Hyperbole Corner: Beatles Edition

Tuesday, 22nd September 2009

The New York Times actually paid someone to write this about a new video game:

Luckily Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the widows of George Harrison and John Lennon, seem to understand that the Beatles are not a museum piece, that the band and its message ought never be encased in amber.
The Beatles: Rock Band is nothing less than a cultural watershed, one that may prove only slightly less influential than the band’s famous appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience.
In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made.
Never before has a video game had such intergenerational cultural resonance.

The terrifying thing about this is that the author of this tripe is actually older than I am.

Mind you, I could quite happily go another 10 years without hearing a Beatles song again. Don't we know them all far too well already?

The New Yorker has more on this. Recommended.

[Give me Country Music or give me death.]

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Jeremy

September 22nd, 2009 6:02pm Report this comment

Some years ago, I saw George Martin being interviewed, and he said he thought there was perhaps too much on the White Album - that if he had had a free hand, some of the material included would have been left out.

I would love to know what Sir George's running order for that album would have been - what he would have left in and what he would have left out, and in which order the included tracks would run.

Will we ever know?

Fergus Pickering

September 23rd, 2009 2:32am Report this comment

The most important video gamew yet made. I love that. Do you remember theTimes's comparison of Lennon/Macartney with Schubert. I dislike Schunert's songs quite a lot, but it's mnot a comparison I would have thought of. Which is doubtless why I am not a cultural commentator. I don't think Lennon?Macartney could hold a candle to Cole Porter. Imagine it taking two people to write a song, he said. Imagine!

Jeremy

September 23rd, 2009 1:14pm Report this comment

Fergus Pickering:

"Imagine it taking two people to write a song, he said. Imagine!"

I think you will find that "Imagine" was written by John Lennon alone.

Fergus Pickering

September 23rd, 2009 5:18pm Report this comment

Yeah, and it is a very crappy song, don't you think? Particularly lyricswise He needed McCartney to stop him... well to stop him doing things like that

elixelx

September 30th, 2009 12:30pm Report this comment

Yeah, I know! Music stopped being music after Ol Blue Eyes left Count Basie!
Oh! Alex! Thank G-d you are all alone in the wilderness! Why, the trees die, and the land dries up upon hearing your sighs of despair over the breakup of the Andrews Sisters!
Toady!

elixelx

September 30th, 2009 12:46pm Report this comment

Surely a hoi polloi name like Fergus Pickering is abjectly declassé when your loving parents could easily have named yo Railton Wambugu or other such princely name!
Surely Cervantes is greater than Shakespeare!
Surely you must see how inept, how beside the point, how totally inane are comments like "The Beatles are not as good as Cole Porter".
Well I say they are! In fact they are better! So there!

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