'How the Beatles Destroyed Rock-n-roll' Has anyone read this book?

[malthaussen]

19. I'd point out that "909" was written in '62 or '63...

... it was part of the Beatles repertoire for years. They just didn't record it until '69.

If the point of the "Get Back" sessions was to get back to their roots, then it must follow that they themselves thought they had strayed from them. Or some of them, anyway -- the whole point of the breakup was that the group had different ideas on how to shape their music.

Saying that the Beatles broke rock and roll, though, may give them more agency than they deserve. It seems that the branching of pop music into rock and rock 'n roll camps proceeded concurrently with their development, but correlation is not causality. The fact that the Beatles had so much success moving into harder rock from the "Please Please Me" sort of tune may have (probably did have) a big impact on imitators who came later, though.

It's interesting to me that so many who claim to be Beatle fans almost always claim to prefer "late Beatles" to early Beatles, as if the original Rock and Roll material that the group wrote and performed were some kind of embarrassment. Given that they earned their early success based on the merit of those early embarrassments, it seems a bit disingenuous, to me. Without "She Loves You," we're never going to get to "I am the Walrus."

I think the social conditions of the '60s had a lot more to do with the segregation of pop into "black" and "white" genres than the appearance of the Beatles on the scene. And anyway, R&B also become harder and lest "dancy" in the latter part of the decade than it was when Chuck Berry was cranking out the same tune every six months.

I think if you look at music history from the beginning of recorded music until many decades later (classical music excepted), you can see a cycle of dance tunes giving way to more "serious" musician's music as a new generation begins to take itself more seriously than an earlier. Swing gives way to bop, rock and roll gives way to harder rock and then swings back to Disco, which while not rock, is definitely dance-oriented, rather than oriented towards virtuosity. The Beatles were able to straddle both trends, and so were a few other acts (hell, the Bee Gees were balladeers before they started doing dance music).

-- Mal