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All you need is HATE….


I dated this girl for 5 minutes once. She was cute and fun and lived very close by. You know, all the things I look for in a woman. Anyways, we were driving somewhere and the Beatles came on the radio. I turned it up. She turned it off. “WTF?,” I exclaimed. (Or whatever the 2005 equivalent to ‘WTF’ was) And then she said it: “I HATE the Beatles.” The following is what I should have said in response to her, but chose not to out of fear of not getting laid.

You cannot HATE the Beatles unless you, in turn, hate all popular music from 1964 on, because if you really break it down, they were responsible for 99.9% of all major musical trends in Rock/Pop that have happened since. They were the first boy band that gave way to imitations like the Monkeeys, which eventually gave way to other contrived acts like Kiss and then back to boy bands again with NKOTB and ‘those who shall not be named’ from the dark time in pop that was ’98-’02 (roughly).
They were the first band to emphasize writing their own music as opposed to covering others. The majority of 1950′s rock consisted of country and blues redos, and, hell, even Hendrix spent much of his career playing other people’s tunes. Without that trend, that douche bag that used to show up to your college parties and “write” songs about girls to woo them into his room would still be a virgin. (see: me) But more importantly, I think we can all agree that original songwriting has been a plus.
They were one of the first bands to really push the envelope in the studio, discovering new ways to produce a record, giving way to the masterminds of production like Jeff Lynne and many others who I’m just not cool enough to know about. Concept albums? Hello? 
And if you weren’t into their polished, golden-boy image, you had the Stones. And the Stones are the Yin to their Yang, the Agent Smith to their Neo. They only exist to embody the backlash of the Beatles. The Beatles are going to write a verse, chorus, bridge structure? Well the Stones are gonna just repeat a riff over and over again and call that a song. The Beatles are going to spend hours overdubbing vocals to create a cacophony of voice over a given track? The Stones are going to do it in one take, and Mick’s going to be hopelessly out of tune, yet somehow make it all work. My point is that even the alternative to the Beatles is simply a response: An answer to their question.
So, you can ‘not really like’ the Beatles. You can not want to listen to them. That’s fine. I don’t want to listen to Steely Dan, even though when I do the math, I feel like I should. But I’ll never HATE them, because that’s dismissive and disrespectful. And you just sound like you’re being contrary to set yourself apart from everyone else. And, despite what you may have heard, it’s lonely in your little ‘cooler than the rest of the world’ cave, well unless there’s DVR. Is there DVR?
In conclusion, things didn’t work out with that girl.
side note: I’m not obsessed with the Beatles. In fact, I’m more likely to listen to Billy’s Joel’s ‘Piano Man’ than ‘Sgt. Peppers,’ but I get it. They’re like the Moses of pop music. Respect.

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