Beatles Criticism Archives - Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

The Beatles, “Let It Be,” and “Get Back”: “Trying to Deceive”?

By Nancy Carr|2021-10-22T09:59:45-07:00October 22, 2021|1970s, Abbey Road, Beatles Criticism, Breakup, Let It Be, Movies|

Michael G's post "Let It Be, Get Back, and History as Art" and the comments on the site have raised so many interesting points about Lindsay-Hogg's 1969 film and Peter Jackson's forthcoming one that I wanted to say a bit more about why I'm looking forward to Jackson's film, but also not expecting it to be the whole truth. A lot of that expectation derives from considering historical context, so let's get into the wayback machine for a minute. In 1975, Barclay James Harvest released the song "Titles," taken from their album "Time Honoured Ghosts." The vast majority of the song does consist [...]

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Critic Amanda Marcotte: Sgt. Pepper’s made rock “music for men”

By Nancy Carr|2020-09-10T11:22:31-07:00June 1, 2017|1967, Beatles Criticism, Beatles on the Web, critics, Sgt. Pepper, Uncategorized|

Amanda Marcotte, critic and politics writer for Salon. Yeah, no surprise that the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's has everybody out there opining. But I find Amanda Marcotte's take in Salon worth calling out, if only to say that as someone who considers herself a feminist I'm thoroughly tired of this kind of facile, oversimplified finger-pointing. Her claim that Sgt. Pepper's "was the point when rock stopped being the music of girls and started being the music of men" is potentially defensible. Certainly the critical reception the album received made it clear that popular music could be considered serious art. If Marcotte stuck to analyzing what critics at the time said about the [...]

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Critic Richard Goldstein’s 1967 pan of Sgt. Pepper

By Nancy Carr|2017-05-22T13:23:45-07:00May 22, 2017|1967, Beatles Criticism, Robert Christgau, Sgt. Pepper|

Richard Goldstein, back in the day. The Washington Post has published this intriguing piece about how a 22-year-old critic came to write a negative review of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the New York Times when the album was originally released. Richard Goldstein, the critic in question, has the complete review on his website: you can read it here. Although he was a young freelancer at the time, Goldstein was an important figure in 1960's music criticism. Robert Christgau says that Goldstein "invented rock criticism. He was the first rock critic. I mean, it turns out Paul Williams was publishing his [...]

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Starostin on the White Album

By Nancy Carr|2016-06-20T07:18:13-07:00June 20, 2016|1968, Beatles Criticism, George Starostin, The White Album|

The tireless George Starostin, still working his way through Rate Your Music's list of "Top Albums of All Time," has just published a new review of the White Album (currently #25 on the list). As usual, there's plenty of substance in Starostin's review, and I highly recommend it. These lines particularly stood out to me (ellipses mine): "A typical 'complaint' against The Beatles is that this is the first album where the band, much too often, reads like the sum of its parts rather than a collective whole: The Lennon songs are Lennon, the McCartney songs are McCartney, the Harrison songs mark [...]

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Tumblr Fandom Categories and Beatle Books

By Karen Hooper|2016-03-08T09:13:27-08:00March 7, 2016|Beatles Criticism, Beatles on the Web, biography, books, Uncategorized|

By Gibson DelGiudice, guest Dullblogger As a 21st century Beatles fan (born in 1990, and so coming of age during the new millennium), it seems only natural that I probably have a different perspective than most Beatles fans on the literature that documents the group's rise to fame and the careers of its members. I’d like to share a Tumblr-influenced way of looking at Beatles books and sorting them into categories, based on the attitudes they express. Like many young people today, I’m a consummate Tumblr user. At the time of posting, over 277.2 million blogs make up the Tumblr network , [...]

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Lester Bangs’ anti-Beatles sermon, 1975

By Nancy Carr|2016-02-25T11:14:49-08:00February 25, 2016|1975, Beatle myth, Beatles Criticism, critics, Lester Bangs, solo|

Lester Bangs takes a call, mid-70s. Lester Bangs declared the Beatles “nothing” and hated A Hard Day’s Night. To be sure, he despised plenty of other bands. If you rate Bangs as a great critic (I don’t), you pretty much have to relish his talent for insult. Bangs’ animosity toward the Beatles, however, was particularly barbed. In 1975 he printed, in both The Real Paper and CREEM, an eight-page screed damning not only the former Beatles’ solo work, but the entire legacy of the band. Reading “Dandelions in Still Air: The Withering Away of the Beatles” in 2016, I thought: [...]

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McCartney and Critics

By Karen Hooper|2016-02-22T06:59:09-08:00February 19, 2016|1970s, Beatles Criticism, McCartney|

Mike and Nancy’s great posts about Starostin's critique of Abbey Road led to a lively discussion about how Paul McCartney is viewed and treated by music critics, particularly with respect to his early solo efforts. This is a great topic and one that I think deserves its own post. Why is it that Macca seems to run afoul of critics? Is there a particular set of reasons or circumstances we can pinpoint which would explain it? In their interview with author Tim Doyle, author of Man on the Run, Paul McCartney in the 70’s, Mike and Nancy asked a similar question: Why [...]

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Starostin reviews “Abbey Road”

By Nancy Carr|2016-02-15T17:29:07-08:00February 15, 2016|1969, Abbey Road, Beatles Criticism, Beatles on the Web, George Starostin|

George Starostin, who by my calculations must sleep four hours or less per night to work an academic job and find time to review as many albums as he does. Indefatigable reviewer George Starostin, of the Only Solitaire blog, has just posted a review of the Beatles' Abbey Road. This one is part of his "Important Album Series," in which he is offering critical considerations of the "Top Albums of All Time" on the Rate Your Music site. Abbey Road currently sits at #7 on that site. I prefer the more comprehensive review of the album that Starostin posted in 2012 on his regular [...]

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Lester Bangs on the Beatles

By Michael Gerber|2016-02-25T11:13:26-08:00January 28, 2016|critics, Lester Bangs|

"Uncool" is just another type of cool, Lester. Oliver Hall over at the amazing website Dangerous Minds surfaced this contentious clip by ur-rock nerd Lester Bangs dismissing Beatles nostalgia as "sick" and "a rip-off," a mind-killing corporate shill whose ultimate victims were "the consumer" and (gulp) "John Lennon." This explosion of insight comes from a TV series called "FM-TV," which did a segment on Beatles nostalgia. The entire annoying segment is below. Right up front I'm going to cop to taking this personally, being one of those second-generation fans that, in Lester's eyes, should've lined up to see -- I [...]

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Why Those Screaming Beatlemania Girls Matter

By Nancy Carr|2015-11-30T12:09:11-08:00November 30, 2015|Beatlemania, Beatles Criticism, books, pre-Beatles, Television|

Those videos of Beatlemania girls screaming have have always made me squirm. All that howling, weeping, and writhing bug me for multiple reasons. As a woman, they make me cringe because rock criticism defined itself against them: screeching gals over there, analytical guys over here. As a Beatles fan they make me wince because they (superficially) reinforce the argument made by many non-fans that the Beatles “were just a boy band.” At a time when Why-Can’t-The-Boomers-Just-Get-Over-The-Beatles-Already is a definite thing (see this Washington Post piece), it's worth asking: Really, why all that screaming? And why should any of us post-Boomers care? Measured [...]

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