[AnotherUnixGeek]

Recently, I was sent a clipping from Newsweek’s 1964 cover story on the arrival in America of the Beatles:

Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.

Hilarious, immediately brings to mind some of the criticisms I'm seeing in another FR thread on hip-hop. I don't believe music critics really ever have anything more worthwhile to say than "I liked it" or "I didn't like it". Every criticism of music is always far too subjective to be useful to anyone else.

[Zack Nguyen]

As big as the Beatles were in 1964, they were little more than bubblegum pop at that time. They were exactly the sort of band that today would inspire a ferocious backlash against them by “cool” listeners.