In the Jazz world, people from Ella Fitzgerald to Miles Davis preceded and succeeded the Beatles, and they're sure to be studied for centuries, too.
In Broadway, people like Sondheim will be studied for centuries, his career both preceded and succeeded the Beatles.
I watched the Miles Davis documentary on Netflix recently and it was great. Well worth the time.
Lots of still photos of him working and lots of interviews with him and people close to him.
What it lacked though was behind the scenes footage with his musicians, producers and studio engineers.
We’re told stories about Miles at his best, and worst, but we’re not shown them happening.
Meanwhile the Beatles are the top selling band of all time, voted by specialists as the greatest artists in history. Their impact on global culture is impossible to measure. Virtually everyone knows a Beatles song. So much so that their general impact on the 60s and the world onwards is an actual field of study.
There's a depth to Miles' best that is only reached by a handful of people in in 20th century music. While the Beatles wrote fantastic pop songs, and while I am a major lifelong Beatles fan who has taken a lot of pleasure in studying just about every Beatles song from a music-theoretic framework, I don't feel they reached that level of depth except in A Day In The Life.
John Coltrane is another person who went deep, particularly with A Love Supreme. And Miles' personal influence is such that John Coltrane might not have achieved what he achieved without Miles' personal mentorship.
> J.S. Bach also had less influence on popular music than the Beatles did, even in his own time, during which he wasn't particularly popular.
J.S. Bach is probably the single greatest influence on tonal, Western music, period, and thus an argument can be made that he had much more influence on pop music than The Beatles alone because without him, you don't have The Beatles. You can draw a straight line from him to literally everyone that came after him.
And that started the process of JS Bach becoming known once again, eventually much more well-known than when he was alive. Bach was a genius, and probably the all-time greatest for counterpoint, but I think you're overstating his effect on the development of popular music.
I'd actually assert that the Beatles ultimately owe more to John Dowland (a songwriter active in the late 1500's to early 1600's) than to Bach.
I'm glad you agree about Miles though! :)
I love the Beatles, but I'd _strongly_ disagree that Bach (and later Mozart or Beethoven) had less influence on popular music.
I've been a Dowland fan for probably 40 years now. At some point after my own discovery of him, Sting recorded an album of his songs. I wasn't surprised at all. It's not an accident that he recorded Dowland, rather than Bach, etc.
I am a major Beethoven fan and regularly listen to him (my most-listened-to Beethoven piece is the Hammerklavier sonata, which I listen to in several different performances with great attention to the differences). I'm not remotely ignorant of what somebody like Beethoven brought to the table.
But the Beatles were much more influenced by the popular songwriting tradition going back to, and through, Dowland, combined with American blues, than they were by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc. Even implicitly.
The Beatles had a huge influence on popular music. First from a music theoretic standpoint, particularly with their use of flat-seventh chords as if they were "normal" chords. Second from their bringing non-rock traditions into the rock world, such as Indian music. Their effect was huge. As Dylan said about his experience of their breakout songs such as I Want To Hold Your Hand, they were “doing things no one else was doing. I knew they were pointing in the direction that music had to go.” He concluded, “It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.”
I won't debate this any more, life's just too short, but I really suggest you deeply listen to Dowland, and then add the American blues to that, and then the harmonic and stylistic innovations of the Beatles, and consider specifically Bach had to add that had a larger effect on popular music.
While I see your point, this excerpt also feels a bit comically overstated. How are the Beatles impacting my life and the world today, exactly?
Though if you're just referring to the collective knowledge of some popular songs, then sure.
I think there's a tendency music fans have of overstating the impact of the bands they like (Velvet Underground is another good example). But from what I've seen, there very rarely is a case where a single musician or band comes along and single-handedly changes everything. Usually there are a lot of musicians influenced by and playing off each other that move along a general trend, and from what I've listened to that was very much what was happening in the 60's.
In terms of lyrical complexity and political commentary in modern American pop music, I'd say that a lot of that starts happening in the more folk-aligned circles (such as Simon and Garfunkel or Dylan) before you see its influence in other groups like the Beatles.
Rock'n'roll may have been mostly dance music, but Jazz, Folk, Blues, Chanson etc. already existed before Beatles. And songs like Yesterday or Let it Be are not really rock'n'roll anymore than say Jacques Brel is.
I remember The Beatles being brought up in 10th grade. Someone did a project on it. The teacher said something like “you don’t even need to say the album name. We all know.” I didn’t. I had no clue what was happening. It was just assumed every one knew.
I suppose you could hear them in a store and never think to ask who that is. I'm sure I've probably heard an Ed Sheeran song but I could name or identify precisely zero and he's had a billion dollar tour...
That said, speaking from the perspective of myself, a professional musician has my roots planted deep in a dozen musical traditions, jazz and pop included among them, the shadows of both Miles and The Beatles loom equally large in my mind, in multiple directions and often overlapping.
> Miles changed jazz multiple times but from fusion onward jazz becomes mostly an irrelevant genre like rock-and-roll sadly is today.
This is just...wrong, sorry, and you're really doing yourself a disservice by ignoring such an absolutely massive amount of great music being made. We live in one of the most vibrant times for jazz since the 50s. Tigran Hamasyan, Mark Giuliana, Julian Lage, Wayne Krantz, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Joshua Redman, Kamasi Washington (and his LA jazz scene pals like Thundercat). Legends like Herbie and John Scofield are still around. Jack DeJohnette is doing massively vibrant stuff. Pat Metheny still sells out arenas. Jacob Collier is massively well-known and is this generation's de facto jazz educator, like a little elfen Bob Ross of jazz.
The list goes on and on and on. As a jazz fan and musician myself I can't think of a better time to be alive than right now. Saying jazz is irrelevant is like saying comic books are irrelevant while ignoring the existence of the MCU -- sure, maybe not everyone is reading comic books anymore, but look at what it's become!
Ditto for rock but I'm not even gonna go there, it's even more broad.
These genres evolve, yes, but just because Miles isn't up there in a suit like it's 1958 doesn't mean that jazz is irrelevant.
You're also ignoring the influence of his (reading between the lines, music you dislike) later work. Without his post-fusion stuff, hip hop as we know it would not exist. Quincy Jones' entire career would not exist. Just...stacks and stacks of records would not have even been given their initial drop of lifeblood. Immeasurable. And that's from his "worst" era.
Just because The Beatles changed everything (and, no doubt, they did; I'll happily wax poetic about them just as much as I will about Miles), doesn't mean that others didn't have an equally large impact. I feel pretty confident saying your inability to see that has less to do with objective reality and more to do with your perspective of it.
OK, Boomer…
Obviously, the Beatles were an enormous global phenomenon for baby boomers and for GenXers like myself. But if you were to poll my children and their classmates how many Beatles songs they could name, you might end up in the single digits.
Not that Miles Davis, whom I prefer, would fare any better, mind you.
A quick Google search for the age of the Beatles listeners led me to the Spotify statistics for 2019.
The Beatles were streamed 1.7 billions time in 2019. 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year. Of these listeners, 30% were between 18- and 24-year-olds, 17% between 25- to 29-year-olds. Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
Amusingly this is second time in this thread that I have been asked to somehow justify the cultural relevance of what is the most successful and most likely the most famous band in the history of humanity. I think we have reached peak HN.
Ed Sheeran, who I doubt will ever be regarded as the most famous musician in the history of humanity, has 4 _songs_ with more streams than that each:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on...
> 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year.
That's hardly "virtually everyone", though, is it?
And were they listening to the song because they sought it out, or because it happened to be on a playlist?
> Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
I think they wrote a number of songs which have stood the test of time. But massively overstating their enduring cultural relevance is quintessential boomerism in my opinion.
Living up to your username, mate. It's a lost cause :-)
Are they as well known as the Beatles? Hard to know, I could be a bias sample!
Though I suspect you'd conclude that not knowing Davis' discography automatically makes me not a serious music fan.
Not necessarily. Just not a serious jazz fan. Most people when they say they are a "music fan" invariably mean rock/pop of various stripes (from indie to metal and everything in between) and not jazz, or opera or "world music" so maybe it's that you gave a pretty broad statement with no caveats?
This is a debate, not fallacy UNO.
Miles is arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century, period. While the Beatles were indeed a "global phenomenon" so was Miles (his success was hardly limited to the US). Whereas the Beatles indeed sold more records, Miles was a musicians musician who helped vanguard a half dozen subgenres of jazz (and jump started the careers of dozens of others who eventually became giants in the genre, as well as crossover successes like Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Marcus Miller) his influence extended well beyond jazz into pop, funk, rock, hip hop, punk, hip hop and on and on. Even metal bands like Helmet and Mastodon name check him.
Often the bands/artists that have the most impact on the actual direction of music aren't the ones who benefit the most commercially from it.
I'm in the early 40s myself and I do regard them as one of the greatest music bands ever, even though I used to listen more to the Beach Boys and I regard Michael Jackson as a bigger phenomenon/star than the Beatles ever were, but I'm curious how much of that feeling is shared by kids/young adults in their teens or in their early 20s. Incidentally I've seen lots of 14, 15-year old kids with Nirvana or Kurt Cobain shirts but, of course, none of them with Beatles shirts (never seen a Beatles shirt, to be honest).
T-shirt merchandising is probably more to do with who owns the rights though and if they want to sell products in places like Target or Tescos.
For a long time you couldn’t download Beatles albums on iTunes. That was purely down to the dispute over the name “Apple” rather than popularity of the music.
And yes, I have every MJ album.
Miles Davis is popular and well known all throughout the world.
"Paris is so full of shoestores"
P.S. I'm not from the USA.
You could come to the Copenhagen Jazz festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Jazz_Festival - basically lots of people around town who don't much care about the Beatles but will go crazy talking about Miles.