Sick of James Blunt? Hate prog rock? It’s all the fault of the Fab Four, says a new book
IF YOU'RE A music writer and you call your book How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, you really need the smarts to back up that incendiary title.
The four young men from Liverpool who went on to shake the musical world reside in an inviolably sacrosanct place, their collective work held up as a particular high point in the evolution of popular music. Surely the only criticism of the band that could in any way stick would be from a mostly discredited “high art” perspective, wherein their deceptively simple arrangements and lyrics are compared unfavourably with those of the classical greats.
Even the modern "not as good as everyone says they are" naysayers have to acknowledge the pre-eminent status of The Beatles in the popular musical canon – how they progressed from the charmingly adolescent She Loves Youto the complex and resonant Sgt. Pepper'sin five short years; how their influence is still clearly transparent in today's chart-toppers; how they became such totemic figures.
To arrive at the money-shot contained in the book’s title, American author Elijah Wald takes a very long run-up. He presents an alternative history of popular music, “stripping away layers of past opinion” and focusing more on the unheralded mainstream acts of any given time instead of those musical stars who were canonised after the fact.
“It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music, that is rarely true,” he writes. “The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio.”
He cleverly dismantles the arguments of egg-headed music critics (those people who view rock music as being inherently superior to pop music) and exposes the pieties inherent in the form – that if something is mainstream and popular, it can’t have any artistic merit.
He traces how popular music has been delivered over the years – through radio, jukeboxes and television – and finds that the music that has really captivated over the years belongs not just to the likes of accepted greats such as Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Sinatra, Presley and The Beatles but perhaps even more so to the largely forgotten names of Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Frankie Avalon and The Shirelles.
These latter names, he says, have been written out of the musical history books by critics who have been consistently out of touch with popular tastes.
This argument is nothing new. Yes, critics can have a high-minded approach that is airily dismissive of the popular and the mainstream, but Wald’s thesis, that “there are no definitive musical histories because the past keeps looking different as the present changes”, tees him up nicely for his act of lèse-majesté on The Beatles.
He cites the case of the “King of Jazz”, Paul Whiteman, who was the most commercially successful musical leader of the 1920s. Whiteman, he explains, stripped his sound of “African rhythm” to accentuate European melody and became massively more popular in doing so. Some 40 years later, The Beatles would take the same approach.
WALD, WHO GREW up as a big Beatles fan, argues that the band, by discarding their early Chuck Berry and Little Richard influences, created a musical division between “white” (read rock music) and “black” (read soul, r’n’b, hip hop) music that has widened to this day.
“The Beatles destroyed rock’n’roll – turning it from vibrant dance music into a vehicle for white pap and pretensions,” he writes.
This "pap and pretension" can be best heard in the band's Yesterday, "an effetely sentimental ballad". For Weld, this and other similarly structured Beatles songs opened the door for Billy Joel, Elton John and ultimately, one would suppose, to James Blunt today. Whether you passionately agree or violently disagree with his proposition, you have to admit it is a brave and well-argued point.
And he doesn't stop there. When The Beatles stopped touring in 1966 and became a solely studio band, the resultant 1967 album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was cloaked in "a robe of arty mystification" ushered in the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
So, for Wald, The Beatles are to blame for James Blunt and prog rock. Over and above his argument, though, is the sense of liberation to be felt by criticising those who are never criticised. You could throw a bit more wood on this fire: The White Albumis overly indulgent and not really that good; the band's druggy mysticism period was a load of hippie nonsense; their latter albums were more fuelled by a sense of spite than anything else.
Blasphemy? Maybe. A spirited and informed polemic? Definitely.
How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, by Elijah Wald, is published by Oxford University, £14
