Rating My CD's: Relax, and Float Downstream...

 5. The Beatles -- Revolver

Imagine, if you will, a universe in which the Ramones actually had serious commercial viability, and did not require an endless touring schedule to make a living. Imagine a hip young manager took over the Ramones and made them into pop stars, and that the band went along with this, and basically turned themselves into the Jonas Brothers, perhaps dumping the drummer and replacing him with an amiable, technicolor-named journeyman  in the process.


Then imagine that they became the biggest band in the world, provoking media insanity on two sides of the Atlantic, and every band wanted to be them, and everything they recorded turned to gold. Then imagine that they tired of this, and worked over a few records to transform themselves into Bends-era Radiohead, without sacrificing a jot of their sales. After this, they shifted again, to become Pink Floyd, and when the run was over, an odd halfway split between the Kinks and Fugazi. So that's Ramones to Jonas Brothers to Radiohead to Pink Floyd to Kinks/Fugazi. Improbable. Impossible. But it happened. That's basically what the Beatles did.

Rating My CD's: They Won't See Me.

4. The Beatles -- Rubber Soul

I've made a long habit of not particularly liking the Beatles very much, mostly out of sheer obstinate contrariness. Something about the media force-feeding of this long-gone group with only two members still above ground down the collective throats of those too young to remember them has always made me gag.  It's easily the most galling manifestation of the Boomer Grief-Nostalgia Complex: every few years some corporate clown decides to repackage the same old songs we've heard a thousand times, cries "The Beatles!" and lets slip the dogs of Pavlov. Say what you will about the Rolling Stones, they at least have the decency to record some crappy new songs to summon us to hear the old ones.

So I used to make great show of denouncing the Fab Four with any one of the following epithets: