Chris Richards, WaPo: "... the Beatles are overrated. It's our fault, not theirs."
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@Chris__Richards
" Hot takes are boring, so forgive me for serving up this sizzling fajita plate of an edict, but the Beatles are overrated. It’s our fault, not theirs."
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Music • Perspective
The Beatles are overrated. That’s our fault, not theirs.
By Chris Richards
Pop music critic
Today at 2:12 p.m. EST
Hot takes are boring, so forgive me for serving up this sizzling fajita plate of an edict, but the Beatles are overrated. It’s our fault, not theirs. This band made profoundly beautiful music, and as a society and a species, we have a very hard time saying goodbye to the things we love. So to make things easier on everybody, our current pop culture leans toward rejecting the idea of finality altogether. No Hollywood franchise shall go un-rebooted, no vintage Beatles footage shall go unseen. Rich people get richer, our imaginations get poorer and nothing is allowed to end.
Which is why so many people chose to spend nearly eight hours of their wild and precious lives watching “The Beatles: Get Back” over the recent holiday weekend, a three-part documentary series on Disney Plus directed by Peter Jackson in which the Beatles literally come quite close to fulfilling the consensus expectation that they be everything to everyone. “Get Back” is interesting, irritating, sweet, stultifying, illuminating, punishing, satisfying, totally life-sucking, ultimately unnecessary and still pretty cool.
The footage — 60 hours of film originally shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that Jackson has edited down to eight — was gathered back in January 1969 as the Beatles aimed to write and record a new album in a tight two weeks, then unveil it in a grand televised concert that was eventually downsized to a nontelevised romp on a London rooftop that would famously end up being their last public performance. Throughout the 22-day process, various deadlines get blown, but the songs eventually get written, and with the refreshing presence of guest keyboardist Billy Preston, the Beatles find a way to run out of gas with smiles on their faces. Countless bands have marked their respective declines in tears, fists or worse. It’s nice to have proof that the Beatles didn’t go out like that.
This much proof, though? “Get Back” offers hours upon hours of rehearsal footage and all the rudderless noodling, joking, bickering, dithering and guitar tuning that goes with it — but try not to zone out because, look, they just figured out how to play “Don’t Let Me Down.” Enduring this whole thing is not unlike hearing some of the greatest songs ever written come together on the sales floor of a Guitar Center. “Maybe we’ll go on rehearsing forever,” says George Harrison, 252 minutes into the proceedings. “Back to the drudgery,” says Paul McCartney at the 318-minute mark. John Lennon is prone to yawning, and shouting, and singing in silly voices when he’s bored, while Ringo Starr, as patient and economical in conversation as he is on the drums, is never seen complaining.
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Which brings us back to those fajitas, now silent and room-temperature. When McCartney foresees his bandmates “very old,” we need not mourn the 21st-century Beatles reunion album that nobody gets to hear. The music these four managed to record between 1962 and 1970 is enough to sustain a lifetime of enjoyment, easy. But there’s also an entire world of new music being made at this very moment, and it’s already passing us by. Yes, we have to make room for the past and the present to coexist in our listening lives — but if we’re more excited about spending eight hours fly-on-the-walling with the Beatles than opening our ears to what this world currently sounds like, imagine what we’ll be grieving another 50 years from now.
By Chris Richards
Chris Richards has been The Washington Post's pop music critic since 2009. Before joining The Post, he freelanced for various music publications. Twitter https://twitter.com/Chris__Richards
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I actually find it quite charming and enjoyable. And their 'worst album' is better than 95% of any albums ever made 
I'd rather hear it than disc 2 of The Beatles on most days, so there's that.
Honestly it's really easy to say a band is overrated when they're ranked basically as Gods in the pantheon of rock and roll. You couldn't BE any more highly-rated, so ... I'd go with maybe a LITTLE bit?
And yet still, IMHO, LIB is better than any entire album prior to Rubber Soul.
Not saying every song on it is better than every earlier song, not by any stretch.
And yes, I'm talking original EMI British versions (and Capitol's Magical Mystery Tour, the one US version also considered canonical at this point).
Of course, I also think Help! is better than Hard Day's Night, so ... what do *I* know
I know there's some filler but the best tracks are so solid. So there it is. I will also say ... I consider the non-Spectorized 'Long and Winding Road' to be the definitive version, and I like it WAY better, so I'm maybe rating the record higher than I should on those grounds. It's schlocky on LIB but the stripped down version is great.
Also ... Don't Let Me Down is the b-side of Get Back, and is in the movie, so I can't help but count it in 'the list of songs on that album' even though it's technically ... not 
And I dig me some power pop. Big Star is an absolute all-time fave of mine, as is Matthew Sweet's early 90's stuff. Badfinger, T-Rex, Cheap Trick, Teenage Fanclub, to name a few others I dig.
You're right, it is kinda hard to define, it's more like you say 'the bands that are called power pop' instead of trying to define it
Also Abbey Road is clearly the greatest top-to-bottom Beatles record, and anyone who says differently is just wrong
