of this from Velvet Underground fans as well). If you really dig into the music at the time, though, you see that there was a very rich mix of different musical groups experimenting with a lot of different styles that would influence what came later.
By the way, we can imagine a music critic when he had been a baby.
"Yesterday's lullaby sung by my mother was very sweet and I fell asleep like I was supposed to (mostly due to boredom), but beyond that it had little redeeming value. The lyrics were overly simple and repetitive, and it didn't stray from the major scale, except by accident, which could partly be attributed to the gaping lack of instrumental accompaniment."
Even worse are the smooth-brained douchenozles like Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, who reamed Led Zeppelin’s early albums, then bitched that the later ones weren’t nearly as good as the old classics.
Pathetic hacks like him never gave Kansas, Styx, Journey, or Abba the time of day. They loved burning up 1500 words on the existential tragedy that Van Halen wasn’t Lou Reed. How many people know Carry On Wayward Son vs. dried-up manlet Robert Hilburn now?
I think a lot of this is just the well-known "mere-exposure effect". The more you are exposed to something the more likely you are to like it and think it's good. A critic listening to a Beatles album for the first time has never been exposed before and it's inherently unlikely to sound great unless it's already similar to other music they are used to. But over the years since they were so popular later critics were used to them (especially since many other musical acts were influenced by the Beatles) and so it became more typical to consider it great. The same effect applies to the other examples in the article.
This review is as flawed as other roc lreviews, by making incorrect claims and merely asserting that oterh bands have better music, without any deal analysis, except for moaning about rock critics
> And consider this: Not only were the Beatles breaking their own rules, but each time they left behind the biggest money-making formula in commercial music. They would develop a new concept, unleash it, sell tens of millions of albums, and. . . then they would walk away from it.
> There really is no equivalent—not then, not now, not anytime.
It's unreal how dedicated they were to inventing entirely new musical ideas (or pastiching them together from many sources), and then on their next album they throw it out the window and create something new all over again.
You can listen to pretty much any pop album from any group in the mid-late 60s and know immediately what year it was recorded. Does it have tape loops/backwards audio? It was recorded right after Revolver. Does it have animal sounds or evoke childhood nostalgia? Recorded right after Sgt Pepper (granted, Brian Wilson started the animal noises thing). Is it stripped down and with very simple production? It was recorded right after the white album.
This is an interesting example of the structure of many modern (frequently political) blog posts. You start with an historical statement that has proved to be wrong, or (for politics) incendiary, and then have a long discussion about what lead to the error.
Yes, a NYTimes reviewer didn't like Sgt. Pepper. But lots of other reviewers did (Time Magazine put it on the cover, and loved it). The internet is big -- it is easy to find examples of bad predictions. And, because it is big, you no longer have to extrapolate from N=1 (although sometimes N=1 and things are repeated). I often remember the review of the new IBM VGA standard, which had no significant advantages (to the reviewer) over the older CGA. The Beatles got bad reviews because review accuracy (whatever that is) has a distribution that includes statements that do not stand the test of time.
The people in place to review popular culture are normally those who have built up a portfolio of critical material over the years. When dealing with young groups like the Beatles, many times, these people are NOT the intended audiences of the art. The Beatles in particular came around at a time of post WWII hegemony. They were born before or during and grew up after the WWII era. Critics of the era were used to artists being a certain thing, whatever that thing was. Then here come the Beatles, popular as hell and willing to reinvent themselves on every album. It's much easier to write about someone doing the same thing they've already done than trying to digest entirely new sounds. They rankled the critics, because their music was never intended for critical consumption. Their music was what they wanted to play and what they wanted to say.
Hell, this still happens today. Consider the following 5 songs from Eminem's portfolio:
My Name Is
The Way I Am
Stan
Lose Yourself
Godzilla
Now, granted, he's not a musician in the traditional sense, but each of those songs are very different. And even though this is a high school dropout, his work will be studied for decades simply due to his rhyming structure. And just like the Beatles, the method and manner in which he chose to express himself rubbed some critics the wrong way. He challenged orthodoxy and wrote the songs he wanted to write.
Music is highly subjective and critics are really just providing entertainment value in their columns, not some peculiarly valuable insight. Someone once expressed their real value/function in this subjective context: "I try to find critics who share my tastes, and then I listen to what they say".
Personally the only Beatles album I think has any truly great lasting value is Revolver, that's the only one I'll listen to occasionally, and after that it was mostly downhill - but that's just another subjective opinion, and of course many will disagree. Which is fine, if you like the same thing recycled over and over but just not as good as the high point. Maybe the critics were right? Maybe all that success went to their head and they got lazy and lost their way? The end of their live shows was the end of it? The White Album is just boring noodling-about-at-the-ashram, not inspired at all?
I think that's how critics make their living, tossing out opinions that'll get people all riled up one way or the other.
I tried many times to listen to the Beatles but I can't stand a single song. I really tried to understand the popularity, but it does not work on me.
I have close friends which are big music fans, they play music as well. We share almost all our tastes in music but they love the Beatles and I never got it.
My idea is taste is very tight to genetics and sense does not react the same for everybody. And I am very honest when I say I hate the Beatles!
I think there's a difference between "I don't like the Beatles" and those critics. You're not claiming that you're representative of a whole population or that the things you don't like about the Beatles are reasons why nobody else would like them either. And if asked to explain why you don't like the Beatles, you probably wouldn't give the reasons given by the critics in the article.
It's been bothering me my whole life because it seems so irrational. I love plenty of adjacent music, just not them. Same goes for Elvis.
My theory has been that it's because I feel like I'm being gaslit into believing they are innovators when they are really popularizers. Doesn't sit well with me how often those are conflated for the sake of marketing and an indifferent public.
it sounds like The Beatles are just not to your taste, although they had such a wide varying range of styles it seems unlikely there wouldn't be some song you'd think ok that one's ok.
I found a 3% rule on Youtube. It means regardless how spectacular/popular the piece is, there is always at least 3% Unlikes. Why this particular 3%, I don't know. Perhaps that's the landmark of honest review or it lies in the human nature.
> This produces the possibility of a Pop symphony or oratorio, with distinct but related movements. Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtapositions of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.
Everyone(more or less) in the UK House of Lords and Commons was critical of the US revolution.
I recall how all the classicists heaped scorn and umbrage on these emerging musical trends.
Why did Nietzsche sell just a few hundreds copies of his works during his lifetime?
Why was Bach forgotten and then suddenly rediscovered a hundred years later?
Why are many works that were regarded as masterpieces a century ago out of print today, and nobody reads them anymore?
Because any notion of "quality" applied to cultural products is invariably subjective, and indeed more closely resembles (intellectual) fashion than anything else. In the late 23rd century, people may decide that 1980s dance music was actually timeless genius, and the "classics" of 1960s counterculture were boring political drivel. It won't mean anything, just like today's assessment of the Beatles and Van Gogh doesn't mean anything.
Van Gogh was insane tho and makes doing business hard to impossible. Sever mental health issue do push people into poverty. He also made the most of oil paintings in two years before his death. It is not like he would had stashes of awesome paintings to sell and ability to participate in business.
The post death fame was heavily influenced by his life story being clusterfck - but those people were not the ones who had to deal with Goghs seriously disturbin behavior. They were safe, but Goghs contemporaries were not.
I agree with your point but I think you confuse things a bit by mixing up commercial and critical success. While there is some correlation, there are many cases of having one but not the other so I don't think we can say that the same factors explain both.
My point is essentially that "critical success" is meaningless, because critical opinion doesn't actually say anything about the work itself, and will flip back and forth arbitrarily often given a large enough historical timeframe. Commercial success at least implies that at one point, there were large numbers of people who enjoyed the work. But when critics write about a work, they are really writing about themselves, and there is no reason to value what they say beyond its applicability to a very limited temporal and cultural context.
I think a lot of what's happening is that there is not necessarily a correlation between the technical quality of a piece of art and its cultural influence and legacy. The former is far, far easier to evaluate "in the moment" than the latter is to predict.
For The Beatles specifically, I don't think it's a particularly controversial take to say that while the Beatles made great music, they (with perhaps the exception of Ringo) were unremarkable musicians. Lennon's butchery of the bass line in "The Long and Winding Road" is one famous example but hardly an outlier. I don't think we need to be too harsh on critics who compiled a long lists of technical failings in the latest Beatles album without recognizing its importance to the trajectory of pop music.
The counterexamples are perhaps even more interesting: cases like The Ramones's debut album that were commercial failures but recognized, correctly, by contemporary critics as the start of a momentous change despite its technical failings.
I never got the hype about the Beatles. So many people have told me, "well, you had to be there". Ok. So? What does that have to do with my listening choices now? I want to hear an enjoyable song, not "I wanna hold your hand" repeated 15 million times (and that's just one listening!)
EDIT: this is hilarious, and not unexpected. As soon as you say something against the Beatles, all the self-described "experts" come out to tell you "you're entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is wrong".
A fairly huge percentage of the people who really rock music and/or make rock music think the Beatles were great. (edit: but even within that group there's plenty of dissent and/or disinterest)
I guess I can identify with people who feel like they've had them shoved down their throat. I feel that way about a lot of Dylan and the Stones and a few other darlings.
Funny, though. I've never heard "you had to be there" about these acts. I certainly love the Beatles and was not there.
I do think that your experience with the Beatles, as with nearly all art, will be greatly enhanced by some contextual awareness on your behalf. If that's not your cup of tea that's completely OK though. There is no reason you need to like or care about any particular art. I'm sure you have other things in life that you enjoy.
I might think it's a bit of a shame, but I also think it's a shame that I don't like cauliflower.
I also hate cauliflower. What is a shame is how others will try to sneak cauliflower into your meals, despite your assertions that you have already explored the full breadth of cauliflower and still find nothing there for your liking.
"Oh, but you've never had it as a pizza crust!"
I assure you, I have. I still hated it. Stop trying to assume you know more about my lived experience than me.
So it is with The Beatles. I have listened to it. I do understand the cultural context. I still don't like it. So kindly please get off my front porch.
For the analogy to be apt we'd need to be sneaking snippets of Beatles songs into things you're already listening to, and even then that's not as egregious as tricking you into putting things into your body. I don't think that tracks with what I said.
It certainly says something about your experiences, though. People must have been attempting to cram the Beatles into your life in some extremely obnoxious ways if you feel like this.
I'm sorry you dealt with that.
If people obnoxiously forced the Beatles on me, I'd probably feel the same as you. I mean that sincerely.
> I might think it's a bit of a shame, but I also think it's a shame that I don't like cauliflower.
Have you tried it breaded (broken to smaller pieces) and deep fried, then after cutting, sprinkle salt on each piece? It's pretty good and popular here in Czechia, only other way I ate cauliflower I think it's boiled in vegetable soup.
The Beatles are like Tolkien. They had to happen for us to land where we did. Without Tolkien we don't get modern fantasy. Without the Beatles we don't get metal, punk, glam rock, etc. I think rap is probably the only modern genre that doesn't trace its lineage to the Beatles.
Yeah. I don't think that anybody needs to like a particular piece of art, but nearly all art is enhanced by some contextual awareness on the audience's behalf.
When I see people dunking on the Beatles or Tolkien, I think wow, there is a person who's really dedicated to not giving a crap about those forms of art.
Which is... fine, but what a loss.
You can stroll around a museum and treat strictly as a picture gallery, devoid of all context, or you can really get into things on a whole other level. So many famous works really come to life that way.
Is their music good (enjoyable) and Is their music influential are two totally different and unrelated questions. It is entirely possible that their music was downright terrible and unenjoyable, yet nevertheless influential for unrelated reasons. This is my opinion too, fwiw.
I don't care for your assertion of only two sides: "Beatles fans" and "those who don't put effort into understanding art."
In point of fact, all I really said was that "I don't get it". I specifically stayed completely away from making any kind of direct, critical judgement of the Beatles themselves.
Maybe you might be able to see how one might see such replies as overly-defensive.
I don't care for your assertion of only two sides:
"Beatles fans" and "those who don't put effort into
understanding art."
Well, that's an obnoxious assertion and I don't like it either so I suppose we agree on something.
However, that's not the assertion I made. Not even close.
I specifically said "those forms of art", not "art" in totality. I'm sure there's a lot of art you enjoy.
I also referred specifically to those who feel the need to dunk on the Beatles, not merely people who don't care for them. It's absolutely incomprehensible to me when people go out of their way to click on an article about artist XYZ simply so they can tell the world how they don't understand or don't like that artist. What an odd impulse.
Anything about the Beatles seems to draw out this sort of reaction (and counter-reaction, and counter-counter-reaction...)
I've never had anyone tell me that. I love the Beatles, and I certainly wasn't there. Nor did I grow up listening to them. That being said their early stuff, like "I want to hold your hand" is pretty basic 60's pop. Everything from Rubber Soul on is the work of well refined musical masters. My favorite is Revolver.
To appreciate the early stuff (and I agree there’s a lot of filler on the early albums) it’s interesting to listen to what else was around at the time. Any vitality of the early rock and roll artists was long gone and the charts were filled with schmaltz like Bobby Vee. In that context, “Please Please Me” would have sounded something like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did in 1991 when it arrived in a world of hair metal.
It's just consistently good stuff, that's all. To a degree no one else reached. You don't have to like it, but shouldn't be determined not to either. Forget the hype, it's over.
Also, the first album is basically enthusiastic teens manipulated by a record company. So try the more mature albums, starting at Rubber Soul as others said.
As for you had to be there argument, that wouldn't explain why I consider Rolling stones or Beach boys from same era better than overhyped Beatles. And honestly I was not really there even during Queen and Abba fame and find these two vastly superior to Beatles, which is almost unlistenable for me besides few great songs like Imagine (which I guess ain't even Beatles), Yesterday, So this is Christmas (is it Beatles?) or All you need is love.
I think a lot of people forget that pop-music is a business. Pop bands are essentially corporations in competition with each other.
I think the true legacy of The Beatles is that they were the first band to understand that about themselves.
But to then assign unique artistic genius to that output--that's completely ignoring that competition existed at all. Like how some fanboys seem to think Apple invented the smartphone.
Yeah as someone using Symbian years before iphone I always find it funny they kept calling it first smartphone. Heck even in my previous dumb Java phones I was already many years before running email client, IM, games, browser, calendar and was doing almost everything I'm doing with smartphone, just the experience was not that pleasant, I was fan of Siemens phones which allowed root access to file system unlike other locked brands where you could not even share your resources with others.
> I want to hear an enjoyable song, not "I wanna hold your hand" repeated 15 million times (and that's just one listening!)
Well, at one point Dylan told Lennon that his lyrics were shit ... so you're not wrong ...
People forget that the Beatles rode a technology wave, as well. TV uptake meant that the they were in the right place and right time to be a cute Boy Band. Audio recording technology underwent a vast shift and improvement in less than 10 years. The Beatles also happened to actually have talent and be very good musicians. And managed to have a band that didn't implode until after they generated a solid catalog.
Maybe they weren't first at everything they did, but they were close enough to first and had a reach due to their Boy Band years that nobody else could possibly match. So, The Beatles doing something novel was invariably how anybody not directly in the "scene" would find out about it.
People also forget that The Hollies were arguably more popular than The Beatles back in the UK. However, America was the music market at that point.
I don't think your opinion is wrong, but if you like rock music and you have a favorite band/artist, they were likely influenced by another band/artist that listened to or studied the Beatles or they have the Beatles as part of their ancestry tree of influences. There have been a lot of great artists/bands that weren't very popular (at least initially) but ended up having a major influence on music over time (e.g. the Velvet Underground). The Beatles have been one of the biggest influencers on music.
What does that have to do with listening to goofy, Jim Henson-esque stuff like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Octopuses Garden" and having people try to gaslight you into believing there aren't a dozen better ways to spend your time?
It seems odd to pick on one of the most universally reviled Beatles' songs to make your point. Three of the band's own members despised it. I don't even think the dozen fans of Maxwell's Silver Hammer would argue it's high art
Lol, it doesn't. The Beatles are one of my favorite bands and I really dislike some of their songs too. I was just trying to say that a big portion of their hype is because of their influence. You don't have to like them, but they deserve respect
No musician has ever produced 100% masterpieces. I can cherry pick bad songs from any artist you care to choose. Also FWIW some people actually like those two you mention.
Great music does at least one of two things - it sounds amazing, and/or it really says something that resonates with the people in a particular time. "Well, you had to be there" says that it fits into the second category, but not the first.
Another example is "The times they are a-changing". The lyrics were amazing and really resonated with a huge segment of the young. But if you just listen to it as music, you realize that Dylan can't sing, and it's not a very good composition.
I relistened to it just now and I actually really like his singing style on this song. I think the bare and minimalist style fits so well with the meaning of the lyrics that it adds a whole layer of complexity.
Of course a lot of people prefer the Byrds cover, which is great in its own way.
There's a lot wrong in that for such a short sentence.
The Beatles were not at all renowned for lip syncing. They grew up playing live in Hamburg and played countless live shows, both during and post-Beatles. Many of their most famous TV appearances including Ed Sullivan were performed live. I'm sure you can find times when they were required by shows to lip sync, but I find the criticism a little bizarre.
As for writing by committee, about 88% of the songs they recorded were written by the band themselves. Which committee are you referring to then? Perhaps you take issue with the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership? That would stretch the definition of committee to its limits. For you, any music written by more than one person is unacceptable?
Quite a few people here don't love the beatles. That's fine, they're entitled to their opinion, but I think they were fabulous. Every single album they made was good, all 13 of them, and their singles too. It's quite extraordinary consistency. Try writing a 3 minute pop song some time, it's not so easy.
Why were they so hated? Easy, why was every popular boy band hated!? They were popular and got the girls, people hate that. Look at the response to Justin Bieber, or any pop star. It's often irrational hatred.
I realize that "getting it wrong" could be a shorthand for "being so different from the historical majority opinion" but the piece doesn't seem to approach things that way.
It's significant in a way because I think over time majority opinions have a way of stifling minority perspectives on things that are most popularly seen as "great art". I don't mean to sound contrarian, I'm just suggesting that maybe consensus about a given work isn't quite what it seems all the time, that there are social pressures and dynamics at play that sometimes distort how people might consciously consider a piece versus how they might react to it completely independently without labels.
I also think it points to other things, like art perception being contextually dependent. People change and their tastes change — it doesn't mean one perspective is invalid, just that it was occuring in a different time.
Of course, sometimes people just don't fully appreciate something because it's new and are looking at it with a certain lack of imagination. But I also sometimes think we look back at the past as if it were preordained, more so than how we see the future.