The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines | Hacker News Reader

The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines

phys.org

23 pointspseudolus27 comments

The Beatles seemed to have had an effect on the youth of their day that hasn't been fully repeated since, even though there are a lot of groundbreaking, genre-defining musicians that came after them.

I was not around in the 1960s, and I was wondering if anyone who was could answer this:

It seemed to me that the Beatles set off a cultural shift in pop music. They started out in beat music, but in a few short years they brought in psychedelic culture, they adopted Indian classical music and instruments, they used tape-editing techniques in the studio to make rudimentary "electronic music"...

My question is: did they establish these shifts, or were these shifts already gaining steam independently and they popularised them?

I'm pretty sure those things already existed before The Beatles. But it's safe to say the Fab 4 acted as a cultural amplifiers, so those things became accessible to global mass market.

This. The Beatles happened upon the right things at the right time and therefore cemented their place in the zeitgeist as the progenitors of a lot of stuff that they themselves probably wouldn't even take credit for. Taking psychedelic rock as an example: "Pet Sounds" predates "Sergeant Pepper's" but only one of these albums gets the graphic t-shirt and VH1/NPR/Rolling Stone retrospective treatment. This happens all the time and is largely a product of critics coalescing on narratives simple enough for them and their audience to reason about. It's easier to say, for instance, that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal because their name sounds a lot spookier than "Sir Lord Baltimore" or "Blue Cheer", not because they actually did it.

Is “Pet Sounds” generally considered “psychedelic rock”? It’s a good album to be sure but nothing on it sounds to my ears like anything in the same space as “Lucy in the Sky” or “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” or “Fixing a Hole”.

I don’t think it is. However, the song Good Vibrations is in the psychedelic style, and came out before Sgt Peppers.

Both I think. There are always innovators in every cultural form, and there is a spectrum from the actual first movers/avant-garde through early adopters to forward-thinking mainstream popularisers to trend-followers and mass adoption; the Beatles were unusual in at least two ways:

1. They had feet in avant-garde and early adopter camps.

2. They had a popular impact that has arguably never been matched (I include eg. Sinatra, Elvis, MJ and Madonna etc) which lifted the normal "populariser" contribution to your cultural shift.

So there are other huge bands or artists in the progressive, influential respect, people like eg. James Brown, Nirvana, Kraftwerk, NWA etc etc and lots of influential but not commercially successful or mainstream acts.

The Beatles though were arguably more progressive than even those, and on a completely different level in terms of cultural reach. That's what makes them special.

Btw they're not really a band I listen to much, in case there are any "you're just a fanboy" suspicions motivating counters to this. :)

I suspect George Martin was a major factor in the innovative techniques they used.

> did they establish these shifts, or were these shifts already gaining steam independently and they popularised them?

You're assuming The Beatles had significant control over their own success.

The Beatles are highly comparable to other phenomena such as The Simpsons and the iPhone, and discussing their merits and contributions is just as irrelevant. All of what has been said about them applies to The Beatles.

EDIT: I almost forgot about Michael Jackson.

EDIT2: To answer your question more directly, mass media picks and chooses what it popularizes. The artist can choose what they make, but they cannot choose to be chosen. The audience doesn't choose what is mostly heavily advertised either. You can insist that modern ads don't have this effect anymore, but we're talking about a different era.

What's this about the Simpsons?

They're still making episodes and Paul McCartney is still performing.

I think maybe the radio and possibly tv programs that were shown probably had a lot to do with it. Just like social media came along had had a cultural impact, national tv and radio shows that weren’t targeted at news and high brow culture might have been pretty new at the time.

I wonder how the Beatles count compares to the count of references to Alice in Wonderland, which I think are especially frequent in papers on physics and mathematics.

PopularBeatComboBench has been saturated

My favorite thing like this is when Scrooge McDuck has made it into legal proceedings.

Or Calvin and Hobbs

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/justice-jackson-accu...

My Son used to make me play Calvinball with him lol

That is interesting. I’d like to see stats on the ages of the papers authors. I’ll be amazed if they are on the younger side of the scale.

My favorite example is "The Beatles" of chemotherapy, viz. platinum, paclitaxel and doxorubicin, at least one of which appears in nearly all first-line cancer drug regimens.

I wonder if there is a correlation between the non-seriousness of the research papers and the permeation

There are only so many Beatles songs. Does that explain the replication crisis??

Help! me guess how to translate the headline. People decorate their papers with quotes from the song lyrics. And the article decorated that with words from scientific research like “permeate”, maybe “meta”, could find “tertiary research” in here? Fun!

All you need is... to read the article.

I can't tell what you're asking. It sounds like you're asking why they used the word "permeate" in the headline, but you don't explain what the implication is - why are you confused about it? And then you make some kind of joke, I think, about the theoretical use of other, seemingly unrelated words. I don't follow.

It’s a smartphone comment with a lot of layers, a glass onion if you will.

Here’s another clue for you all.

I’m so tired of these silly love song references.

I am the walrus?

"Shut the @#$% up Donny!"

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