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Reason # 561 - The Beatles, Hanging Tough

You say you want a boy band revolution?

The FF are usually thought of as one of the defining bands in rock. A pioneering group which broke boundaries, bent the rules, and changed the face of popular music to become the greatest band in history. This is true in a sense; they were the first boy band. This honor is usually bestowed on the Monkees, but the truth is the Monkees weren’t the first, only the most blatant.

Take a look at some of the characteristics of a boy band.

They’re composed of several male singers with a strong emphasis on vocal harmonies and little importance given to musical ability.

One of the most crucial aspects insuring the success of a boy band is their image, which is carefully constructed and controlled by managing every aspect of the groups clothes, hair, promotional materials (which are frequently supplied to teen magazines), promotional items (anything that you can slap a picture of the band on), and of course music videos.

Their fans are young people, mostly girls.

Typically each member of the band will have some distinguishing feature or personality stereotype, such as the baby or the tough guy. This formula is based on the groundbreaking work of the FF: Paul was the cute one, George the quiet one, John the smart one, and Ringo the dumb one.

The music of a boy band is arranged and produced by a producer who works with the band at all times, oversees and controls the groups sound - if necessary, to the point of hiring session musicians and singers. (cough, cough. George Martin)

The Key factor for a successful boy band is to be trendy, or Fab. This means the band conforms to the most recent fashion and musical trends in the popular music scene.

The modern boy band has taken all of these ingredients and added a heaping tablespoon of dancing to the mix. If the beatles could have danced they’d be bigger than the beatles! (Jesus analogies don’t apply to this kind of fanaticism)

Quiz:

Apply this simple formula to complete the following paragraph:

The ____ were picked up by manager _____. He quickly got rid of _____ because ____ the front man needed to be the cute one, polished them up, put them in suits with fab haircuts, told them what kind of songs to play, teamed them up with ______ and proceeded to get them on the cover of every teen magazine in existence.

For bonus points, add dancing to the equation and see if you can distinguish between the FF and New Kids on the Block.

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100 Reasons Why The Beatles Suck

We received this fantastic list in the mail and decided it deserves to be shared.

The sender has no clue where it originated, if you have any idea please drop us a line.

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Fan Mail #3 - Help! There’s a Beatle in the closet!

According to popular opinion, anybody who doesn’t like the beatles is a homosexual who lives in his mothers basement. This seems to be the consensus amongst beatarded fans, so if you don’t think the FF walked on water you’d better run out and grab a tube of Astroglide and a Judy Garland album.

Its strange when you’re suddenly forced to realize that your sexual orientation is hinged upon a bunch of Fab sissies singing silly love songs. Who knew?

These homophobic messages usually take two forms:

The hit and run:

Subject: Hey!
You’re all gay!

and who can forget the angry diatribe:

Subject: I have something to tell you homos!!!
You fucking assholes deserve to suffocate on each others shit. You deserve to die moer than that fat lard ass Mark David Chapman. Why dont you faggots do something useful with your time, like suck each other off, instead of trying to make your own pathetic lives seem better by putting down well-respected and very talented individuals.

Honestly, suffocating on it is still preferable to listening to it.

Parents, listen closely.
If you want to find out if your child is gay just play him a heterosexual anthem like Dear Prudence, I wanna hold your hand, or in a truly desperate case, Michelle or Wild Honey Pie. If the worst is true, simply wrap them in an All you Need is Love pillowcase and drown them in a river.

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Reason #307 - Three Days In the Life of Lame

Breaking News!

Following a much maligned documentary drought lasting nearly fifteen minutes, beatlemart is finally back to work!
To make up for their lack of productivity they’ve stunned the world by pumping out not one, but TWO brilliant new works of art to deify the crumbling remains of what once was a mighty and insurmountable gravy train. Whoops sorry, make that rock band.

The first incredibly important waste of celluloid is entitled, All Together Now. It chronicles one of the greatest casualties of modern theatre; LOVE, aka: Cirque du So Lame. Finally we’ll have a chance to see behind the scenes of this glorious production! Candid, never before cared about interviews and clips of McCartney, Ringo and Yoko Ono hard at work.

We imagine it looks something like this:

*Warning - Spoilers!*

The second film is of far greater cultural and historical significance. Three days in the Life come from a recently discovered wealth of John Lennon videos. Nine excruciating hours of it. This surely means eight more films. It shows the former beatle at home doing such incredible things as, brushing his teeth and cooking dinner, as well as more exciting things like walking, sitting and doing chores. Its been called a precursor to reality television. Oh boy, maybe we’ll get to see Lennon eating live maggots while walking barefoot over broken glass!

Luckily for us, at the last minute Yoko intervened and blocked its premiere claiming she didn’t authorize its release. In other words, a candid Lennon would be seen as human, and that could spoil his image. Either way, we are once again in Yoko’s debt. Thank you!

A quote from executive producer Ray F. Thomas puts the importance of this film into focus for us:

Bring your students and peers to witness an important part of history through this incredible educational documentary. It will no doubt inspire and challenge young minds to think differently and make a difference in the world … just as Lennon did.

Professor Tangier, who holds his PHD in Bullshitology, was heartbroken by this tragedy and couldn’t be reached for comment. Don’t worry professor, tomorrow there will be a new film to take your class of beatards to. Maybe they’ll even d-colorize Help! Gee, wouldn’t that be swell?

You can view eight minutes of this controversial new film here, if you have eight minutes you’d like to squander.

*warning - don’t watch*

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Fan Mail #4 - A word from an above average beatle fan

Occasionally, sandwiched between gripping messages like this:

Subject: Dick

get cancer

We’ll receive an inspired message that humbles even the most cynical seekers of sanity, causing us to question if this noble crusade is even worth fighting. Not very often mind you, in fact it’s more rare than a good song on Revolver. This is one of those rare gems, it brilliantly chisels away any arguments and leaves you scratching your head in amazement. Myspace is great.

Subject: forget you !!!!!!!

In the name of God, ALLAH, the Father the Son and the Holy
Spirit , I condemn your site as anti Christian. You are just jealous
that Jesus lives. If I lived next door to you youd be pissed off even
more. And furthermore may the USA beat Canada at Hockey in every
olympics in the future. And at the best most manly and exciting sports
in the world :………curling.

I just dont see why you dont like the Beatles. I like Second City
Television, Wayne Gretzky, The Canadian National Anthem, all Canadians
and the whole Blessed Great White North. And so since it is Christian
to forgive and be nice I cant be mad at you. You have a right. But if
the Beatles were naturally like YOU and YOU were like Them you would
think it was cool. Just like if you born like Chuck Berry or like Kiss
or something.

ANyway , I found you on a friend of mine Fuck Shit Piss from Las
Vegas Nevadas Comment site and was so intrigued by this I just wanted
to write.

ANd tell you …….and tell you……..awww…..I cant even
remember now……something about…. the Butthole Surfers or
something. Dont ear Yellow Snow My COmrade.

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Reason #930 - I Heal Fine

By the height of beatlemania many fans had completely lost their minds. A combination of bad music played at mind-numbing volumes, media manipulation, and complete global saturation resulted in a state of what could only be called ‘forced retardation.’

The average beatle fan suffered not only a loss of intelligence, but a loss of reality. Beatle blind pilgrims searched desperately for secret messages and salvation on album covers and cereal boxes. A few even went so far as to try finding meaning in their music. Delirium raged and the moptops were suddenly elevated to the status of prophets and snake handlers.

Fans began bringing disabled children to their concerts, convinced that with a word or a gesture the four wise men from Liverpool would heal them. It didn’t end there, mentally and physically handicapped people of all ages were wheeled backstage for a shot at salvation. Thalomide kids with deformed and missing limbs, the blind, people with crutches, canes, wheelchairs, and oxygen tents. Understandably, the only people who didn’t want to be healed by the beatles were the deaf.

These poor misguided people, or spastics as Lennon commonly referred to them, may have pinned their hopes of salvation on the wrong lads.

Ringo: “people would bring in these terrible cases and leave them in our dressing room. They’d go off for tea or whatever, and they would leave them behind. If it got very heavy we would shout, “Mal, cripples!” and that became a saying, even when there were no handicapped people present. If there were any people around we didn’t like, we’d should, “Mal, cripples!” and they’d be escorted out.”

George: “John was allergic to cripples. You could see he had a thing about them; I think it was a fear or something. …We’d come out of the band room to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.”

John: “When we would open up, every night, instead of seeing kids there, we would see a row full of cripples along the front. When we’d be running through, people would be lying around. It seemed that we were just surrounded by cripples and blind people all the time, and when we would go through corridors they would all be touching us … They’d line them up, and I got the impression The Beatles were being treated as bloody faith healers …”

-source: The Beatles Anthology, pages 142-143

Honestly, it would be really uncomfortable for anyone suddenly thrust in that position. Regardless of what they may have said or thought, you can be sure they held only the utmost respect and compassion for those unfortunate people who not only had to overcome incredibly debilitating, life shattering obstacles; they also had to sit through beatles concerts.

Lets end this on a brighter note. Here’s a clip of some of that respect and compassion in action:

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Reason #781 - A Pictoral History of The Beatles (part one)

A picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a few candid shots of the FF throughout the years. Click on the thumbnails for the full sized image.

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Reason # 141 - The Beatles Sucked, claims another former Beatle

Hot on the heels of our Liverpool Ache and other turd related exposés, Ringo Starr has finally relented his stance.

Stepping down from his throne on Mount OhLoveUs in order to grant the mortals of Ireland Online an interview, for the first time he delivered a testament of truth. Basking in the awe of his godlike status, fans of this formidable skin tapper were moved to tears of joy as he entered the hallowed halls of…well, thats not important. It’s rumored that a reporter in attendance accidentally touched his cloak, and began singing in tongues before scribbling words of wisdom in his gilded Sgt Pepper’s notebook.

Ringo stood before the congregation, slowly raising his magical scepter. He opened his mouth to speak, and the words he uttered fell upon the terrified audience like a plague of flying dung beetles, ‘The beatles turned into an awful band.’ Tears of joy turned into tears of horror and blind rage. Lives were shattered, reduced to a meaningless confetti of memorabilia and warped 45s. A billion empty beatleheads squinted blindly in the harsh light of reality, and wriggled vainly to find cover in their malodorous piles of nostalgia.

Although Ringo finally admitted to the world the truth about the money grubbing fab four’s fraudulent claims to rock pedagogy, he quickly weakened and began to backpedal so quickly that he careened recklessly into the trusty old fall-back, “…because we literally couldn’t hear ourselves over the screaming from the audience.”

Ah, so close. For a brief moment the world made sense. At least Lennon had the balls to stand behind what he said:

Lets end on a note from happier times, here is a rare 1972 image of Ringo granting wishes via Ringovision:

Source: Ireland Online

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Reason # 7005 - Flabby Soul

Occasionally you’ll hear the fab-blind discuss how soulful various songs and albums were.

Usually we just laugh to ourselves when we hear the word beatle and the word soulful in the same sentence, unless the sentence is, ‘The beatle were soulful of crap it was coming out of their mouths!’ So, we decided to find out exactly what this sound people are mistaking for soul. We came up empty handed.

Our first stop was Fab4Fan’s infamous Rankopedia to see what the consensus is for the most soulful beatles songs. Alas, there was no such category. The closest we found was ‘which beatle fan has the brownest nose and emptiest wallet.’ So a few weeks ago we created our own poll, Most Soulful Beatle Songs. Ten thousand opinionated members, and we only got two votes, not a good sign. Searches elsewhere turned up little more than slanted reviews with the word soulful getting battered like a piece of tempura. We’re left to our own devices to get to the bottom of this one.

The problem now became how do you judge soul? We’re obviously talking about soulful music here, not soul music like the stuff that came out of Motown. There doesn’t seem to be any working soul-o-meters these days, they all disappeared with STAX. So, first we need to define it. I think we can all agree that a fair definition of soulful music is music that is passionately sung and performed, full of both feeling and expression.

Secondly, we need to identify a fair starting point and level the playing field. You can’t just listen to an FF song and decide, ‘yup - thats pretty soulful, way more than Yellow Submarine.’ The only way to do this fairly is to compare two performances of the same song, then we can easily gauge who has the soul going on.

Lets get to it.
First we have Long Tall Sally, an original song written and performed by none other than Little Richard. It was covered by the likes of Elvis and the Tielman Brothers, as well as Pat Boone and the Beatles. Let watch this go down, live.

First up is Little Richard:

Hot Damn!

The challengers, four lovable moptops from Liverpool with their version:

…Uhhh. WTF?

To be fair, everybody knows that in those days the beatles had to suffer with inferior equipment. Whats that? They were both recorded the same year? Oh, I see…

Lets stick to official releases. Thats where they’ve been proven to really shine.

Next up is an excerpt of the FF singing their famous version of the Barret Strong/Berry Gordy classic, Money(Thats what I want):

Next up is Barret Strong with the original version.

Whew, getting a little hot in here. Bet you never realized that song actually has a groove.

Perhaps this isn’t fair. Lets give the FF an original song and let somebody else try and cover it. Nobody can touch the beatles…right?

Next up is an excerpt of the original smash hit We can Work it out:

Followed by a cover of the same song by Stevie Wonder:

Its seems Stevie interpreted the meaning of this song as ‘We can work out how to play and sing this thing soulfully.’ This version is surprisingly listenable, even enjoyable. Who would’ve thought that was even possible?

Okay then, final challenge. Its obvious the band as a whole should never, never, ever again be considered soulful. But vocals, thats another story. Its kind of odd that vocals-only mixes are so scarce for a band that releases two or three albums a year, forty years after they broke up. There must be hundreds of thousands of them in the vaults, but they never see the light of day. What could be the reason? I wonder if they’re trying to hide anything? Crappy vocal performances…covered up cleverly by edits and music….Nah, not beatlemart.

Here’s Paul singing one of their most soulful ballads Oh Darlin’:

The flipside of the coin is you can find pretty much any Motown song you want as an a capella performance. We thought it would be funny, and just a little ironic, to post a Jackson 5 era Michael Jackson performance, but it might be just too cruel to destroy the beatles with a seven year olds soul, wouldn’t it?

Instead, here’s Marvin Gaye to single handedly destroy any semblance of soul left clinging to the fading reputation of this band:

And what the hell, just to rub a little salt in the wound here’s little Mikey Jackson too:

Final Verdict?

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Reason #267 - The Beatle Ford Clinic

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

If you’ve ever searched for an excuse to drink on a Monday, today is for you.
Tip back a few yards of your favorite poison and don’t forget to drink to your pals at SMB.

Just be sure to avoid any noxious concoctions like the Brandy Alexander (Brandy and Milk?!?) which Lennon loved so dearly, or you may wind up in the Beatle Ford Clinic. This is a fate far worse than death, which the following video proves conclusively.

(warning - don’t watch)

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Reason #517 - You Say Good Buy, I Say Hell No.

This is a clever tactic, a new form of some sort of Gonzo Advertising. Target has not only advertised a product, but simultaneously created a demand for it.
By the end of this thirty second spot you will definitely need to run out for a fresh supply of toilet paper. Talk about squeezing out a winner, they’re shitting gravy!

This is marketing at its finest.
(warning - don’t watch)

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Reason #357 - The Beatles will Rot Your Teeth

Everyone has experienced this familiar scenario:

You see an ad for food that looks so great that next time you go out you make it a point to pick up some of that delicious looking delicacy. When you sit down to feast, you discover it only vaguely resembles what you saw in the photo or the commercial, and it tastes like the ass end of a mule on laxatives.

Why does this slop look so good in ads, but not when you get it? Its possible you’re a crummy cook or you’ve encountered an unstable fast food worker, but realistically the most likely reason is that the food you see isn’t meant to be eaten, its created by ‘food stylists’ to look good. Its poisonous and it will kill you.

Why do those Corn Flakes Lennon loved to sing about so much look so nice sitting in a bowl of milk? Its not milk, its white glue. Burgers are sprayed with glycerin and painted to make them look moist and juicy, as well as cut up and shaped from behind to fill out the bun. That beautiful roast turkey has been washed in dish detergent, cooked briefly, painted with ten coats of food colouring, and blow torched to give it that roasted look. The syrup being poured over pancakes? Motor oil. The secret to juicy, delectable BBQ ribs? Half-cook them and paint with wood stain and BBQ sauce. That cold, refreshing bottle of beer with beads of condensation clinging to it? A thick, clear gelatin product called Ice powder. Cake? Styrofoam with icing. Ice Cream? Mashed potatoes and food colouring. Hot steam rising from this fresh from the oven creation? Cigarette smoke blown through a straw.

This deception isn’t considered lying, its considered a good sales strategy. Most people know that the food they see on TV is fake, but they buy it anyway. They don’t care its a two-dimensional fraud, backed up by a snappy jingle which is replayed hundreds of times a day so the name becomes impossible to forget. They don’t care that it actually has very little nutritional value and the labels are completely misleading (MSG is still used in foods that proclaim that they’re MSG FREE, they simply either change the name to a variation of ‘hydrolyzed soy protein,’ or flat out lie), the ingredients cheap, the flavor created in a laboratory (what the hell is ‘natural flavor’ anyway?).

People still buy this stuff because they don’t care. Its easy, they’re conditioned to like fake food, and they have no taste. These are the beatle fans of food.

Its the same illusion that allows FF fans to pretend this music is good, healthy, or worth digesting. They don’t like to think about it. They prefer music presented as sugar coated, mass marketed, pre-digested bite-sized lumps, repackaged in shiny wrappers and served on a platter of psychedelic swirls and mundane mediocrity. The beatles are the Pizza Pops of music. How else can you explain something like this:

We hope this whirly mixture of toffee cookies and fudge peace signs enlightens your bellies and souls and makes you ask what you can do to promote peace in your lives. -Ben & Jerry

Or this?

Its now very obvious that John Lennon was talking about fudge peace signs and toffee cookies when he wrote Imagine, not some stupid message of world peace…duh! Finally fans can rot their teeth while they rot their minds.

When you compare the mass marketed bubble gum claptrap* that creates the bulk of the beatles easy-to-swallow repertoire to actual bubble gum, the similarities are uncanny. The simple, inoffensive, safe melodies and lyrics perpetrated by this overblown boyband and the unholy following Madison Avenue has created behind them becomes nothing more than a bunch of lazy lab rats, too stupid to leave their wide open cages, opting instead to sit in the darkness on their overgrown haunches and chew on grease stains clinging to the discarded wrappers of yesterdays swindle.

Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game.
It’s easy!

*Thanks to Gary Hall for this expression.

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