IG2EUS: The Beatles

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderful piece of fiction about a fish out of water, babelfish in peoples' ears, the significance of the number forty-two, the greatest drink in the universe, and a bowl of petunias.

This is not that story.

Rather, this is the Irreverent Guide to Everything Under the Sun, which is in no way a pathetic rip-off of a book written by an atheist that is probably read more than the Bible nowadays.

Statements like the previous one used to be rather inflammatory and taken far too seriously. There was once a man who suggested that an organization that he was part of was bigger than Jesus. He cannot be reached for comment, because quite like the author of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he is spending eternity dead for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes whatsoever. But the organization that he was a part of lives on. You can hear their message on the radio every day. They were instrumental in creating a movement that can still affect young people today despite the fact that they haven't done anything, really, in 40 years.

They are, of course, the Beatles, a band whose name could not possibly have gone five seconds in this day and age without some clever critic adding a second "s" to the end of their name. Another thing that the Beatles did that no band could possibly get away with today is not tour for the second half of their career. In the days before the invention of the Internet, when disaffected teenagers (called "fans" by their idols and the media) could not copy and share audio and video recordings for free, when record sales actually meant something, touring was really a means of supporting an album. And because the Beatles' albums included Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, there was really no need to go on tour.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is claimed by some to be the very first rock concept album. This is untrue. Not even John Lennon thought Sgt. Pepper was a concept album. Sgt. Pepper may have brought the concept of concept albums to the rock scene, but it didn't do much more than that, other than sell, sell, sell, and also cause everyone to wonder how in the hell they'd managed to record an orchestra on only four tracks.

Not long after Sgt. Pepper, the band recorded The Beatles, also known as The White Album.

No. Stop.

The previous statement is incorrect. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded The Beatles, but with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that they did not do so as a band. A general rule of thumb that all bands can follow to benefit from this lesson is not to skimp on the cover art. To wit:

AC/DC: Back in Black had a mostly black cover. Their sales started declining with the release of their next album.

Pink Floyd: The Wall had a simple cover. The recording process saw one member of the band get fired, and was the beginning of the end for another member.

Metallica: Metallica. They followed the Beatles' strategy of releasing a self-titled album under the nickname "The (Absence of Color) Album," and like the Beatles, went to Music Hell shortly thereafter.

Note that all of these albums sold very very well and were generally well-recieved.

At any rate, The White Album can be generously reviewed as a project made by four people who, because they weren't touring and also their manager was now dead, simply weren't relating to each other very well anymore. The Beatles broke up in 1970 and there was much sadness.

Then in 1971 an untitled album by four other Brits was released and eventually outsold Sgt. Pepper. But that's a different story.