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Are they better than the Beatles?
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Apr 28, 2015, 07:06
Re: Are they better than the Beatles?
Apr 27, 2015, 11:27
If what you are asking is whether XTC were / are better at being the Beatles than the Beatles then the answer is a firm "no". I am not a big fan of rose coloured 60s nostalgia at the best of times but they invented the form and very little has been done since their demise to advance that form beyond the templates they laid out. XTC have moved it forward not an inch and I doubt they would claim any different.

I don't actually much like most of the Beatles music (I listen to the expanded Magical Mystery Tour and maybe Abbey Road or the Blue album once or twice a year) but there is no getting away from the fact that anyone still working with guitars and drums and keys and voices in straight 4/4 with verse chorus song structures owes them a living. Their ubiquity and mass appeal are I think actually a testament to their transcendence as originators rather than a sign of hidden shallows. Shallowness seems to me to be neither here nor there.

There have been "advances" into complexity and equal and opposite "retreats" into simplification and cod authenticity but very little else has been said in the intervening half century or so that would threaten their place at the head of the Rock pantheon. People have had a fair old dip into jazz and classical and contemporary "art" music to freshen up the sound palette but at the core there is really the same old verse chorus ramalamadingdong whether it is Stock Aitken Waterman or the Velvets. It is no wonder that the genre is so constipated. Here comes another copy of a copy of a copy.

That's why for me the over-reachers who risk absurdity and ridicule and whose wings almost inevitably melt in the process are the people to be really cherished. There are a couple of XTC albums that I think are pretty special but that's being competent at plowing someone else's territory rather inventing an entire art form.
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