pitchfork reviews the beatles

Despite the fact that I started laughing upon seeing an entire day of Beatles reviews, I don't really mind the fact that Pitchfork is doing that: it's certainly easier for them to pay one of their writers a few bucks to review some albums than it is to field a million emails asking why in god's name they didn't review the Beatles reissues, I mean the Beatles come on you have to right? And... well, you do.

In the interest of revealing my biases: from the age of birth to about ten or eleven, the Beatles albums from 1967 and before are practically all I listened to, so I'm quite familiar with them even though I haven't listened to them in quite a while. I'm also a bit biased right now because a guy just walked in to the room where I'm typing this wearing a Beatles shirt in pink type and too-long jean shorts and sat directly behind me.

I wasn't expecting to write this before looking at the reviews, but they're... overly straightforward, without going into much depth on cultural impact or influence or engaging in hyperbolic flourishes. Each review of the early albums takes a couple paragraphs to talk about the circumstances surrounding the recording, the overall sound of the record, and other such matters. The meat of the reviews, though, is what you'd expect to find more of in a longer Amazon review than on Pitchfork: track-by-track analysis that mostly boils down to "this is a good song" and "this song is not as good." This might be because the earlier Beatles albums were so much more straightforward and song-oriented, just randomly-assembled lists of the songs they had recorded recently. This might be a case of the grass always being greener, since I definitely didn't want an overly fawning "I'd never seen a shooting star before" review and definitely not one that namedrops Vampire Weekend, but the reviews are so hung up on the technical aspects (in the review of the remasters, especially their utterly ridiculous images of the waveforms off songs in stereo and mono just to prove it wasn't mastered too hot) and whether individual songs are good or not (in the individual review) that it doesn't take the time to discuss what should be most important: are The Beatles still culturally relevant? Should they be?

It's certainly honorable to discuss the albums just on their merits, but anyone can download these and say, well golly, A Hard Day's Night is a good pop song, or Devil In Her Heart is really forgettable. The reviewer's job shouldn't be to tell us what we can so easily find out for ourselves (or, in my case, what was driven into my head in my developing years). This might be more acceptable if it was a review of a record that people wouldn't know about or hear without the review- that is, more obscure acts. Then, you might be persuaded to get the album by it. With this, people know right off the bat whether they're interested in these albums before hearing the remasters. They're part of a shared culture, so talk about that. They have a unique position: they have entered a critical consensus as the unobjectionable; even the critics that don't lionize them only discuss their flaws in a larger discussion of how great they were. It is assumed that anyone with a best albums list will include at least one, if it's not genre-specific and the list is long enough. No band in history has ever been simultaneously the subject of so much music criticism, yet above it. Mainstream white culture assumes that everyone enjoys them or is somehow not normal. They've even transcended generations: the boomers simultaneously claim them and attempt to share them with later generations, unlike how they think of Woodstock as specifically "theirs."

What I'm interested in more than their music, at this point, is whether any artist will ever replace them, or whether the favorite band of the majority of teenagers twenty years from now will still be The Beatles. I'm a bit worried that this generation will still be playing them for their kids; that our music critics, after seeing the band all over the Rolling Stone lists, will place them just as highly. In a way, it impedes cultural development.

It's also really silly that the most popular band of all time has a bad pun as their name.