Since their emergence from Liverpool in 1962, the Beatles created the template for rock bands that’s still in place today, from the guitar-bass-drums instrumentation to the bitter feuding between band members. For a band that broke up 53 years ago, they remain as culturally relevant as ever, and you can expect those beloved tunes to stay on the radio for decades to come.
With that out of the way, we’d also like to state that, like any other band, they wrote their share of songs you can best be described as “stinkers.” Some were trite and maudlin, some were embarrassingly pretentious, and others seemed completely phoned in. Whatever the individual cases may have been, we feel these songs show the Fab Four in a profoundly unflattering light.
Image Credit: The Beatles by Eric Koch (CC BY-SA).
‘Yellow Submarine’
If you wanted to make the argument that the Beatles couldn’t write anything more elaborate than the theme to “Bob the Builder,” we suggest starting here. Sure, it’s a fun, silly song that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than that, but if that’s the best thing you can say about it, that’s pretty faint praise.
Image Credit: Amazon.
‘Revolution 9’
Perhaps growing uncomfortable with their reputation as slick songsmiths, the Beatles spent the later 1960s eating their own weight in LSD and doing abstract sound experiments, to the joy of no one. Their most egregious offense was “Revolution 9,” which appeared on their self-titled 1968 album, and while it only went on for eight minutes, it was so clearly an attempt to appear edgy that it feels mildly smarmy.
Image Credit: TheBeatles/YouTube.
‘Octopus’s Garden’
If you hated “Yellow Submarine,” you’ll really hate ‘Octopus’s Garden,’ a rock-stupid three-minute waste of Ringo Starr’s talent. It’s tempting to think of the sadly departed Jimmy Buffet hearing this song and seeing his entire life as a musician and hospitality industry luminary laid out before his eyes, with no stop sign in sight.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Rocky Raccoon’
Another cut from the band’s self-titled 1968 album, which producer George Martin once said he thought would have made a better single LP than the sprawling double that we got. We agree with him, and this unnecessary track is a good reason. It sounds like what you would get if someone who had never heard country music wrote a country song or if you told ChatGPT to do it.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’
This song from 1969’s “Abbey Road” was hated by every Beatle but Paul McCartney, the guy who wrote it and made the band record take after take after take. Drummer Ringo Starr called it “the worst track we ever had to record,” and since he was the nice Beatle, you can only imagine what the other guys thought. As for what we think, it stinks!
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Birthday’
The bane of the existence of every instructor who gives drum lessons to ten-year-olds, “Birthday” is yet another utterly unnecessary track from the 1968 self-titled debut. Sure, it’s a fun little rock and roll number, but it’s profoundly repetitive and has no actual purpose to speak of. There was already “Happy Birthday to You,” so no one really needed a souped-up New Coke version.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Hey Jude’
The ending is longer than the song. The ending is longer than the song. The song itself is pleasant enough to occupy three minutes without much objection, but then it goes into that last section, and rather than fade out after a minute, they keep going on and on. It’s like trying to leave a party via the time-tested “Irish Goodbye” method only to get trapped at the door by your relatives for another hour.
Image Credit: YouTube/the Beatles.
‘The Long and Winding Road’
Phil Spector was a convicted murderer who also committed horrific crimes against innocent pieces of music by suffocating them in what was known as his “Wall of Sound” technique. Among those recordings was Paul McCartney’s ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ and the musician took every opportunity to say how much he hated the production. He eventually released a remixed version of the song that dialed the lush sound effects back to a much more restrained level, but honestly, he may have been better off never changing it, since he could blame Phil Spector for making a hash of it. Now, it’s McCartney’s problem.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Hello, Goodbye’
Are these even lyrics? “Hello, Goodbye” amounts to little more than those two words getting repeated over and over again for three minutes, and it’s hard to believe that it took the collective efforts of all four Beatles and producer George Martin to make this happen. Although if the idea was to create a song for the first day of English as a Second Language class, we say well done.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
‘Penny Lane’
By this point in the Beatles’ career, they had carte blanche to do anything they wanted to and write whatever music they liked. Rather than use this newfound freedom to scale great artistic heights, they wrote maudlin garbage like “Penny Lane”. It became a massive hit, so the jokes on the rest of us, but if anyone had wanted to argue that the band was out of ideas by 1967, this would have made it a spirited and lively discussion.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
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