probably my spiciest take yet on mastodon:
the beatles are severely overrated
they get mentioned a lot because i think they functioned as an aggregate of styles, often making those styles accessible/palatable to their audiences - sometimes by virtue of being white/middle class enough - but when you look at basically every single phase of style the beatles went through, you can find other artists who did it better and who you should really be paying attention to instead. if i were teaching a class on this, i would basically never mention the beatles for this very reason.
you want to talk about 60's boy bands? go listen to the monkees instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcXpKiY2MXE (which i think is a better bop anyway)
you want to talk about the development of rock music? MOTOWN IS RIGHT THERE, and again, you'll end up listening to much better music lol, while giving credit to the non-white, non-male artists who defined the musical scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBkiBbO4_4 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C_3eYj-pOM
so in conclusion, the beatles are all overrated, and if you meet someone who says the beatles are their favourite band, that's like meeting someone who says bud lite is their favourite beer
so sympathetically pat their arm and order them the equivalent of a good microbrew to help them through that difficult time in their life
want to discuss psychedelic music and how the hippie movement really impacted the entire musical landscape? good news, jimi hendrix is RIGHT THERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsI15ei76bg and let's be real, that's better music than 'yellow submarine'. it also goes a whole lot harder so historically you can talk about how this style flowed into what we now think of as classic rock. and you can give credit to those non-white-dude artists too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdOkQ6THDVw