Beach Boys vs The Beatles

scary_robot_music said:
I'm Gen X. One thing my generation doesn't like to talk about now that the Boomers are generally loathed is how much we looked up to them when we were kids. The 1960s, the music and the scene in general. It all seemed so stylish and cool. As strange as it might seem, we tended to ape their style and the things they were into when they were young, even as they generally looked down on our music and the various things we were into as somehow inferior and less pure.

I had an English teacher who went to Woodstock and also saw all the cool bands like Zeppelin and Sabbath live in the 1970s. He seemed so cool at the time. Only later in life did I realize that he was just a burned out hippie loser. It took me decades to deprogram myself from the stupid ideas he and other teachers like him put in my head when I was a teenager. It's one of the main reasons I home school my own kids.

I still like Boomer dad rock though. A lot of it's really good stuff.
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What you have reminded us all here is very true.

It's very easy for all of us to forget that was a time when we were children and/or early teens, that all boomer pop cultural phenomena were still considered "cool" and "amazing" by us. This lasted from the late 70s all the way until about the late 90s. For example I remember television wouldn't shut up about the 30th anniversary of woodstock in 1999 for almost an entire year, and yes the film "Forest Gump" is a boomer's wet dream.

I think the precise moment the later generations turned against the boomers was when we entered the employment world, got jobs, started renting apartments, and got into relationships with girl and/or got married. That was when 90% of people realized we had an inherited a social and economic situation that is no way resembled all things the boomers were handed on a silver platter.....chief among them ridiculously high salaries compared to the price of buying a house, and easy divorces without any financial risks for men. Boomer families were able to buy houses (plural !!), go on vacations, and still put aside savings, with only 1 family member working in a job, with stay at home mothers.

After realizing that later generations salaries had less than half the purchasing power of their boomer fathers, and that out women were either riding cock carousels, and/or divorce raping us for every cent we had left, we quickly turned on the older generation that had been so "cool" in out childhood..

To add insult to injury, boomers in the early 90s started calling us the "slacker generation"....that insult in itself turned a quiet dissatisfaction into a burning hatred of all the damage the boomers had done, and still cause to this day.

The worst part is that to this day the boomers haven't even said sorry even once, or admitted their life advice was either wrong or essentially worthless.
 
Caduceus said:
What you have reminded us all here is very true.

It's very easy for all of us to forget that was a time when we were children and/or early teens, that all boomer pop cultural phenomena were still considered "cool" and "amazing" by us. This lasted from the late 70s all the way until about the late 90s. For example I remember television wouldn't shut up about the 30th anniversary of woodstock in 1999 for almost an entire year, and yes the film "Forest Gump" is a boomer's wet dream.

I think the precise moment the later generations turned against the boomers was when we entered the employment world, got jobs, started renting apartments, and got into relationships with girl and/or got married. That was when 90% of people realized we had an inherited a social and economic situation that is no way resembled all things the boomers were handed on a silver platter.....chief among them ridiculously high salaries compared to the price of buying a house, and easy divorces without any financial risks for men. Boomer families were able to buy houses (plural !!), go on vacations, and still put aside savings, with only 1 family member working in a job, with stay at home mothers.

After realizing that later generations salaries had less than half the purchasing power of their boomer fathers, and that out women were either riding cock carousels, and/or divorce raping us for every cent we had left, we quickly turned on the older generation that had been so "cool" in out childhood..

To add insult to injury, boomers in the early 90s started calling us the "slacker generation"....that insult in itself turned a quiet dissatisfaction into a burning hatred of all the damage the boomers had done, and still cause to this day.

The worst part is that to this day the boomers haven't even said sorry even once, or admitted their life advice was either wrong or essentially worthless.
Click to expand...

Edit: Don't feel like geting into this debate. Just gonna focus on the music.
 
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I found this video with a bunch of clips of Mick Jagger's views on the Beatles. They keep asking him which were better, Stones or Beatles, and asking him to characterize the differences. One thing he says a couple of times is that the Beatles were packaged and promoted as being nice and clean cut, but in fact they were just as rough and rude as the Stones. The clean cut image for the Beatles was an act, whereas the Stones came out with their authentic rough and rude personas.

I thought it was an interesting window into seeing the real nature of the Beatles. I wonder what the Stones thought of the Beach Boys.

 
I found this video on the Beach Boys' reception in England, specifically the reception of Pet Sounds. It says that while Pet Sounds received a mixed reception in the US, it was a huge hit in Britain, with widespread praise by the British music press and the various musicians.

It says that the Rolling Stones producer also had the contract to distribute Pet Sounds in the UK. He got the first tapes of the album a couple months before it was released, and the day he received it Paul McCartney was at his house, so McCartney got to hear it at that time. The Beatles music immediately started to reflect a change based on the influence from Pet Sounds.

 
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