The Beatles: Has evolutionary biology proved the Fab Four weren't musically important

swilow

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This article is fucking interesting.

The Beatles: Has evolutionary biology proved the Fab Four's early work wasn't 'musically important'?

They might be the icons of a musical revolution in the early 1960s, but now science is questioning whether The Beatles' music from that era was important.

beatles-teaser-image-data.jpg


"I think that our estimation of the Beatles' importance at that time, or how we think about them, has become vastly inflated," evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London said.

He said the music that launched the Beatles onto the global stage — including songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Ticket To Ride — "is in fact relentlessly average".

And he said he had scientific evidence to back those claims up.

What can science tell us about the Beatles?
In a study published in 2015, Professor Leroi and his colleagues tracked the evolution of US pop songs between 1960 and 2010.

They measured specific musical characteristics in the top songs on The Billboard Hot 100 chart of each year.

The researchers used audio processing software to extract changes in chord sequences, and put these into broad "harmonic" categories.

Read more
 
But he said objective scientific research may help re-evaluate claims about their earlier songs.

"We just forget then about the fact that the songs themselves weren't actually that remarkable," he said.

scientific research to determine if something like music is remarkable or not.... how is that even possible ?

research techniques are interesting, as is the bit about the introduction of drums machines/hip hop, but the conclusion "We just forget then about the fact that the songs themselves weren't actually that remarkable," he said... fucking stupid as hell.
 
Yeah, i totally do not buy this hypothesis but its still interesting. You cannot really quantify something subjective like the value of music. I think The
Beatles are the influential band in history, both in musical terms but also cultural and ideological terms.
 
This guy tries to quantify the value of music and completely the point of what music is. Its lunacy .
This.

This seems like your average Facebook-article garbage. Using the vapid framework of 'lets pretend we're scientifically literate, to write sensational nonsense and get ourselves noticed and by 'proving' the babyboomers were idiots'.
 
...which youll notice (like idpol) is the trendy socio-political propaganda at the moment - to herd and feed passive criticism of past populations in favour of active evaluation of current political wrongs - pointlessly, decontextualised fluff.
 
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