Oh Yoko!

Have to shake my head at some of the comments on here.

1.It was all down to George Martin - Ah no, not really. Obviously without him things wouldn't have been the same and he could justifiably be called the "fifth" Beatle, but George went on to produce a lot of people after the Beatles but no-one matched them in terms of critical and commercial success or cultural impact. So I think The Beatles had a lot to do with the success of The Beatles, really.

2.They are overrated(even if I haven't listened to them that much) - Now if something like hardcore techno or Norwegian Black Metal is your thing and you disagree with the merits of The Beatles on the grounds of musical taste, then I can somewhat understand you.

Which is to say: I can understand why you are mistaken

And, also, yes I can partly, just partly, understand why some could find their unassailable position upon the top of the musical pantheon to be a bit predictable and boring. But that doesn't make their music predictable and boring. There is no getting away from it: They were the greatest band of all time. I've listened to lots of bands from the fifties upwards to the present day and they are for me, by far, by a huge distance, the absolute best. Now, I'm not saying that because that's what I've been conditioned to say and, being honest, they are a slightly predictable answer for "best band" of all time. I'm saying that because that's what my head, heart and, most importantly, ears have led me to believe. To say otherwise would be a lie. After all these years; it's still The Beatles.

The Beatles were so good it's frankly a joke. During the sixties - a time of unparalleled inventiveness and musical high standards in popular music - the amount of absolutely timeless genius songs that they pumped out at an alarming rate, was staggering and continues to blow my mind. If you are a person who can appreciate melody, vocal harmonies, diversity, inventiveness or musicianship in a band, and you've yet to really listen to them - Wow. You are in for a treat. Their music is life enriching and will stay with you forever. And that point about "really listening" to them is important. They are, of course, the complete opposite of an obscure band but their catalouge is pretty huge and the stuff you tend to hear on the radio - utterly brilliant as it might be - only scratches the surface of what they've got to offer. Most people I know have never even heard I am The Walrus for god's sake! And yet they think they know The Beatles...Pfft!...

Now if you have, extensively, listened to them and they still do nothing for you? I dunno? I suspect you could be some sort of android? Does your soul have working parts? Only joking of course! But, still, at the very least, I wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift with you for an extended time because I'd suspect that after a while you'd try to eat me and wear my head as a hat.

And as for the people who refuse to give them a fair chance. Those that listen to one tune and then bring their judgement down like a gavel and pronounce them OVERRATED! You guys are the absolute worst. Not just in this. In everything. I'm prepared to give any music a fair shot before I rush to judgement about it. For instance, I'm not a massive Pink Floyd fan, even if I own half a dozen albums by them, I can't totally say what my final opinion on them would be - because there's a lot of other Floyd out there. I must own over twenty albums by Bob Dylan and even to this day I can't say for absolutely sure whether I truly consider myself a fan or not.

Going off topic a bit here, but I absolutely despise people who tend to harshly dismiss things- cultural things usually - as "crap" instead of having the courage to at least try to understand. The worst. Your opinions are worthless.

3.The Beatles aren't truly important because their music doesn't reflect the time in which it was made - The Sixties was a tumultuous decade, to say the least. And I'd wager that the The Beatles and their music reflected the maelstrom of it all in a musical microcosm better than anyone else of the era. Maybe, possibly, nothing else captured the zeitgeist of those days better than their music did. They started off lovable and energetic, in the newly prosperous and teenage filled 1960s. Then their music matured and as the cultural wars, as such, became a more prominent feature of life they moved along with them - becoming emblematic of newfound youthful exuberance, then drugged out Utopian dreams of happiness, followed by darkening gloom and increasingly embittered bitterness as the dreams died and the decade waned. Their music was rarely as explicit as many of their contemporaries, but their time is definitely in the music - in it's subtext or just even the tone or feel or individual albums. St. Pepper's tells me something of the hopeful spirit of the summer of 1967, while The White Album speaks to me from the jaded perspective of '68, with the hippie dream dead and everything that once had seemed so simple and universal now confused and disjointed. Popular Culture and Music moved along at a fair lick during the sixties and yet The Beatles always remained popular and moved ahead with the times. They were some bunch of lads.

Oh yeah: Yoko Ono. She gets a fair bit of flack for supposedly being the root cause of their break up but I don't know if it's a fair charge. I'd say the break up was inevitable. They'd been together as a band for so long by the time it all fell apart. After all the life changing success and fame - not to mention the drugs, drink, money, women, egos - they'd all been through it was inevitable that eventually something had to give. They were teenagers when they started out and were men who had seen and done it all by the time it was done. Men with vastly different expectations of themselves and each other. Something would have given eventually. I can't envision an alternate history where Lennon and McCartney kept working together past 1970 and part of me is half glad that it didn't happen. They hadn't a chance to start to properly stagnate like their peers. Their catalouge is peerless. Whatever about the solo albums... Plus John wrote some really great deeply felt emotional tunes inspired by Yoko, so I'll thank her for that.