(01-25-2026, 03:15 PM)BostonCard Wrote: (01-25-2026, 11:40 AM)MV72018 Wrote: IMO, the Beatles are an extremely rare example of a pop group that was extremely popular and was also a legitimate example of cultural excellence, in significant part because of the brilliant songs (including melodies, lyrics, arrangements, and Abbey Road studio recordings) written by McCartney and Lennon. Their works will long endure and enlighten.
I wonder if contemporaneous critics universally felt this way.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la...story.html
https://www.quora.com/What-did-music-cri...nia-period
Quote:"Don't let the Beatles bother you. If you don't think about them, they will go away, and in a few more years they will probably be bald….
And teenagers, go ahead and enjoy your Beatlemania. It won't be fatal and will give you a lot of laughs a few years hence when you find one of their old records or come across a picture of Ringo in a crew cut."
60 years from now, it is entirely possible that some now-20-year-old will trash whatever is popular music then as a cultural wasteland and pine for the important culturally relevant music of… BTS
BC
I asserted nothing about "contemporary music critics."
BC, your entirely-possible-in-60-years-comment may indeed pan out. But even if it did all that that pining 20-year-old you imagine would have done would be to have shown the persistence of "cultural relativism," a profoundly corrosive, noxious force, which is increasingly widespread today. Obviously, cultural preferences vary greatly across space, time, age group, etc. Fine. But there is more to cultural excellence than being ephemerally extremely popular, which can be and often is manufactured by those standing to gain financially from fostering it.
Those who embrace, tout, or tolerate cultural or ethical relativism -- holding that no cultural or societal phenomena are objectively any better than any other -- forfeit the right to have their critiques of even the worst cultural or societal phenomena of their day viewed as more than just their own subjective judgments, even if some might vigorously and admirably oppose such phenomena in their personal lives. i believe that (trans-genre) cultural and socio-ethical excellence are not chimaeras, that aesthetic judgments such as "Beethoven's 9th" or Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" is a greater human achievement than any BTS work, and that social-ethical judgments that contemporary Nordic societies are greater human achievements than Nazi society or the kind of society that the current president is trying to create are more than (and cannot be reduced to) mere subjective expressions of personal preference.
(IMO, cultural excellence claims about a work depend on whether and the degree to which a work, because of its properties, can retain the experiencer's interest upon multiple encounters, whether the work embodies a measure of organic unity or coherence from its diverse complexity, and the degree to which it sheds meaningful, non-obvious light on some aspect of the perennial human condition. Also involved are the kinds of basic needs that all humans have across space and time and the ways we have evolved for satisfying them, either directly physiologically or indirectly psychically, through encounters with works of art and social institutions.)