The Beatles — On Their Old Sound

Currently, I’m supposed to be writing a series of critical articles on The Beatles and determining their actual level of greatness. Also asnwering if they are great then why? Discussed previously here

Why Is that needed? Well, without reasons for the greatness of any artist but only declarations given it leaves the room open for arguments against that greatness.

But In trying to deal with that I realized there are in fact two distinct periods of The Beatles — the old Beatles and the New.

So this article is sort of about the Old Beatles - but really about what Oldness means in modern media — as seen through the lens of an especially popular old band.

A sort of Quote

More than a decade ago now, but probably less than two decades I read a review where the hapless reviewer had been tasked with reviewing a CD boxed set of all the Beatles music. The conceit of the review was that he had never heard The Beatles before and from this he drew the hilarious comment (remembered from memory):

half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.

This will of course only be amusing to members of the aging cohort that remember who Oasis were.

The quote is unsourced as one cannot find anything any more via the internet, and it may not be wholly accurately remembered, but who cares if it is accurate either in remembrance or in its statement, pithiness beats out accuracy in matters of expression.

It’s true that Oasis does derive their sound from / was inspired by a number of different Beatles records. But not quite so much as half. And also to be fair to Oasis — they are instantly recognizable as who they are.

As far as sounding like every other band, critically it is usually considered a bad thing if one does not have one’s own style. The quality of an artist is often calculated based on their uniqueness and instant recognizabilty.

Uniqueness is a necessary component for a musical artist to have wide ranging Mana.

Nor that I think the Beatles didn’t have this, I just think it was a weird thing for a critic to claim. I guess it’s important to get in the zingers, even if the implications are not what one actually wants.

Dividing the Styles of the Beatles

The Beatles have 227 songs, and they do cover a lot of styles, but we can do one quick division of their songs into two groups: The songs that sound old, and the songs that sound modern.

So — I will need to split this over several articles if I hope to have any bit of it read. People on the internet are not going to read something that promised to be a 30 minute read. So this article is going to focus on just one thing.

Ranking the Old Beatles — first attempt

In Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé by Bob Stanley he remarks

If you had to explain the Beatles’ impact to a stranger, you’d play them the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night.

to which I’d have to answer you would really be assuming quite a lot about this stranger. Without comparing the music of A Hard Day’s Night to the other music of the time period how do you think the explanation will go other than — here is a bunch of old sounding music, youngster! (assuming the stranger who needs this explanation is a youngster and not an alien)

A knowledge of other music at the time would be at least a preliminary — I can scarce imagine a person stranger than one who knows all the music that was contemporary with The Beatles and yet not know the Beatles.

Going by this quote it seems that one can only really explain the impact of The Beatles to somebody who knows the impact of The Beatles.

The Old Beatles

Evidently for some people all the Beatles sound old — taking as evidence this subthread on a Hacker News post dealing with the Beatles critical influence:

Technically that doesn’t mean they were bad at the time, that just aged much worse than the other bands you mention, so depends whether you rate them in context of their era or in present day, some things age bad, some age good.

followed by

To me they are like Citizen Kane: it’s a great movie because what it did had never been done before but I have no interest in watching it ever again.

and that followed by

Funnily enough I share same sentiment about Beatles as about Citizen Kane, I forced myself to watch it together with Casablanca and few other “classics” and it’s horrible movie by nowadays standards and I’d say you don’t need to see it even once unless you are really movie nerd…

So there seems to be at least a subsection of people who have heard The Beatles and think it all sounds Old which seems a bit weird to me, and should probably be addressed.

Oldness in Recorded Music

Oldness in any mass medium is sort of weird, because mass media’s ability to replicate product means that old music coexists with new without problems. This same phenomenon can be see in books.

If the future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet, then it follows that the past is still here, it just hasn’t been evenly forgotten yet. But the point of modern mass media distributed via the internet is that everything can basically be distributed everywhere instantaneously.

Thus the products of mass media are theoretically outside of time, and the future and the past are here until some cataclysm destroys humanity.

But in practice of course they will still be understood as ‘old’ and ‘new’ and not timeless.

As I said above we know which songs sound old, just as we know what books when reading them seem old.

But we must ask a question here — is this ‘oldness’ just a form of aesthetic quality.

There are, after all, forms of oldness in the arts that are aesthetic in nature.

As we are all familiar many movies or books are set in the past and the authors when they write them try to make the past seem real. That is one level whereby the oldness something can be falsified, through pastiche.

Nostalgia for various periods help in the promotion of bands that have sounds that call back to those periods.

Ursula K. LeGuin in an essay in her book Language of The Night (which unfortunately I do not have a copy of right now so I shall have to paraphrase) said that fantasy fiction should not sound like normal speech, that is to say it should have a distancing effect and sound somehow foreign to our world.

And if you think about it there are lots of fantasy books that do not sound like the people in those books speak a contemporary form of the language they are written in although they do not exactly sound old either, in LeGuin’s. essay there were some various examples from books, one of which was one of Tolkien’s books so I must assume the phenomenon is reasonably well known to readers of fantasy literature.

Obviously most songs sound in some way like they come from their time, and some maintain that sound even after the time they first hit is gone. Some genres are very wedded to a time and place — so Grunge and Hip-Hop often sounds like the 90s (amending hip-hop to for most people, familiar with the genre, so even earlier hip-hop sounds like the 90s to those who first became familiar with the form in that decade), Electronica often sounds like the early 2000s, and so forth. We can vaguely place an unknown song by its genre, but not perfectly.

There are many musicians that sound like they are not contemporary either or that sound like musicians of the past, bringing this back to The Beatles — the term beatlesque is after all in use.

There are obviously many artists in the Americana category that try to perfect a sound that does not sound modern, but then to quote Oscar Wilde

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.

But the ‘old’ sounding Beatles do not sound aesthetically old, they sound legitimately old.

That Legitimate Old Sound

Here another blanket statement — The Beatles pre-1966 sound old and from Rubber Soul onwards sound Modern.

This is really the temporal marker between when music sounds legitimately old in our culture or not, things in the later 60s up to our present day sound like they could be from our day — unless they have a specific sound that dates them and even so that ‘sound’ can manufactured.

More will be said about this as the article goes on, let this stand as the introductory statement of the concept.

Old Music that does not sound Old

Just as there is music which sounds ‘old’ that is actually new, or old music that sounds ‘old’ that is old, there are various forms of old music that do not sound ‘old’.

The Rolling Stones

It was of course the ‘old’ Beatles that first succeeded, that broke through and paved the way for their later stuff. In contrast The Rolling Stones ‘old’ sound did chart, but only “It’s all Over Now”, written by Bobby Womack went to #1 in the UK.

The Rolling Stones charting with their old sound was just not as phenomenal and memorable as The Beatles, and really their first important song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” did not sound like it was part of their old period (obviously I am going to have to make flat statements like this in the interest of not writing a book, so some disagreement is to be expected)

But here is the Rolling Stones with It’s All Over Now, and come on, it sounds old.

The album that is from is 12X5 and I think every song but one on that album sounds old — that one being Time is On My Side which admittedly has some old sounding parts.

I’m not going to defend that statement of Time is on My Side not sounding old right now, as this article is already running overlong — but I will say there are a few other songs that do not sound legitimately old but maybe only aesthetically old, that is to say they sound like they could be done by someone today trying to sound old.

These aesthetically old sounding songs are:

Good Times, Bad Times — a pseudo blues song

Grown Up Wrong — a pseudo blues song

Under the Boardwalk — a cover

The two pseudo blues songs have a benefit in that they are not covers of actual blues, so written by Jagger Richards, trying to sound like authentic blues but not totally succeeding (one because of Jagger’s voice, two because the lyrics are slightly off), as such they could very easily be written by someone today trying to write a blues song. If you did not know Jagger’s voice, did not know the songs and were told it was modern (recorded on some shitty equipment to get that lo-fi feel) you might believe it.

The Under the Boardwalk cover sounds like ti could be modern because we know what the real old Under the Boardwalk sounds like, again if you did not know Jagger’s voice well you would probably think it was a cover sometime in the 60s but you might just as well believe it was a cover by some band that is touring now and is coming into town next week.

Our detour through the early old songs of The Rolling Stones done for now we can say that one really interesting thing about The Beatles is that they had a significant number of songs that went to the top of the charts that sound old, and even sounded old and out of date just a few years after they were released. Which is not the case for most of their contemporaries (by which I mean the other big groups of the first British invasion)

Their contemporaries hit with songs that sound like they could be modern.

Why Do Songs Sound Old

One reason why old songs sound ‘old’ is that we know they are old, in this way basically every Beatles song will sound old because they are mainly so well known as being of a particular time.

If you do not know a Beatles song, somehow, but it is sung by John Lennon, you will probably also think it sounds old because in the Beatles he had still a bit of a clear accent that made him especially distinctive — at least to me. Both George and Paul are not nearly as recognizable. So if you hear an unknown 1960s song sung by Lennon you might just think it sounds old based on the voice.

Another reason a song might sound ‘old’ is that it is a nostalgic song, many of The Beatles greatest songs were nostalgic, Yesterday and Penny Lane are two obvious examples.

Someone might say that another reason why songs sound old is that they were recorded using old technology but I doubt that is it, digital remastering of old songs is well enough advanced that it can obfuscate the origins, and at any rate lo-fi is its own aesthetic marketing segment — as was noted in the old Rolling Stones songs which sounded like they could be from our current era but only made to sound ‘old’

Perhaps the old sound gets so defined because it so exemplifies the fresh sound of a particular period, so that even if we didn’t recognize the actual song we definitely recognize the old sound.

To Quote Oscar Wilde:

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

But just as there are old songs that so defined the sound of their time or were so widely known that half a century later we can identify them as ‘old’ despite whatever digital remaster is done to them, there must be songs that are old but did not establish their sound or become so widely known. The old songs that might be new.

Just like “Let’s Spend the Night Together” these ‘new’ songs will probably have some signature sounds as part of them that sound older but the song as a whole sounds not necessarily placeable.

An example of a Not Placeable Old Song

Past, Present, Future — The Shangri-Las 1966

Part of the new sound of this song is the lyrics, some of them are hokey, like the obvious

The past is filled with silent joys and broken toys, laughing girls and teasing boys,

but that is followed up by

Was I ever in love? I called it love- I mean, it felt like love, There were moments when, well, there were moments when

Which sounds like a more clever modern phrasing (dependent on stylistic conventions of the era). The overall sentiment of the song is one that you do not expect from a band with a lush sound in the 60s. And thus the lyrics make you think it could be some forgotten song from the 70s or a more modern one, in which the vagueness of the song’s lyrics

But don’t try to touch me, don’t try to touch me Cos that will never happen again,

Might be in reference to a sexual assault.

The all spoken lyrics are also unexpected, a spoken interlude might be expected for the time period but all spoken seems to belong to a later time.

The song is orchestral and mixed in a way that might make you think it was the late 50s early 60s but again, maybe it is a modern artist, playing with some sounds from that time in conjunction with lyrics that deal with darker aspects of life.

If you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t expect this was by the group that did Leader of The Pack.

A Short Playlist of Unplaceable Songs

Following a playlist of songs that if an average person heard them, without knowledge about them, might place them in other times than they originate from.

Observations

The Rolling Stones songs and Past, Present, Future from The Shangri-Las have already been addressed.

There are two songs that are not in English. Probably the people reading this are not especially familiar with non-English language music, these two examples show how, with an unfamiliar language, and coming from an unfamiliar culture the music looses some important referents to determine its exact age.

Another two songs are from bands that have a nostalgic view, that does not mean that they are nostalgia acts like Sha-Na-Na or The Stray Cats but a nostalgic viewpoint on things does make it somewhat difficult to place. They are not wedded to only doing old styles of music but they pull on older styles more strongly than many groups do, and that makes them somewhat unplaceable.

In the end it seems most likely the Old Beatles sounding songs are victims of their own success — they sound old because we know they are old and furthermore they established so completely a particular sound that we cannot fail to hear the songs as being old.

In the next article we will discuss the New sound Beatles — those songs that do not sound legitimately old but sound either aesthetically old, modern or some weird combinations of the two. The songs that come in Rubber Soul and Onward.

This is the second in a series of articles by IG Agent 19 in which he will try to reasonably evaluate the legacy of The Beatles.

Other Articles that IG Agent 19 has worked on that might be of interest