The classic song Alice Cooper thinks The Beatles could’ve easily written: “They’re aliens”
There isn’t much that The Beatles haven’t inspired. Such was their overwhelming cultural transcendence you could argue that the Fab Four helped to formulate everything from shock rock to films and even political overhauls. They were quite literally the most pervasive artistic force in history, and Alice Cooper basked in the light of their beacon, knowing he’d never be the same again.
When selecting his favourite records of all time, the singer and golf fanatic proclaimed, “I picked Meet the Beatles! only because it was the first one that totally knocked me out, because I’d never heard anything like that before.“ They were just breaking onto the scene as young kids, and yet, they were already providing a jolt to the youth that plugged into the zeitgeist like a lightbulb.
“We were listening to the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, and all of a sudden, here’s this band coming along with all this hair and Beatle boots and these suits, and they were singing these songs that you could hear them one time, and you knew them,” Cooper recalled. Instantly, he was enamoured and inspired to do something fresh with his own music moving forward. The Beatles, in turn, always propagated something fresh.
However, it wasn’t just their keenness or daring that kept them ahead of the curve; they also had the chops to pursue anything fresh that they wished to turn their hand toward. As it happens, Cooper claims they could’ve made light work of many of the so-called cultural masterpieces that followed. “I’ve always said this, and people might disagree with me, but it’s easier to write something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than it is to write something like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’” he said.
It’s a contentious point, given that the typical narrative is that the Fab Four hadn’t really found their musical stride at the time of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand‘, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ moves through so many modes it is essentially ten songs woven into one. However, that is just the point: The Beatles were crafting hits within the restricted realm of what the radio would play at the time, and they were just about doing enough to subvert those norms and project a more nuanced future.
There are great subtleties stitched into the iconic fabric of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand‘. It’s the song everyone was trying to write at the time, but only one band managed it, and they did so by avoiding the pitfalls of all the platitudinal melodies that everyone else was tumbling down and twisting three familiar chords with more, zip, fizz and nuance than any of their peers.
“I’m still pretty sure they’re aliens,“ Cooper reconciles. “I don’t think they’re from this planet.” That is high praise indeed for a man who has always sought to capture something otherworldly. The Beatles did that with such little sweat that it can barely be considered anything other than proof of an alternative nature. “The simplicity of all The Beatles’ songs is what made them so perfect,” he says.
This was a point that even Leonard Bernstein agreed with, celebrating their ‘more with less’ genius when he said, “This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language,” Bernstein adds, “It relies more on the simple triad, the basic harmony of folk music. Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary; limited harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extraordinary. Only think of the shear originality of a Beatles tune.”
However, it is also worth noting that he also rates Queen, so they don’t catch a stray in his critique for any reason other than the fact he genuinely thinks ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a classic that Paul McCartney and Co would’ve had no problem writing. In fact, McCartney proved he could write in the operatic style two years prior to the Queen hit’s release with ‘Live and Let Die’.
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