Amazing how brazenly you flaunt your abominable bad
taste. John Lennon was the Mozart of the 20th Century,
a fact only denied by people with the musical
sensitivity of a warthog and the morals of a bedbug.

Amazing we would attempt to contact aliens when we have enough problems communicating amongst ourselves. But my suggestions would be “Come Rain or Come Shine” or “Edelweiss”.

Learnin’ the Blues by Frank Sinatra should make them more mellow. When they come here they can have a scotch or a few. Going back the next day they are going to have such a hangover they will never want to come back to our place and if we are lucky Paris Hilton will be on board their spaceship!

@ man

John Lennon was a bum.  And with the exception of George Harrison so were all the rest of the Beatles.  May God forgive them for bringing that hellish uncultivated Brit-pop to our shores.  None of them save for Jethro Tull and Eric Clapton knew what rock or the blues really was.

@man

“de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est” but I’ll make an exception for the late poltroon John Lennon.

John Lennon was a talent-less arrogant tiny-brained low-life whose over-estimation of his importance was only exceeded by the shallowness of his ideas. “All You Need is Love” indeed.

This BBC interview reveals his truly repugnant nature all too well.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/12/genius_is_pain_.html

It took the genius Michael O’Donoghue and Tony Hendra at National Lampoon to expose him for the fraud he was in their hilarious and underappreciated “Magical Misery Tour” from the NL album “Radio Diner.”

Is it true that the biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas, having expressed the hope that Bach’s music would be sent into space via the Voyager craft for the edification of ETs, immediately paused and said “But that would be boasting”?

Bill Buckley cited this quote in National Review 23 years ago; but I haven’t been able, so far, to find it confirmed (i.e. with an actual source given) anywhere else.

I’m sure that if there’s other life in the universe, they look at us the way we look at cavemen.

<<if some of them are racists and don’t like African-American music, we hit them with grace, sophistication, and wit à la Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, and Lorenz Hart>>

What if they hate both Negroes AND Jews?!

I’ve always hated the Beatles’ music. They started their careers making sanitized versions of real African American Blues and Rock n Roll muscians work, pure plagerism. And the tunes THEY wrote is better suited to elevator musicia or the background track at a grocery store.

The appeal of the Beatles was always to sexually repressed, suburban white teenage girls, and idiotic liberals of the “Save-the-Earth” or the “We are the World” variety.

RAP---is also commercialized garbage for ignorant teenage suburban boys whose education has been turned over to the politically correct feminists and self-hating white well-to-do liberals that inhabit the Teacher’s Unions and the NEA.

If we want to keep them away, perhaps we should beam out a steady stream of Phil Glass, the next best thing to Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons.

@ Andrew, Go back to picking your banjo.

Please, please, please.....all they need to hear to know we are a benevolent (!) and advanced society is Tony Bennett.

I vote for a nursery song with the most idiotic text. Nothing would communicate better the present mess humanity is in when juxtaposed with the technical know how. Then, some million years from now we could get a undertaker mission from the aliens to clean up here what is inevitably coming. Perhaps they would even finish the job with deadly intent.

Most contemporary music is crap. Most
contemporary art is crap. Lennon was
an idiot; McCartney an equivalent; but
a fair amount of the music wasn’t all
that bad especially in comparison to
what came afterwards. “Rap” is not
even music so it’s pointless to mention
it in the same breath. All music, in
case you haven’t noticed, winds up as
elevator music. For aliens, how about
“Hit the road Jack....” ?

Another universal problem solved.....

“Beatles music” is a contradiction. Where’s the music? You know, skilled musicians playing musical instruments? All you have are some fools with girly voices aping a choir with catchy choruses with some faint drums to keep the beat and sometimes someone strums a guitar.
cRap and Hop Hip are just computer sound simulations with pirated samples mixed in and some ex-cons speaking insults and gibberish into the microphone.
Similar goes for some of the other folks mentioned in the comments. Too much emphasis on vocals/the vocalist with musical instruments just accompanying the voice. When it should be the other way around, unless we are talking about a world-class voice, and there aren’t many of those.

My wife and I once had a wonderful little dog who we were fairly certain was from another planet.  She repeatedly assured us that her favorite piece of music was also (appropriately enough)that of most alf’s: the Jupiter symphony. She also noted that early Miles, especially Kind of Blue, was well regarded.

I still like the Beatles. And what kind of man was Cole Porter anyway? Judge not harshly.... Anyway, you’d have to include a tune sung by Bing, and something sung by Rosemary Clooney, a Gershwin song would do. Perhaps a Bing and Rosie duet.

Really, I’m just as big a fan of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and those wonderful Nigel Kneale QUATERMASS scripts as the next guy, but searching for aliens in outer space?  Good grief.

These “scientists” bring nonsense into the realm of high art.

There was, after all, only one Incarnation.

Taki:  Before the Beatles, we had been subjected to
the puerilization of popular music, as described by
John Lukacs. I grew up in the fifties, and recall a
lot of singers called Johnny, Timmy, Frankie, etc. etc.,
whose songs can be classifed as earworms (unforgettable
tunes, and how we wish we could forget them).

There was some good stuff, but most of it, like the
Big Bands, were a holdover from the thirties and
forties, when adults still wrote songs.

In that environment, the Beatles could be seen as an
improvement.

The Beatles were over-rated in their time, but they had lots of good stuff. You have to discount the junk they put out after they burned out; intoxicated with a bit of everything plus the demigod status conferred on them, it was pretty much inevitable that they would start turning out crap. I do agree with most of Taki’s judgment of the good stuff. The main point is that broadcasts over light years are going to be lost in the noise, even if the aliens have dishes miles across. A sphere 10 light years across is 1.2 x 10exp19 square meters. If they have a dish 10 km in diameter, they will receive 1 twenty trillionth of the broadcast signal. If they knew where we were and the frequency we were using we would still need billions of watts to get them a signal that won’t be lost in the noise. This falls off as the inverse square, and Polaris is a thousand light years away, OK? Nobody is going to get our signal, and we’re not going to get theirs unless they can harness an appreciable part of a solar output for their station. My guess is that this is funding related.
HTH,
Phil

Well what if the Aliens use magnetic/gravitational lensing to focus the signals the way we use it to see distant planets?

Well, I dont know about yall, but If’n I was a space alien and came to earth and saw how insane this freaking planet was, I wouldn’t attack it because the fools will eventually blow themselves up, why bother traveling at light speed to attack those that attack themselves? I forget who siad it but it went like this: Maybe the reason planets are uninhabited is because they had better nuclear scientists than we do.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13362-giant-ropes-of-dark-matter-found-in-new-survey.html

The descent of music from the 17th,18th and 19th centuries to Dixieland, Swing, Jazz, Rock & Roll,and now Hip Hop has mirrored the slow decline of Western civilization. As Plato wrote, when the music changes, so does society. Dvorak’s New World Symphony always leaves me melancholic and lamenting the impending demise.

And I actually like some Dixie, Swing and Jazz.

I am the same age as Israel. During the past score, or more, of years I have endlessly read men of my generation declaim that the Beatles sucked.

Bull shit.

There were on of the most popular groups of all time and Lennon had a great rock’n’ roll voice.

The simple fact is that they were enormously popular and their music was a lot of fun.

Back in the day I used to pick-up she who was to become The Bride and we used to drive to the highest hills in Vermont so we could listen to WRKO out of New York and hear some decent rock ‘n’ roll.

We’d pull over to park and drink some long-neck Budweisers and neck and listen to the latest Beatles tune. It was absolutely damn fabulous.

A hot summer night. The Bride-to-be’s long beautiful neck bathed in sweet perfume and I’d incline my neck towards hers and I’d be swept away with the smell, the longing, the music, the beer, the pot, and Lennon singing “Stand by Me.”

One of the worst “conservative” aspects of the back-words looking rewriting of reality is this “The Beatles sucked” idea.

Look, I was a Catholic who dated a Protestant - a Congregationalist (you can’t get more prot than that).

Why did I date her? Pure ecumenism. She had long strawberry-blonde hair and she wore tight white jeans with a pink turtle-neck and back in the day I’d have driven 250 miles just to watch her walk up and down a staircase.

Fast forward. The Bride converted and she beaded our own Rosaries and we go to Communion together every Sunday.

I really don’t know what this has to do with this post but tonight I drank some Petaluma Cabernet (Mr. Ball knows what that is) and I couldn’t take The Beatles B.S.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioiv2IGRcVY&feature=related

This site is rife with arguments about politics and religion, why not add music.  When the aliens land we will send them to Taki’s place for some vibes - I hope he doesn’t start with jazz tho or that might send them back.

All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

@man

John Lennon as Mozart?  Gag me.  Few songs have lyrics more inane (and hypocritical) than “Imagine”.  I like the Beatles, but Lennon alone never produced anything of interest.

I recently heard a number of Beatles tunes after a long time without them. They sounded quite dated and empty, though often clever in a show-off way.

I was thinking maybe Johnny Mercer’s lyrics in “Out of this World”....

I suppose it may be a cultural paradox, but I always thought that asthe Beatles evolved (devolved?) into their “psychedelic” phase, they on occasion wrote some strangely brilliant things, including some chord changes and harmonies that were actually more influenced by classical music than most of the ‘20s-’50s popular music. Not that it fits into the “psychedelic” category, but if one listens to a tune like “Penny Lane” (McCartney probably wrote most of it), he or she would be soulless to not at least acknowledge a certain melancholy about it, a strangely English (Celtic?) sentiment that moves me in a way that none of the ‘20-’50s popular American tunes do (the signature bass line one Penny Lane is actually very close to one of Elgar’s bass lines on his Pomp and Circumstance march #5).

Forrest has quite good taste, I must admit. He has mentioned some very good compositions and musicians indeed. And the whole 1920s-1940s period of music is a musical time I could learn far more about. Anyone who knows about Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things is no musical plebeian, to use a bit of litotes. But, since Penny Lane didn’t do it, how about a late Beatles tune like “The Long and Winding Road”? (it seems McCartney wrote most or all of it). How can one not feel the beautiful sadness of that song’s simple melody and rich harmonies? I suppose I have much more music to listen to, but I would say that this tune expresses a more trenchant, bereft melancholy than most of what I’ve heard from the ‘20-’50s.

Well, at least I now know how mufti spartacus’
ecumenical catholicism developed.

Oh, and in response to his last unenlightening
response:

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/dhimmis_on_the_thames/

OldSchool is right...now that I’ve reviewed some of the
comments. Lennon alone was absolutely useless...pretty
much like Harrison alone or McCartney alone or Ringo alone;
although McCartney has been the “most successful” alone.

Forrest needs to experience Ronstadt singing Yesterday in
her own inimitable style—not that McCartney’s wasn’t any
good; I only heard it a million times back when....

This may be one of the very few times where I can agree
(somewhat) with mufti spartacus: the Beatles really aren’t
all that bad...depending, of course, on which tune, etc.

His memories are, how shall we say, inlfuenced by the
obvious and exquisite reminiscences of a pink and white
image of perfumed pulchritude for which he may be properly
envied.

As for moi, well, we tangoed. Most unfortunately, the tango
was condemned by the Church prior to Vatican2. Perhaps it
is, at worst, a venial sin for which we can blame Argentina.

The Beatles weren’t all that bad. The group had a joi de vivre that excels in comparison to the vapidities of contemporary popular music.

http://tropicalglen.com/

for an interesting assortment of tunes

The Beatles were the greatest musical act of the 20th century. The only reason Taki took a dislike to them was that they were immensely talented, provincial, working class and were self-made. But the worst of these to Taki was that they were self-made. Their unbridled success stands in stark contrast to his abject failure.

He also resents them because they are linked to the liberal attitudes of the 1960s. At the same time Taki was an indolent, effete social-climber. The basis for all of his bile is actually self-loathing - the late realisation that, despite all material advantages, he actually hasn’t achieved anything more noteworthy than a drugs bust.

What’s really disturbing about these attempts to contact alien civilizations is that there are wackos within NASA who apparently really believe that there are ETs within shouting distance and that it’s worth spending public money to attract their attention.

While it would seem almost a statistical impossibility that the known universe isn’t teeming with intelligent life, given the distances involved all such life forms will likely spend eternity in splendid isolation from one another.

Given the inability of humans to live together without armed conflict, that’s probably a good thing.

Why only human sounds? Animals are larger in numbers than we, and one of them might make a sound an alien species would recognize.

Of course, communication in the animal world consists mostly of violent threats, or shameless invites, so the recording situation must be chosen carefully.

Let us hope the aliens we summon will be small and chirpy, here to chat with the canaries, rather than some larger species all exited by the alligator’s mating call…

Taki’s list is a gaddamn sham - as if he’s ever listened to Charlie Parker. It’s unlikely that Bird is on the playlist of the Park Avenue chapter of the Klan, you daft klunt

Stick with the showtunes.  Sending out Mozart, Beethoven, or Bach is bragging, which is never in good taste.

Hmmm. This thread is quite a bastion of Beatle-bashing. I guess a certain amount of backlash is inevitable when you’re the most influential act of the second half of the 20th century. The mere fact you find it necessary to rip into them ALMOST FORTY YEARS AFTER THEY DISBANDED is unwitting testament to their importance. If I were a cranky, pre-Boomer conservative worshipping at the altar of Cole Porter, Bruce Springsteen would be a vastly more suitable target for my bile than the Beatles. Bruce couldn’t write a melody to save his life, his drummers sound like they’re playing garbage cans, and his identification with left-of-center political causes is at least as overt, and certainly more long-lasting, than John Lennon’s.

Postscript: A couple of years ago National Review picked the Beatles’ “Taxman” as one of the greatest conservative rock songs of all time.

“Under My Thumb” was a good one too. A couple of years ago the Stones stuck it to the neoconservaties with their song “Sweet Neocon.”

“It’s liberty for all/’Cause democracy’s our style/Unless you’re against us/Then it’s prison without trial.”

“But one thing is certain/Life is good at Halliburton/If you’re really so astute/You should invest at Brown & Root.”

“How come you’re so wrong/My sweet neocon/If you turn out right/I’ll eat my hat tonight.”

I left the “v” out of “neoconservatives.” Sorry.

Back to the Beatles for a second. If you want to get really extreme, let’s not forget Charles Manson. He interpreted the White Album in general, and “Helter Skelter” in particular, as the blueprint for race war. Not exactly hippie-dippy We Are The World sentiments. (Charlie does fancy himself an environmentalist, however.)