Saturday, April 18, 2015

The Beatles - wrestling with octopi???


I had to laugh at an article in the Los Angeles Times, recalling what critics said about the Beatles during their first tour of the USA in 1964.  For example:

William F. Buckley Jr. - Boston Globe

An estimable critic writing for National Review, after seeing Presley writhe his way through one of Ed Sullivan's shows ... suggested that future entertainers would have to wrestle with live octopuses in order to entertain a mass American audience. The Beatles don't in fact do this, but how one wishes they did! And how this one wishes the octopus would win...

The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as "anti-popes".

There are many more reviews at the link.  Good for a giggle through the lens of music history.

Peter

3 comments:

Old NFO said...

Buckley may have known politics, but he didn't know music...LOL

SiGraybeard said...

Sigh... some things are as pervasive as fungus. The disdain of older generations for younger generations and their music is probably in Socrates' writings. Or older.

Another pervasive thing is people who couldn't write a piece of music if there were a gun to their head always condemn the music that others write. I follow a guitar tutor on YouTube (Tone Doctor) who can play just about anything, but one day we were talking about his performance of the lead guitar part in Aerosmith's "Dream On" and he said he couldn't imagine writing something like that; where the inspiration and the tonal ideas come from.

JC said...

I'd like to be
Under the sea
In an octopus's garden
In the shade