Van Morrison on why The Beatles “didn’t matter”
Over years of hindsight, there has been a common debate as to whether The Beatles lived up to the hype. Even though they may have changed the world of rock music with their various genre experiments across each album, the advancements in musical development have called their influence on today’s music into question more than a few times. While The Beatles have still etched themselves into Western culture, not everyone could claim to be a fan.
For all of the great music that they have made, The Beatles did have their fair share of critics back in the day as well. Lou Reed notoriously hated the sugary style of pop songwriting on a handful of the group’s earlier projects, and Frank Zappa had gone on record saying that there was much better music in the world other than the Fab Four.
While the sounds of tracks like ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be’ might not have been to everyone’s taste, one staple of rock history didn’t think The Beatles even deserved their accolades. At the same time the lads from Liverpool were making their classics, Van Morrison was emerging on the scene with the band, Them, bringing a rootsier take on rock and roll.
Although Morrison may have become a phenomenal songwriter in his own right on albums like Astral Weeks, he was not even going to attempt to praise The Beatles. In an interview with MusicRadar, Morrison thought that The Beatles’ influence had become far too overblown, saying, “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of The Beatles. We don’t think music started there”.
While the major rock circuits may have loved to praise The Beatles to high heaven (as they should), Morrison thought that the work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney hardly made a dent in music history, explaining, “The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t mean anything. To me, it was meaningless”.
In terms of his taste in music, though, it’s easy to see where Morrison was coming from. Considering how much of his solo material was indebted to the work of jazz and old blues, the experimental sounds of a track like ‘A Day In the Life’ doesn’t necessarily gel as well the sounds of swing.
When working on albums like Moondance, Morrison preferred the sounds of horns to deliver R&B rather than what the Fab Four tried to accomplish with guitars. However, what Morrison tended to overlook about The Beatles’ influence is just how many sonic avenues they could cover.
In just under a decade of recorded output, The Beatles never considered any genre to be off the table, going from traditional pop rock to folk music on Rubber Soul, avant-garde pop on Revolver, and even ushering in the psychedelic movement of music on Sgt Peppers. While The Beatles may not have been to Morrison’s liking, the reason why modern music sounds today comes from the landmark recordings that they made back in the 1960s.
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