29 days ago, I discovered the Beatles and what a beautiful 29 days it has been. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Everyone in the world knows The Beatles - you haven’t discovered shit, you hipster!” Of course I knew The Beatles prior to my 29 day honeymoon…
I’d heard loads of their songs and had a considerable number on my iPod. More specifically, I had their greatest hits (The Beatles don’t have an album called ‘the greatest hits,’ but for the sake of brevity I’ll use it as a pseudonym.) My opinion of the band was tepid, I liked their songs but in truth… I thought the band were overrated.
On light inspection, greatest hits albums are a simple, harmless tool for getting a refined impression of a legendary band or artist. They’re an innocuous introduction, they save you time by presenting you with the best songs. If anything, they help people appreciate the band, right? WRONG! The truth of the matter is that greatest hits albums are the biggest deterrent of one’s enjoyment of a band like The Beatles. Allow me to explain.
The first and perhaps most blatant argument against a greatest hits record is the album ‘Rubber Soul,’ the sixth studio album released by The Beatles. The group regard it as the first album they conceived as a holistic piece rather than a collection of songs. They wrote the album during a 3 month break from touring, the longest they’d had since the touring years began. The band were growing tired of the incessant demand of Beatlemania and what they felt was becoming a factory production line of singles and albums. Artistically, the group were maturing and ‘Rubber Soul’ is considered by many to be the group’s first truly classic, landscape changing album. The Beatles lost their matching haircuts and suits and really began to push their creative boundaries. Each new track on ‘Rubber Soul’ is a new page in a slowly unfolding book of potential. The group were bending the formula of their creative process on all sides. ‘Norwegian Wood’ displays Lennon’s development with subtle metaphors and vague ambiguity. The track is also the first time that Harrison exhibits the sitar, something that would become fundamental to the band in later years. ‘Nowhere Man’ again shows Lennon’s growth with a harsh autobiographical reflection. Even the happy-go-lucky romance that made the band such a teen hit morphed on ‘Rubber Soul.’ ‘Girl’ is a darkly, creeping and bitter portrayal of love and on ‘Run For Your Life,’ Lennon threatens to murder his girl if she leaves him. A far cry from “she loves you yeah yeah yeah.” Even the ever-goody two shoes McCartney got a bit adventurous and sang in French. As well as venturing into new lyrical themes and tones, ‘Rubber Soul’ signifies a real shift in The Beatles’ sound. The album draws heavily from folk, soul and other music from around the world, and it shows in the final product. The album is more sophisticated, thoughtful and diverse than anything the group had created before. The improvements made on ‘Rubber Soul’ are also reflected in pop music more generally. The calibre of albums released in the mid 60s outshone anything that had come before with artists pushing each other further, resulting in new albums being more ambitious than the last. ‘Rubber Soul’ is in many ways a response to Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Bringing it All Back Home.’ (Fun Fact: In reply, Dylan released his version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ in the form of ‘Fourth Time Around’ on ‘Blond on Blond’.)
As well as the nerdy fun to be had in the context of albums, charting the arc of a group like The Beatles through their long players is one of the most gratifying things in music; watching the group grow through each new release, seeing them pick up new techniques and instruments, running with some and dropping others. The greatest hits give you a flavour of an album, you roughly know the chronology of the songs and can get an impression of where the band were artistically. But it’s just not the same. You could listen to ‘Yesterday’ and know it was an unusually sober song for the band at the time. But unless you’ve listened to ‘Help!’ (the album) you wouldn’t know that the tone of the album reflects the struggle that Beatlemania was becoming. With themes of regret and a wistful spirit, the album shows the beginnings of a band moving away from the things that made them so famous. You could listen to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and think it shares no resemblance to any beatle song before it. But unless you listen to ‘Revolver,’ you can’t appreciate quite how far the band had come since their: “he loves her, she loves him, I love you” years. You’ve heard ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and you know that they were taking the kind of acid that only rock stars can get. But unless you’ve listened to ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ you might not know how hugely fundamental it is to pop history and the course of rock and roll: in its recording, production, experimentation and exploration. You can listen to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and notice that Harrison takes the lead instead of the usual McCartney/Lennon dominance. But if you haven’t listened to ‘The White Album,’ you won’t realise that it signifies the beginning of the end. Each member pulling in a different creative direction, each providing very different tracks. ‘The White Album’ was the least collaborative of all The Beatles albums and it’s reflected in the seemingly random chaos of the track listing. There is no sense of order or structure, with each member essentially writing their own album and blending them together to create a wonderfully confused and perplexing cocktail.
By now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with ‘the greatest hits’. Listening to a greatest hits record should have no bearing on one’s enjoyment of an album and it doesn’t. My problem with the concept of the greatest hits is that they prevent you from ever getting to the full albums. A discography as big as The Beatles’ is quite daunting and getting through it is no small feet. So naturally you listen to the greatest hits and excuse yourself from the whole affair. One would think that if someone listened to the greatest hits and liked it enough, they would of course go on to listen to the albums. But again, in my humble opinion, this assumption would be a mistake…because greatest hits records are in fact the least enjoyable songs from a discography. The songs have always been there and you don’t appreciate the sun rising. I’d bet that you can’t remember the first time you heard most of The Beatles’ songs. They’ll be exceptions, maybe your mum had a ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ single in the car or maybe like me the first time you heard “Come Together” was when Olly Murs sang it on the Xfactor. But for the most part, the songs have just always been there. Like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition,’ it’s almost as if you were born knowing them. By the time you’re 15 you’ve heard all the big Beatles songs countless times and more often than not, involuntarily. You don’t enjoy them as much because there is no personal discovery. When you think of all your favourite albums and artists, I’ll bet that there was a strong element of personal discovery: maybe a friend showed you a track or you heard it on the radio, but the journey that follows was just you and the album falling in love. Take ‘Revolver’ for instance, after going through the album a handful of times you find your favourites. My song is ‘No One’ and if I ever heard it in public after a few drinks I would more than likely shout ‘MA TUNE’ in a very obnoxious tone. My song could never have been ‘Yellow Submarine’ because I didn’t find it, it belongs to that huge library of songs you’ve heard all your life, I couldn’t feel like I had a connection with it, I can’t place it at anytime in my memory. To really fall in love with an album it has to be yours.
It’s easy to forget classic artists in the pursuit of new music, easy to accept the songs you know as a healthy substitute for listening to all the albums. But discovering artists that everybody knows like The Beatles or Dylan have been some of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had listening to music. If you haven’t already, take an evening to sit in a nice chair and listen from front to back and I guarantee you’ll find something you love.