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The Beatles - Yellow Submarine

It’s like watching Tiger hit 250 yard drives with his putter - they let the drummer sing and it still went to #1.

I read somewhere a ways back that Thom Yorke claimed that the last time pop music was truly reinvented was “Eleanor Rigby.” While I recall thinking that he, in all his freaky brilliance, was implying that Kid A was Eleanor’s bastard offspring, his point is otherwise spot on.

Obviously it’s the last day of the month, and I’d be faking it if I tried the predictable façade, whereby I attempt to be serious and ironic in equal measure. Serious because these are two obviously great bands, but surely ironic because, like, this is 2009 and there is no Greatest Band Ever, something, something, “it’s so subjective, man,” post-modernism, and so on.

THAT would be some vacuous, boring shit.

So, let me say simply that: THE BEATLES FUCKING WIN FOREVER. By any empirical measure - album sales ( well over a billion), #1 singles, whatever. Culturally, I’m pretty sure The Stones don’t currently have a circus based on their music, and I don’t think the press would refer to a Mick Jaggar shooting as an “assassination.”  They didn’t make anything like Sgt Peppers or The White Album - albums that completely obliterated the boundaries of pop music. Sticky Fingers and Exile are classics no doubt, but the Stones, at their best, could only epitomize and lay bare what the mastery of rock and roll sounded like. That’s no small thing. But The Beatles transcended music. They didn’t just do something relatively menial like blur genre lines, make millions of teenage girls literally lose their minds, redefine the way a recording studio is used, or kick out dozens of guitar riffs a la Richards or Jimmy Page. Though they did all those. They are unique, because in a time of incredible global anxiety and cynicism, The Beatles reminded everyone how beautiful and stunningly original humans could be. And they did it so gracefully, so purely. They made music something worthy of worship. So, there is a reason that everyone freaked out when Lennon offhandedly said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. They knew he might be right. They are transcendent, impossible and world changing in a way that The Stones, with all due respect, do not even approach, much less challenge.