PSB 8th in hit singles list

[Eldritch]

The Beatles very much created pop music as we know it. To deny that is just being contrary or a bit thick. For further info read Ian McDonald's Revolution In The Head.

And I don't even like The Beatles much.

[Eldritch]

I'm not 100% sure but I think Little 15/Pimpf charted somewhere in the Top-75 as an import.

Yes, it did. Originally it was released in France only, but since it was selling so well in UK too, Mute started distribute copies to UK too. So it was something between an import and a proper UK release.

The b-sides were Stjarna and Moonlight Sonata, though. Pimpf was on the flipside of Strangelove, released a year earlier.

[Niall]

where is oasis????!!!

In the middle of a desert?

[Zeus On The Loose]

The Beatles very much created pop music as we know it. To deny that is just being contrary or a bit thick. For further info read Ian McDonald's Revolution In The Head.

And I don't even like The Beatles much.

Yes, they very much created manufactured pop music and the tradition behind P/W/L, boybands and the Spice Girls and they obviously influenced music in general for the simple reason that they were so incredibly successful that everyone who was a kid/teen in the 60's and 70's couldn't have escaped them, but to rate them as anything else other than an incredibly successful marketing exercise bundled with simplistic pop tunes that appealed to the lowest common denominator, is overrating them to the extreme.

[No Muscle Mary]

Whereas 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah' was very profound...

best retort ever!

[Eldritch]

The Beatles very much created pop music as we know it. To deny that is just being contrary or a bit thick. For further info read Ian McDonald's Revolution In The Head.

And I don't even like The Beatles much.

Yes, they very much created manufactured pop music and the tradition behind P/W/L, boybands and the Spice Girls and they obviously influenced music in general for the simple reason that they were so incredibly successful that everyone who was a kid/teen in the 60's and 70's couldn't have escaped them, but to rate them as anything else other than an incredibly successful marketing exercise bundled with simplistic pop tunes that appealed to the lowest common denominator, is overrating them to the extreme.

Even if that was so, shouldn't you hold them as gods for exactly that reason, since you always claim that simplistic manufactured pop tunes, ie. hit singles, are the only things you like in music?

[No Muscle Mary]

Should I be ashamed that I never heard of Status Quo?

Here's the quo doing their best PSB impression

[Eldritch]

Whereas 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah' was very profound...

best retort ever!

Well, it would be a good retort, if the one who said actually held profundity in pop in any esteem. But coming from a renowned Kylie/PWL/Rachel fan it's just hypocritical, since Zeus always heroically defends their supposed shallowness against the serious rock fan's accusations of their lack of profundity.

[Zeus On The Loose]

Even if that was so, shouldn't you hold them as gods for exactly that reason, since you always claim that simplistic manufactured pop tunes, ie. hit singles, are the only things you like in music?

I don't hold them as Gods because I don't like their tunes but the reason I hate them is because they're considered proper and artist-y which they simply were not.

[Zeus On The Loose]

Well, it would be a good retort, if the one who said actually held profundity in pop in any esteem. But coming from a renowned Kylie/PWL/Rachel fan it's just hypocritical, since Zeus always heroically defends their supposed shallowness against the serious rock fan's accusations of their lack of profundity.

But the Beatles are highly rated as proper. If they were considered fluff, I'd stand up for their worth as fluff.

[Eldritch]

Well, it would be a good retort, if the one who said actually held profundity in pop in any esteem. But coming from a renowned Kylie/PWL/Rachel fan it's just hypocritical, since Zeus always heroically defends their supposed shallowness against the serious rock fan's accusations of their lack of profundity.

But the Beatles are highly rated as proper. If they were considered fluff, I'd stand up for their worth as fluff.

But isn't being one of the forerunners of pop fluff quite an artist-y thing to do? The Beatles were in their time both the first proper pop fluff band and in their latter career also the the band which showed us that it's okay for a pop band to have ideas above its own station – and without that concept Pet Shop Boys as we know and love it wouldn't exist.

[Zeus On The Loose]

Yes and that's why being the Spice Girls of the 60's is not derogatory or a put down but people tend not to appreciate them for what they were, rather for what they have been hailed to be.

However, they didn't show us that it's OK for a pop band to have ideas (like PSB) later in their career, they showed us that jumping on bandwagons, ripping off youth culture, image make-overs, gimmicks and publicity stunts can prolong or revive pop careers (see Madonna) and pretending to care about politics and world peace sells records (see U2/Coldplay).

[Eldritch]

Yes and that's why being the Spice Girls of the 60's is not derogatory or a put down but people tend not to appreciate them for what they were, rather for what they have been hailed to be.

However, they didn't show us that it's OK for a pop band to have ideas (like PSB) later in their career, they showed us that jumping on bandwagons, ripping off youth culture, image make-overs, gimmicks and publicity stunts can prolong or revive pop careers (see Madonna) and pretending to care about politics and world peace sells records (see U2/Coldplay).

If not being Spice Girls of the 60's is not derogatory, why do you then say that in the same breath as that The Beatles were terrible?

As for "ripping off youth culture", McCartney and Lennon were only 28 when The Beatles broke up. Since youth culture in general is a post-war concept, born out of the fifties recognition of a teenager as a potential consumer, McCartney and Lennon were not only part of the whole youth culture, they were among those who created the whole thing.

As early as on Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966) The Beatles were already stretching the the format of a pop song and pioneers in advancing album as an art for and not only a collection of previously released singles. Jumping on bandwagons or not, they were among the first to acknowledge that pop could draw from other forms of culture and art as well – Eastern philosophy, politics, literature, visual arts, even the business world (the hugely misguided yet somehow admirable launching of their entertainment empire Apple). And so on and so on and so on and so on.

[Zeus On The Loose]

The Beatles being the Spice Girls of the 60's is not derogatory in the sense that I admire and respect pop phenomena for being pop phenomena but the Beatles were terrible because their tunes just weren't very good. As a marketing exercise, the Spice Girls were actually even harder to be successful because it was far easier to have cross over appeal in 1963, when there were far fewer categories and classes of people you had to appeal to than in 1996 and the media didn't consume and burn everyone and everything as quickly as they do now. Backlashes were not something one expected in 3 months after a peak as is the case now.

I have tons of respect for the Beatles for what I consider them to be i.e a highly successful marketing exercise of a genius manager and a couple of mediocre song-writers who were lucky enough to have been born in an era that allowed massive cultural phenomena to happen (not the case now) and a period when youth and politics went hand in hand, but comments such as 'PSB would never have happened if it wasn't for the Beatles', I find terribly misguided because musically, what the Beatles did, would have been done by other people sooner than later, with less split but same accumulative cultural impact, but done nonetheless.

Music has always been a continuity and the Beatles just took 50's harmony group and Elvis shock tactics into the boyband format. Polishing off a trend that was about to happen is what they did, inventing everything, they simply did as much as Madonna invented French house by getting Mirwais to produce an album. And I'm willing to bet that many symphonic music composers lifted ideas from politics, literature etc. centuries before pop music did, though one could argue that e.g Mozart was in fact, pop music.

[Eldritch]

The Beatles being the Spice Girls of the 60's is not derogatory in the sense that I admire and respect pop phenomena for being pop phenomena but the Beatles were terrible because their tunes just weren't very good. As a marketing exercise, the Spice Girls were actually even harder to be successful because it was far easier to have cross over appeal in 1963, when there were far fewer categories and classes of people you had to appeal to than in 1996 and the media didn't consume and burn everyone and everything as quickly as they do now. Backlashes were not something one expected in 3 months after a peak as is the case now.

I have tons of respect for the Beatles for what I consider them to be i.e a highly successful marketing exercise of a genius manager and a couple of mediocre song-writers who were lucky enough to have been born in an era that allowed massive cultural phenomena to happen (not the case now) and a period when youth and politics went hand in hand, but comments such as 'PSB would never have happened if it wasn't for the Beatles', I find terribly misguided because musically, what the Beatles did, would have been done by other people sooner than later, with less split but same accumulative cultural impact, but done nonetheless.

Music has always been a continuity and the Beatles just took 50's harmony group and Elvis shock tactics into the boyband format. Polishing off a trend that was about to happen is what they did, inventing everything, they simply did as much as Madonna invented French house by getting Mirwais to produce an album. And I'm willing to bet that many symphonic music composers lifted ideas from politics, literature etc. centuries before pop music did, though one could argue that e.g Mozart was in fact, pop music.

Yes, symphonic composers had lifted ideas from other forms of culture, but The Beatles were the first band to do that in the realm of pop culture. To me most of your argument reads like saying that "Neil Armstrong is far too overrated, because somebody else would have walked on moon sooner than later". There is glory in being the first to do something – like building the grounds for the future of pop music.

As for them being "mediocre songwriters", somehow the Lennon-McCartney legacy still lives on, while nobody remembers who wrote the songs for Spice Girls and not one of their songs has really survived 10 years in the same way as about a dozen of Beatles's songs have survived four decades. All this despite McCartney being a smarm and Lennon being a misanthropic misogynist.