honestly, skyrim and the beatles hold the same place for me
historically significant... ...not because they were actually doing anything unique, all the elements were being done by someone else better at the time, but worked mostly as an aggregate for concepts and was there at the right time with a good marketing department, so that everyone ascribes this to them and not their inspirations lmfao
this is probably the hottest take i have ever put on this website.
the beatles mainly just gentrified ideas to be palatable to audiences. skyrim did much the same.
if you look at any musical concept the beatles did, you can p much find another artist doing it better. they got lucky to be in public imagination and placed themselves there via marketing. ditto skyrim (and its rereleases ad nauseum).
@wigglytuffitout pop music sideways has been and always will be the lowest common denominator of music. It's not popular necessarily because it's good, it's popular because it appeals to the widest audience in the most shallow manner.
Pop music never has been and never will be challenging to the prevailing culture.
@Anarkat ehhh i'm not going to throw all pop music under the bus THAT hard tbh, or popular things in general. most people tend to consider the beatles as groundbreaking beyond simply being pop music, but i'm just not seeing it, was my point - and ditto skyrim, which is presented as groundbreaking but isn't quite so much.
@Anarkat ngl (there is a vein of anti-beatles sentiment which is also very much still present against modern pop music - essentially, "if this is popular with teenage girls, it must be worthless and of no merit". and you'll notice that people who talk about the beatles being significant will often still hold this belief in there - they did their groundbreaking things after or in spite of rising to prominence with teenage girls most gripped by "beatlemania". obviously, i think it's bullshit.)
@Anarkat (however, honestly, i am cynical of such "popular is bad" statements not only with how that critique gets leveled along gender lines, but also because i've mainly seen it come from ...people who want to me to buy "counter-culture". it often gets used as this sort of tribalism, Preps and Jocks versus the Goths and Nerds, that i got way enough of in middle school and am happy to not revisit.)
@wigglytuffitout I'll admit that I tend to be a hipster stereotype. My problem with pop music isn't the tendency for fandoms to arise around them, but rather that once they "make it big" by the very nature of trying to keep such a big cultural machine running, it loses its ability to challenge to the status quo. They become the new status quo.
@Anarkat isn't that true with all genres of music, though? after all, the same thing afflicts rap, country, r&b, etc... even 'hipster music', where the status quo is obscurity, lol
@wigglytuffitout well, you got me there, but I'm talking more in the way that the kind of mass market appeal that pop music is defined by. Rap isn't being listened to by many suburban moms, and can be challenging to capitalism without fearing losing some listener base. Punk can be challenging to music standards. I'm interested in the ways music can be challenging.
@Anarkat you might be surprised by how entwined rap *is* with capitalism, and has been for a long time. same with punk. is it really a counterculture free of kowtowing to capitalism when there's Hot Topic in malls across the nation, catering to that aesthetic? similarly, there's a lot of suburban moms that DO listen to rap... especially when you look at suburbs and areas that aren't lily white.
but hell, even my private suburban high school for rich kids - most were rap fans.
