The Beatles

Name a more influential artist.
Seriously, I'm curious.

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Why is Paul looking away?

It's a "attempting to discredit The Beatles by comparing them to The Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention, Silver Apples, The United States of America, Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart, or Jefferson Airplane as if they have anything in common other than existing in the 1960s" episode

The Beach Boys

JS Bach. The Beatles absolutely for popular music though.

desu desu
#WhoIsTheRealGOAT

Edgar Varese is a fair one to throw out IMO since he's the father of electronic music which even the Beatles themselves eventually picked up on and dispersed into the mainstream

Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin

What about Satie

Queen

Bob Dylan

Why do music fans consider "influential" a positive thing? Hitler was influential.

>"It felt like it all belonged together. Rubber Soul was a collection of songs ...that somehow went together like no album ever made before, and I was very impressed. I said, "That's it. I really am challenged to do a great album."
- Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys)

>“I'm sure I'd been exposed to other songs, but I think the first one that has a real effect on me was She Loves You by The Beatles. It was just magic - it was like being hit by a bolt of lightning. I even remember where I was and what I was doing. I was walking down the road in Aston one day, with my light blue transistor radio, and this song came on. I thought, 'What the f**k is that?'"
- Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath)

>"We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid...I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go."
- Bob Dylan

>"When I was 20, I worked at a hotel in a dance orchestra, playing weddings, bar-mitzvahs, dancing, cabaret. I drove home and I was also at college at the time. Then I put on the radio and I heard this music. It was terrifying. I had no idea what it was. Then it kept going. Then there was this enormous whine note of strings. Then there was this colossal piano chord. I discovered later that I'd come in half-way through Sgt. Pepper, played continuously. My life was never the same again."
- Robert Fripp (King Crimson)

>“I thought the Beatles much more daring and inventive than most of us 'progressive' groups of the late sixties (apart from the Pink Floyd). Something to do with endless studio time replacing endless live gigs, I should think.”
- Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine)

>Hitler was influential.
Was he though? I don't see people everywhere doing holocausts and invading Russia

>"The blending of Folk and Rock was something that was inspired by The Beatles when I was working for Bobby Darin in New York. I was in the Brill Building in 1963 and I heard The Beatles and it inspired a combination of Folk and Rock and I went down to Greenwich Village and I started playing traditional songs with a Beatle beat and gradually when I went out to the West Coast Gene Clark came along and David Crosby and we formed The Byrds around that sound."
- Roger McGuinn (The Byrds)

>“When they made Sgt. Pepper in 67, we were in the same studio making our first record, and I remember when it came out and listening to the whole thing and just sitting there with my mouth hanging open going “Wow this is so complete and accomplished" but it was also more than that. It had a ton of ideas and a ton narrative in it, and I feel more than any other record it was the record that gave me, and my generation permission to branch out and do whatever we wanted. If they can do it, we can do it. It changed everything.”
- Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)

>"I think "Eleanor Rigby" was a very important musical move forward. It certainly inspired me to write and listen to things in that vein"
- Pete Townshend (The Who)

>"The Beatles were perfect for opening doors... When they went to America they made it wide open for us. We could never have gone there without them. They're so fucking good at what they did."
- Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones)

Because everything else is just subjective.

>"I didn't hate them. I actually like two or three of their songs. "
- Frank Zappa

>"I don't think people realize how sad it is that the Beatles broke up. That means there's not going to be any more Beatles music.... We were hearing this bootleg tape of the original Get Back album before Spector, and it's really fabulous."
- Lou Reed (Velvet Underground)

>"They were a driving force in the Velvets, and made us work harder and got us on our bikes. Rubber Soul was where you were forced to deal with them as something other than a flash in the pan. It was rich in ideas and I loved the way George managed to find a way to include all those Indian instruments. Lou and I had tried to work with the sarinda. We were only playing it just to get a noise but I realized you could play melody on the sitar as good as Norwegian Wood. Norwegian Wood had this atmosphere of being very acid. I don’t think anybody has ever got that sound or that feeling as well as the Beatles."
- John Cale (Velvet Underground)

>"Contemporary artists never spoke highly of the Beatles. The critic is the true artist. Why can't I marry a 12-year-old?"
- Piero "Autism" Scaruffy

Kraftwerk

Interesting

Here's some more for your collection

>"The lift from the Beatles wouldn't have been conscious. Like every other band around at that time, bar none, we were hugely influenced by the Beatles. I'd never heard anything like them. The trick was to let your own voice come through as well."
-Rod Argent, The zombies

>"The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock 'n' roll band," said Bob Weir. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing"
-Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead

>They were real important to everybody. They were a little model, especially the movies – the movies were a big turn-on. Just because it was a little model of good times. The Fifties were sure hurting for good times. And the early Sixties were very serious too – Kennedy and everything. And the Beatles were light and having a good time and they were good too, so it was a combination that was very satisfying on the artistic level, which is part of the scene that I was into – the art school thing and all that. The conscious thing of the artistic world, the Beatles were accomplished in all that stuff. It was like saying, “You can be young, you can be far out, and you can still make it.” They were making people happy. That happy thing – that’s the stuff that counts – something that we could all see right away.
- Jerry Garcia

Pretty much everything said about the Beatles is correct, however I question how much of that was industry sponsorship, apart from the obvious talent of the songwriters in the group, a lot of it can be accredited to George Martin.

Johann Sebastian Bach

So you've never been to /gsg/
Good for you, I guess

>"As I said, we were influenced by The Beatles, and we wanted to be a band like that, and when I was working with Bobby Darin, and then in the Brill Building, my job was to listen to the radio, and emulate the songs that were out there. I had already been working on mixing The Beatles’ music with folk music in Greenwich Village, and I had noticed that they were using folk-influenced chords in their music. They used passing chords that were not common in rock’n’roll and pop songs of that time. I remember listening to them, and thinking that the Beatles were using folding chord construction. That comes from their skiffle roots, they will have learned those chords in their skiffle days, and just brought them into their own writing.”
-Roger McGuinn of the Byrds

>I walked in, and they were acting silly and strange and having fun, because I think they were thrilled with what they had done. They knew what they had created. They sat me down in the middle of a room on a stool, and they were laughing about it: they rolled over two of those huge, coffin-sized speakers up on either side of me, and then they played me A Day In The Life. And when they got to the end of the piano chord - man, I was dish-rag. I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that. You couldn't help but have it change your whole world. .... No-one had done an album where the songs felt so right together. They were way ahead of us. ... But by the time they got Sgt Pepper – man, they were so far ahead of everybody ... they hadn't stretched the envelope, they’d thrown the envelope away.
-David Crosby of Buffalo Springfield, CSNY

>"But times changed, and I changed, and I didn't feel that way anymore. The Beatles were happening. I think that was probably the main thing. The Beatles just changed the whole world of music".
-singer/songwriter Barry McGuire

give it a couple of years

>the Velvets really weren't as contrary characters as legend sometimes has it, or immune to musical influences from fellow bands. In various interviews and writings from 1967 to 1970, various members express admiration for the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Phil Spector, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Byrds, and even Bob Dylan.
Richie Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velevet Underground Day By Day, 2009

>Can's early rock influences include The Beatles and The Velvet Underground
Unterberger, Richie (1997), An Interview With Holger Czukay, Krautrock.com, retrieved 2010-06-16
> Initially Holger Czukay had little interest in rock music, but this changed, when a student played him The Beatles' 1967 song "I Am the Walrus", a 1967 psychedelic rock single with an unusual musical structure and blasts of AM radio noise.[5] This opened his ears to music by rock experimentalists such as the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.
"can - publications". Czukay.de. Retrieved 2011-07-06.

>Sgt. Pepper influenced everybody, and indeed was one of the arguments I used to keep the band on track (on my track, of course). Zappa was not nearly so influential, whatever his fans would like to think. In those early days he was mostly into being raunchy and offensive, so the band (during the brief time that it was still a "band" as opposed to the later stuff, which was different ensembles) didn't get much play. On the other hand, his broad brand of satire was more accessible than my more insidious (or so I like to think) kind.
- Joseph Byrd, The United States of America

Only correct answer ITT

>Influential because they influenced the most number of innovative artists?
Frank Zappa > Velvet Underground > The Beatles

>Influential because they influenced the most number of artists?
Ramones

because he died in a car crash

how does that make you look away?

Imagine actually believing this

It was what caused it

What's wrong?

...

The Ramones? okey dokey pal.

As others have mentioned, JS Bach is probably the most influential figure in Western music. It's hard to say because we are still so close chronologically to their oeuvre, but yesterday I went to Target and saw one those major magazines like People or Time with a Beatles cover. If they still have this cultural cache after over 50 years, it's not really a stretch to imagine that people will be talking about them and analyzing them 100+ years from today.

If you think the Shitty Ramones are even in the same universe as the Beatles, you are either a troll, 12 years old, or completely developmentally disabled. Probably all three.

Velvet Underground is overrated but not too bad, I'll give you Zappa even though he's not a very good comparison. If trolling was your intent, you did indeed cause me to take the time to type this out, so I commend you in that respect.

Yeah, the Ramones. Did you even read my whole post? Bach doesn't fall under either of the categories I mentioned, and not being specific about what exactly you mean with influential is stupid.
Also, there is a difference between musical and cultural influence.
So yeah, fuck off with your retarded reading comprehension. I expected something better from someone writing such a long post.

Please stop posting on Sup Forums. You are the biggest embarrassment this board has ever seen.

Paul McCartey is literally the reason the "Ramones" existed in the first place.

I expected something better from someone with a trip... oh wait no this is exactly what I expected

The first caveman who banged rocks together to create a beat.

When will the Zappashills go away?

I'm not going to pretend he's more universally influential, but I can't think of any other artist with more influence over their genre than Dre.

he's not

Bach both influenced more artists and influenced more innovative artists than anyone else mentioned in this thread, by a long shot. Before that it was fucking lute music and Gregorian chants, if you'll forgive a little hyperbole. You know what? fuck it, you win, troll, everybody knows you're a faggot so I'll refrain from replying any further and other anons can draw their own conclusions.

Ugg the Noisy?

Chuck Berry is literally the reason The Beatles existed in the first place, so your point being?
Alternatively, this I hope you realize now why your post is retarded.

Fuck off

As expected from user.

I'm right, you know?

See Cavemen confirmed for being more influential than Bach thanks to this user's retarded logic.

>before that it was fucking lute music and Gregorian chants
I see you don't listen to Classical. As expected from user.

I'm not a troll, you just don't know shit about music and/or have shit sense of logic.

Maybe if Ogg the neanderthal bothered to have some music notation, or his music was captivating and important enough for his tribe to keep his name alive over thousands of years, you would have a point. But we all know that many different ancient niggers invented beating on hollow logs many separate times across vast distances without one singular nigger they could point to as an influence. So your caveman argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Obviously Chuck Berry massively influenced the Beatles, and the Beatles massively influenced the Ramones, but if you took a poll of say 1000 random famous bands or artists in the western pop genre and asked them which of those 3 influenced them the most, I guarantee the Beatles would win by a landslide, despite your assertion that chronology/cause+effect is the deciding factor of who to call "influential". Your logical reasoning is poor and your taste in music is worse.

The idea of the caveman analogy is that it's ridiculous to claim person X influenced the person he influenced directly, and the persons those other persons influenced directly, and so on. Influence should be defined only as the number of direct influences. You get the idea?

>if you took a poll of say 1000 random famous bands
>famous
When did I say anything about famous? I claim that Ramones were the most influential band ever (defining influential as the number of artists who were directly influenced by their sound) because it was probably the Punk explosion what created the greatest amount of bands. While The Beatles did have their own influence as well, I doubt they "created" as many bands as Ramones (one thing to consider, is that Punk was very easy music to make, so everybody could and many did have a punk band, and this applies even to this day).

>I hope you realize now why your post is retarded

Truly a sentiment you should have been following for every post you've made in the last 4 years.

Did you know that John Lennon beat his wife?

>I play music. I'm not anybody you've heard of, but I've opened for and played with people you've heard of and have played festivals and venues you've probably heard of. No, I can't and won't offer proof. Just some perspective on where I'm coming from. Paul McC wrote "Blackbird" as a result of him and George trying to see who could get their fingers around Bach's "Bouree in E minor" first. I have also written a couple of little pieces using ideas from Bach's counterpoint in that same piece. Therefore, I have been influenced by both of those artists. I have played one of those pieces that I wrote for (over the course of time) thousands of people. I highly doubt I have influenced anyone outside of my immediate bandmates, but the point still stands that I have played both Beatles- and Bach- influenced music for a certain, not tiny but not huge, amount of people. And I can say with 100% confidence that I have been influenced by both, regardless of chronology.

When i used the word "famous" (which I most assuredly am not), I really meant "bands whose music has been tolerated by people other than the drummer's patronizing mother". Because most punk bands (not all) objectively suck, those shitty garage bands not only don't count towards that statistic, but were actually hampered by the false song of "punk is easy to play so I won't learn anything more than power chords". The Beatles certainly influenced masses of derivative, untalented garbage, but in no universe other than the twisted one inside your own stunted brain have the Ramones influenced more non-shitty bands than the Beatles.

>I knew what the Beatles were doin', and that seemed to be real pop stuff. The Stones were doing blues things — just hard city blues. The Beach Boys, of course, were doin' stuff that I didn't think had ever been done before, either.
-Bob Dylan

>When i used the word "famous" (which I most assuredly am not), I really meant "bands whose music has been tolerated by people other than the drummer's patronizing mother".
Which is why I said this in my original post >>Influential because they influenced the most number of innovative artists?
>innovative artists
Innovative artists is a better measure than simply "famous" (or "tolerated" or whatever). So I also provided the alternative in case you don't care for such artists and want to consider artists as a whole, so that's when you have Ramones

>in no universe other than the twisted one inside your own stunted brain have the Ramones influenced more non-shitty bands than the Beatles
And I never said otherwise, but now you are moving goalposts now.

Oh, and by the way, if you are thinking of mentioning Bach, at least do it right and mention Buxtehude instead (or even farther in the past, if you want, such as Monteverdi, or Josquin des Prez, or what the fuck do I know).

>Chuck Berry is literally the reason The Beatles existed in the first place, so your point being?
Stupid and regressive truisms are not compelling arguments

In modern music, Les Paul? Satie? They're both up there

Elvis Presley

>Stupid and regressive truisms are not compelling arguments
I know, that's exactly my point.

Chuck Berry

Robert Johnson

Eric B & Rakim

this

Louis Armstrong, Bach, Captain Beefheart, many others

The Beatles are seriously boring once you branch out into more interesting music, which there is a ton of

Loius Armstrong try to beat that

Scott Joplin

...

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five or The Sugarhill gang

>not DJ Kool Herc
Step up, user-kun!

Jelly Roll Morton he basically made Jazz popular

Grand Wizzard Theodore the inventor of record scratching

>turntable music
Step aside, peasant.

>Reel to Reel
Step away m8

>wire recording
Are you even trying?

James Brown

>Before that it was fucking lute music and Gregorian chants
It was not even close. I'm sorry user but even as "a little hyperbole" it's flat out false. Renaissance polyphony (which is emphatically NOT Gregorian chants) reached its heights with Palestrina and Bach himself straight up revered the organ music of Buxtehude. You're also forgetting that Bach came at the tail end of the baroque era and instrumental music was in full force by then.
But yes, great composers after Bach were greatly influenced by Bach. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all looked towards Bach's counterpoint in their later periods. Bach reached a greater level of publicity when his Passion settings were uncovered by Mendelssohn, and pretty much everyone nowadays looks towards Bach as the exemplar of counterpoint and fugal writing.

Really?
Do you not know your history of the U.S.A.?
That's all they've ever done.

And they're STILL doing it.
>And I don't care if this post should be on Sup Forums

If it weren't for The Beatles, there would be no Ramones.

Example 1: See post The Ramones took their name from an alias that Paul McCartney used to use when checking into a hotel.

Also The Ramones had admitted that The Beatles were one of their favorite bands and biggest influences, musically.

Plus the fact they both had and image, that being wearing nearly identical outfits, and they both got their start the same way, which is playing in dives and seedy skid row clubs.

OK, I'll grant you The Beatles' music changed and evolved through out years, while The Ramones' sound stayed consistent, (I'm a Ramones fan, so I won't insult them by saying they put out the same record over and over again) But if you can't see certain parallels between The Ramones and The Beatles, then maybe you should put on the first three Ramones albums and put on Live At The Star Club, and play them back to back (U.S. or international version. Both are great) Or perhaps In The Beginning with Tony Sheridan or maybe side one of the first Anthology trilogy. If you still can't see/hear the parallels between the two bands, you're either deaf, not paying close attention, or dumber than a sack of hair.

See America's been doing what Hitler did since the founding of the U.S.A.

>Cylinder Recording
Are you even trying

phonautographs arent cylindrical recordings idiot.

yeah, i still love his music

Good thing you have that trip so I can skip over the wisdom of the Avant Meth Dog of Sup Forums

>phonautograph
I'm sorry I meant phonautograms

Edgard Varese

You just proved my point and exposed my ignorance in one fell swoop. Nobody outside of people who are serious about classical music knows Buxtehude. Bach is well known to the layperson and revered among musicians of all genres.

We agree.

Good one

He's up there

Can't believe no one has mentioned him yet, although his music hasn't aged as well as the Beatles. Still obviously great. He didn't write his own songs, though.

He jumpstarted popular American music and is perhaps the only artist of his time who wrote a tune that people still recognize today.

>1650
You were born four hundred years too late.

>You just proved my point and exposed my ignorance in one fell swoop
I proved it first actually. See >Nobody outside of people who are serious about classical music knows Buxtehude
But that doesn't change that, according to your logic, Buxtehude was more influential than Bach.

>Can't believe no one has mentioned him yet
Because there is no reason to mention him. You either mention The Beatles or Chuck Berry (depending on your definition of influential), because Elvis doesn't fit any.

>you were born four hundred years too late.
you were born 2150 years late
youtube.com/watch?v=DBhB9gRnIHE

Fuck you!

Eww no

No problem :)

What? By my completely consistent logic, Bach is more influential than Buxtehude. You were the one arguing that the Ramones (a band that won't be remembered except in footnotes) are more influential than the Beatles (the most well known artist of the 20th century), remember? Fuck I'll admit, you're a good troll, you keep baiting me, so you win on that front. If you actually believe the bullshit you're typing, though, you are a genuine idiot.

You also mentioned Chuck Berry, who undoubtedly influenced the Beatles about as much as Elvis did... are you really this stupid? Are you willing to discard arguments that you yourself made earlier for the sake of attempting to debunk one of my points that builds up to a 100% logical and consistent conclusion? You should sign up for a debate class some time so you can begin to understand why you are so wrong... though I doubt you ever will.

>Bach is more influential than Buxtehude
How come when Buxtehude influenced Bach?

> You were the one arguing that the Ramones (a band that won't be remembered except in footnotes) are more influential than the Beatles (the most well known artist of the 20th century), remember?
Correct, because they directly influenced the most bands, regardless of how bad those bands were.

I'm not a troll for fucks sake you fucking retard.

>You also mentioned Chuck Berry, who undoubtedly influenced the Beatles about as much as Elvis did
This is not a competition on who influenced The Beatles the most, because of this, Chuck Berry was more influential as a whole than Elvis.

> Are you willing to discard arguments that you yourself made earlier for the sake of attempting to debunk one of my points that builds up to a 100% logical and consistent conclusion?
Again, by your logic, Buxtehude is more influential than Bach (you had no idea who he was before posting in this thread for fucks sake), so the one who should take debate classes is you.

Now, looking at the bright side, at least you are not that one retard who always argues with me while straw-manning all the time and with a serious lack of reading comprehension.

Since I'm not a tripfag, I guess you don't don't realize I've been the one debating you most of this thread. My argument is that
a) for a band to be influential, they have to have influenced artists that people have heard of, not garage bands. (I don't give half a shit if the Ramones spawned 10,000 shitty bands I've never heard of).
b) chronology is unimportant; you can't call an earlier artist more influential just because they happened to be influential to a band that is more well known and influential (who the fuck cares if Chuck Berry stole some riff of of some nigger nobody knows, Chuck Berry is still more influential even though random nigger#23 influenced him.)
c) it is possible to be influenced by both an artist, AND an artist that influenced them (I am personally influenced by both Bach and the Beatles, and the Beatles were influenced by Bach, but If I'm not influenced by Bach, only the Beatles get their "influence" counted)

In summary, there are two important figures to consider when calculating influence: the Influencers, and the Influenced. you can't count Buxtehude as an influence, because most people don't know him (I am going to check him out though). You can't count bands that the Ramones influenced because the vast majority of them never made it out of the garage.

I reckon many contemporary artists are influenced by the Beatles. In addition, they were influenced by artists who were influenced by the Beatles, and even influenced by artists who were influenced by artists who were influenced by the Beatles. And the whole time, mind you, they were still influenced by the Beatles. They're maybe going back one step beyond the Beatles to Berry and Elvis, but only to see where the Beatles were coming from. Nobody outside of hipster doofus blues revival bands is seriously going back and listening to Big Bill Broonzy or Robert Johnson in the way that they are listening to and appreciating the Beatles. Character limit reached, balls in your court

Alright then
a) The definition of influential is arbitrary. You can choose to only consider artists who "recorded" music, who "played" music, who were "good", who were "innovative", etc. I think we can both agree there isn't a definitive definition for influential based on what we said above, so what I did in my first post of the thread was to say that, by the "played" definition (and probably the "recorded" definition as well), Ramones were the most influential band ever. Now, if we go by "good" (or "tolerable", as you said before), the best answer would probably be The Beatles, and if we go by "innovative", then the most influential would be Frank Zappa. Personally, I think the definition of influential that matters the most is the "influential" one (I too couldn't care less about a bunch of shitty punk bands that never did anything worth saving).

b) This point is arguable, but I will concede it to you.

c) I agree with what you are saying here, but for a moment I thought you were this guy who argued that, if you have an artist X that influences an artist Y, and you have that artist Y influences artist Z, then you have that artist X influenced artist Z. I'm glad we can both agree that this argument is meaningless.

>you can't count Buxtehude as an influence, because most people don't know him
Who are these "people"? Are they artists alive today? Or are they classical composers? Does it matter to be known by "the people" or should it be by "the artists" instead? Personally, I can't tell how influential Buxtehude was other than having influenced the late Baroque artists such as J. S. Bach.

>You can't count bands that the Ramones influenced because the vast majority of them never made it out of the garage.
Like I said in this post above, it depends on which definition you use, which is as valid as all the others.

The rest of your postwas kind of addressed above.

It has been nice debating with you by the way. Keep that up in the future :)

I listened to some Buxtehude. The first thing that came up on youtube. It immediately reminded me of the intro to "Your Time Is Gonna Come" on Zeppelin I. Obviously John Paul Jones knows who this guy is. Led Zeppelin has definitely influenced me. Does that mean Buxtehude influenced me? I don't feel that way, but maybe. Anyways, I agree it was interesting debating you once we came to the agreement that this was an actual debate instead of a flame war.
You faggot.