BTFO: Scrauffi Fags get itt

>Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason.

The Rolling Stones disliked the Beatles so much that they begged Lennon and McCartney to write a song for them; went to the Beatles’ parties; attended the Beatles’ recording sessions; appeared on the Beatles’ records and got the Beatles to appear on their own. Eric Clapton, a principled hero of rock, showed his loathing for everything the Beatles stood for by becoming one of Harrison’s best friends and jumping at the chance of playing on a Beatles session. Jimi Hendrix despised the Beatles so much that he was playing the title track of Sgt Pepper within a couple of days of the album being released. In short, the contempt with which the Beatles were regarded by their peers is familiar to nobody who knows anything at all about the history of popular music.

>Not to mention the American musicians who created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.

You can’t accuse the Beatles of selling other people’s music and simultaneously accuse them of changing the same music before they sold it. If they changed the music, then they transformed it into their own music; if they didn’t change it, then in selling it to the masses, they can’t have wrecked it.

>The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth.

While it’s true that difficult (i.e, non-catchy) music is seldom very popular, there is no reason to suppose that the ‘masses’ automatically reject technical innovation; if a record is hot enough, people will buy it, no matter how innovative it is or isn’t, and the truth is that most listeners neither know nor care about the level of technical innovation in a record. In any case, it is demonstrably untrue that the Beatles’ music was not technically innovative. Among the techniques that they pioneered in popular music were: controlled feedback, automatic double-tracking, use of tape loops, use of Indian musical techniques, use of chance techniques, creative use of studio technology (feeding Lennon’s voice through a Leslie speaker on Tomorrow Never Knows), etc. And those are just their innovations in recording technique; their innovations in musical style and songwriting are too numerous to go into.

>For most of their career the Beatles were four mediocre musicians who sang melodic three-minute tunes at a time when rock music was trying to push itself beyond that format (a format originally confined by the technical limitations of 78 rpm record). They were the quintessence of “mainstream”, assimilating the innovations proposed by rock music, within the format of the melodic song.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

To be serious, once again Scaruffi has it backwards: later rock music picked up on what the Beatles were doing (unusual harmonies, studio experimentation,\emotional intensity) and continued to do it, but no other band did all of what they did. Prog-rock bands extended the musical range, largely at the expense of emotional intensity; hard rock ramped up the intensity, but at the expense of melody and concision. As Joe Carducci put it, the Beatles were simultaneously the biggest pop group in the world, and the world’s first rock band.

Dylan said that McCartney's the only artist he's still in awe of.
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though knowing Dylan I wouldn't be surprised fi he's just saying that. I've read different biographies talk about how he felt about The Beatles during their first few years in the limelight.
>inb4 someone posts that blurb from Chronicles where he says he knew that's where music was headed
Chronicles was a joke, most of it's lifted from other places.

>The Beatles were the quintessence of instrumental mediocrity. George Harrison was a pathetic guitarist, compared with the London guitarists of those days (Townshend of the Who, Richards of the Rolling Stones, Davies of the Kinks, Clapton and Beck and Page of the Yardbirds, and many others who were less famous but no less original).

There are no instances in the Beatles’ official recordings of Harrison not being up to the task before him; he wasn’t a virtuoso because he wasn’t required to be one. He understood that his role was to serve the song, something which all of the above, with the possible exception of Richards, forgot from time to time. A guitar hero of the Clapton sort would have had no place in the band. What Dave Davies, of all people, is doing in this company, is anyone’s guess.

I wouldn't be surprised if Scaruffi doesn't actually believe his essay and just has it open for clickbait.

File: lusty_negro_attitudes.png (131KB, 293x308px) Image search: [Google]

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The fact that so many Americans still believe it should be illegal to marry a 12-year-old only tells you how far America still is from becoming a serious culture. The Europeans have long recognized that the greatest relationships of all times are between male adults and female adolescents, who are the most biologically fit to produce offspring, as well as the most physically attractive. Followers of the Muslim faith rank the highly controversial Aisha over all of their prophet Mohammed’s other wives, who were far past the prime age for reproduction. Americans are still blinded by puritan values. Adult females are more mentally developed than adolescents (not true, by the way), therefore they must be the greatest partners. Europeans engaged in relationships with adolescent European girls in the middle ages, radical Islamists engage in relationships with adolescent Muslim girls in the present. Americans are often totally ignorant of the virtues of relationships with adolescent girls, they barely know the biological benefits. No wonder they think that sexual relations with 12-year-old girls should be criminalized.

>The Beatles had completely missed the revolution of rock music (founded on a prominent use of the guitar) and were still trapped in the stereotypes of the easy-listening orchestras.

What this means, if it means anything at all, is not clear. Is he trying to say that he Beatles didn’t use guitars?

Here's some teens reacting to Strawberry Fields btw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-keBliZndQ

Them masses eating this up.

holy fucking shit dude, stop samefagging

>While the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Pink Floyd and many others were composing long and daring suites worthy of avant garde music, thus elevating rock music to art, the Beatles continued to yield three minute songs built around a chorus. Beatlemania and its myth notwithstanding, Beatles fans went crazy for twenty seconds of trumpet, while the Velvet Underground were composing suites of chaos twenty minutes long.

When the Beatles were sticking baroque trumpet on ‘Penny Lane’, the Velvet Underground’s first album hadn’t even come out yet. By the time the first Velvets album came out, the Beatles were finishing Sgt Pepper. The Velvets album that contains the closest thing to a ‘suite of chaos twenty minutes long’ is White Light/White Heat, whose final track ‘Sister Ray’ is a seventeen-minute jam on one chord, and if Piero Scaruffi seriously thinks that it’s the greatest thing the Velvet Underground ever did as opposed to a juvenile art gesture, he’s got a tin fucking ear. Incidentally, Scaruffi’s earlier crack about how the Beatles removed all traces of ‘black music’ from their music is far more true about the Velvet Underground than it is about the Beatles. Almost alone among great 60s rock bands, the Velvets never, ever swung. They were a white folk-rock band turned up to 10.

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Im posting an article dweeb

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is me

glad i never took this place seriously enough to right a fucking dissertation about scarufffi

>>73850854
>They were a white folk-rock band turned up to 10.
I'm Waiting for the Man and Run, Run, Run both sound like they could've from a southern black rhythm and blues bar. They wouldn't be the most popular there mind you, but what you said is objectively false.

And I've been posting in this thread alongside you, so don't call me a Scaruffi drone.

>Moreover, Martin undoubtedly had a taste for unusual sounds. At the beginning of his career he had produced Rolf Harris’ Tie Me Kangaroo with the didjeridoo.

He means Sun Arise (1961). Far from being made at the beginning of Martin’s career, it was made eleven years after he joined EMI.

>At the time nobody knew what it was. Between 1959 and 1962 Martin had produced several tracks of British humor with heavy experimentation, inspired by the Californian Stan Freiberg, the first to use the recording studio as an instrument.

He means Stan Freberg, but if he’s trying to suggest that Stan Freberg was the first person ever to muck around in a recording studio, he should take it up with Spike Jones. In any case, the history of experiments in sound recording is as old as the history of recorded sound.

Those of us who write about music in more than a dilettante way believe that writing about music is subject to the same rules as writing any other kind of non-fiction. You should write so that your meaning is clear. You should strive to be consistent. If you have an argument to make, you should base what you have to say on solid evidence. You should avoid writing badly, unclearly or illogically. You should try not to be dull. Piero Scaruffi flouts all these rules, but that wouldn’t matter so much because lots of people break them. But there is one rule in writing music criticism, the breaking of which is the only truly unforgivable error, and it’s the one that I’ve tried to demonstrate Piero Scaruffi breaks all the time, it would seem compulsively, perhaps without even knowing or caring that he does so.

You are not allowed to make shit up.