Battle Of The Bands

When I was a kid, radio stations played music from black and white artists and were happy to mix them all up. Then over the years stations became more and more segregated, along with play lists written up by just a few corporate types that has resulted in most American's exposure to music consisting of a few tunes played several times a day for literally decades!

Sadly, Americans have no idea of what kind of Rock & Roll and Jazz was created in other non English speaking countries during the Beatles Era. I'm talking about France, the entire Spanish speaking world, Brazil, Italy, South East Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore and even Indonesia and Malaysia. These people absolutely rocked out and in many cases were just as talented and just as innovative as their counterparts in the English speaking world.

I would also point out that rockers in these countries listened to and were inspired by everything that came out of the English speaking world. Choice in music today would be far more extensive and far more fun if the British and the Americans had been as open as their non English speaking counterparts to other artists. Sadly, exposure to various music, an art form that is universal among humanity is regulated and monopolized by a few corporations, which to me is like people laying claim to the air we breathe.

Music is all the same, the only difference is how we enterpret it.

Summer resort.

You live
in the youth
of a summer
resort, your
delicate voice
appears in
my mind like
a winged creature,
and even a
pleasure describes
in a moment
a bright sensibility.

Francesco Sinibaldi

John Lennon said it best when he lamented that the Beatles attempt to expand the boundaries of popular music backfired when popular music instead narrowed to include only the paths the Beatles traveled. The Beatles, probably more than anyone, lamented the wholesale cultural abandonment of the Gene Vincent/Eddie Cochran/Link Wray/Carl Perkins rock and roll.

WE try to define that which we do not understand. A testimony to the human condition. Whan we can accept that for what it is then we will have trully evolved. Its like saying which music is better? or which painter is better than another . How can you compare. the beauty of beauty is it resids in the beholder. Certainly not the critic!

The great jazz guitarist John Scofield once said, "When you compare one type of music to another you lose the beauty of listening to any of it." I think what killed rock 'n' roll [and ultimately every other genre for that matter] is the application of the genre's name to too many different musical styles. Rock 'n' Roll means loud guitars, a snare drum on 2 and 4, and a gratuitous scream or two. But, when the term gets stretched over everything from Little Richard to The Police to The Noisettes to The Naked Brothers Band, it's asking too much of it.

The Beatles didn't kill rock 'n' roll. They popularized a broad scope of other types of music by mixing them with rock elements. And by being alarmingly creative. They played a lot of different types of music from well outside the Rock 'n' Roll formula. "Got to Get You Into My Life" is Motown. "A Day in the Life" is early rock opera. "Yellow Submarine" is a children's song. "Helter Skelter" is pre-pubescent punk. How could they kill rock 'n' roll if they didn't play it straight?

No, the Beatles took a sad song-form and made it better.

that's such an ignorant question. the beatles didn't do Rock and Roll.

It's true that we define music by what we like, which is usually the result of the imprinting of what we were listening to in our teen years. The music world is so much broader than any of us realize. It is impossible to define an era by one type of music. While rock was morphing to psychedelia, country, jazz, reggae and pop continued developing and attracting listeners. Music thrives in all it's types, despite what the music industry would have us believe. We suffer from the music industry's attempts to narrow musical offerings to small slices of listening preferences for marketing reasons.

The Beatles provided some of the greatest popular music of their era, and ironically, also ruined popular music. It is because of them that we have the standard of electric guitars, loud drums and long hair. Without George Martin as a producer, however, their imitators produced mostly just noise. This pleases most fans, nevertheless, because most Americans have no notion of pitch, and therefore are mainly impressed by rhythm and style.