The Smiley Smile Message Board

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGVRQ-DC9PE&sns=tw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGVRQ-DC9PE&sns=tw)

I've always thought these were funny and this one doesn't disappoint.  :lol

That's excellent. I never knew Hitler was a fan.

(The movie this is from, "Downfall", is excellent too.)

Brilliant.  ;D

YES! Brian and Poco!! I have to rethink my opinion of good ol' Adolf.

It's so true though. Even ignoring Sgt Pepper as number one, why do the Beatles take up half of the top 10? Look...I'm not trying to talk sh!t on them. They're a great band. They innovated music. But there's a LOT of other great bands out there. Many who were just as experimental and influential even if they don't get even a fraction of the credit for it. The Beatles were *a* great band sure, but it seems like many would have you believe they were *the* great band and everyone else owes everything solely to them which just isn't true. Even ignoring Brian Wilson, there were other great artists like Frank Zappa, Joseph Byrd and Arthur Lee who were far much more creative and sincere in their craft.

Goes without saying, SMiLE deserves that number one spot, even in its unfinished state. Not just on its awe-inspiring musical and thematic depth of vision, but in how advanced for its time (and still today) and thought provoking it really is. For all the blind "best album ever!" praise Pepper gets, I've yet to see any truly engaged analyses or ponderances of its message or material. SMiLE on the other hand, has been the subject of so much speculation, debate and intellectual critique it's unfathomable. And where is it on the list? Like, #300 something? What an absolute joke.

And this is just the sixties I'm talking about. I could make just as passionate of a plea for Dark Side of the Moon or Bad or Nevermind or something else to be in the top spot or at least top ten above all those Beatles albums.

Best of lists, as a rule, are pretentious and stupid. Hitler...was right.

Hitler knows his stuff when it comes to great music. The Beatles are absurdly overrated for what they were.

Agreed. They really must have had an amazing PR team, though. And now their image is so enshrined that it's borderline unquestionable.

 :lol

the Poco references were out of left field but this was a good one. there's a million of these


i'm sure most deadheads have seen this one by now: The Last Dead Shows (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTBZuulCoPo)



oh and there's this one too: Hitler buys the new Beach Boys album (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0r72b9X3Fo)


there should really be one for the end of the C50 tour

I love the Beatles, but Pepper isn't even their best album. Revolver is better and you can make a good case that Abbey Road is better as well. And Rubber Soul is almost as good.

Not a single Beach Boys album besides Pet Sounds in the top 100-lame. SMiLE even if unfinished should be top ten, and Today and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) are top 50 at least.

I don't even know where to begin with this. I don't think it's possible to overrate the Beatles, their music is (in my view) unique and wonderful. But 'absurdly overrated'? I absolutely love the Beach Boys but the only full album that equals the Beatles incredible run of albums is Pet Sounds. There are other albums I love but none have the consistent quality, and that's because brian had to do it all by himself!

Anyway sorry, I do know you're entitled to your opinion Mike's Beard, I just feel quite passionately! I do probably agree having so many albums in the all time top10 is a *bit* much.

Amazing video.  :lol

There's also this gem for those who haven't seen it: "Hitler buys the new Beach Boys album"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0r72b9X3Fo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0r72b9X3Fo)

Ha Ha Ha  :lol :lol :lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untergangers

Exactly. Saying The Beatles are overrated is like saying Shakespeare is overrated.

You know there's more bands out there than just those two...right?

Edit: Today, All Summer Long, Smiley, Friends, Sunflower, Love You and Holland are just as great as any Beatles album too, I'd say. SMiLE far surpasses anything they ever did.

I say that as a Beatles fan, yes I find them overrated. Both Please Please Me and With The Beatles contain filler. Even many Beatle fans admit that Beatles For Sale was padded with too many covers. They developed into a truly great band with Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver. IMO it was never the same from Pepper onwards (although there is a terrific single album scattered over the White Album). The Beach Boys were better, The Kinks were better, Pink Floyd were better, The 'Stones were better, The Byrds were better, Creedence Clearwater Revival were better, The Monkees were better, Zappa & The Mothers of Invention were better, The Bee Gees were better, The Doors were better, Velvet Underground were better, I could go on...... AND these was just their contemporaries from the mid to late 60s. There have been better bands than them in the 70s and 80s.

Um, he is. And boring as f*** for the most part too.

I don't think anyone's saying the Beatles are "over-rated" -- just that they're not that great.  You know, in hindsight.   :-D

Disagree.

I do think the Beatles are great; just that there are plenty of bands who were greater.

Exactly this.

Well, except Shakespeare being overrated. But c'Mon, how do you seriously compare pop songs to language-shaping, culture- defining tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, MacBeth and others? To even compare the two is a testament to how overrated the Beatles have become in the first place. And I say this as a huge fan of both.

Yeah I suppose I just chose to compare them to the BBs because... This board is about them.

Anyway yeah I know there are other great bands. Just disagree that they're "absurdly overrated".

In what sense? Are the record sales that we have, all the number one songs, all the videos of the screaming, their ongoing place in culture in some way false? Did these things not happen? Or, are you saying that there is an objective way to evaluate music - we can, say, listen to an album like All Summer Long and know objectively where it sits, say, on a scale of 1-10 wherein there is no wiggle room - we can conclusively say that definitively that that album is an 8.7/10. Do you believe that that's the case? If you don't believe either, then by what criteria are The Beatles overrated?


And, in my opinion, you're wrong about every single example that you bring up. In fact, outside of The Beach Boys, I'd probably say that The Beatles output is stronger than the rest of those bands' combined discographies. But, of course, that's a meaningless value judgement. Whether or not you and I think a band is better or worse than The Beatles is meaningless outside of our own personal interests. It certainly tells us next to nothing about whether the band was overrated. OK, so YOU like other bands better. Fine. How does one conclude from that that The Beatles were overrated?


And, like The Beatles, he essentially informed Western culture and thereby dramatically affected your understanding of reality. One could, in effect, never read a single word of Shakespeare and nevertheless be unavoidably influenced by him. Whether one likes him or not is not the point - it is quite simply impossible to overrate him. You might as well say that Christ was overrated. Or World War II was overrated. Or the discovery of gravity was overrated. Or the discovery that Earth revolves around the sun was overrated. Or Einstein was overrated. Or Freud was overrated. It just doesn't make sense.

Because The Beatles have been just as crucial in defining the culture as Shakespeare has been - and there is a tremendous amount of scholarly work that suggests that. And even if one could conclude that they haven't been as crucial as Shakespeare, they've certainly more impactful than any other band that could be listed in the Rolling Stone list, with only Bob Dylan coming close. I don't know how one can even look at the world around them and not see that.

I found another funny video: http://captiongenerator.com/31568/Hitler-reacts-to-Mike-Love-

This video pertains to Mike Love, previous arrangements, a notorious email, fact checking and lots more.  :-D :-D :-D

Because I honestly think that there are dozens of artists who have made much better records than The Beatles. So to constantly hear/read them being praised as superior to all else, in my mind leads me to conclude that they are overrated.

I don't doubt that you honestly think that. But if you are up against the overwhelming majority of critics and the music listening public, and you insist on some stable notion of "rating," then isn't the more likely conclusion to draw that you are underrating The Beatles? Or do you think that what you like constitutes the norm and when public or critical opinion deviates from your personal taste, that's how you can conclude how much a band/song is being over or underrated?

Love the AGD reference. Surely OSD is behind that one. :lol

(http://i.imgur.com/0d0tg7w.gif)

The Monkees sold more records than anyone else in 1967. And probably made more girls scream then too. I guess that makes them the best band of all time, whose output is greater than all other bands combined, more influential to English language and heritage than Shakespeare.

Apparently that's how that works.



Guys, I get it. Different strokes and all. But some of these claims are absolutely ridiculous. The amount of overwhelming, hyperbolic, unquestionable praise the Beatles get is ridiculous. The fact that they're so totally worshipped while other, just as talented bands are dismissed or ignored is insane.

Interesting straw man construction. Do you seriously claim that more people today have heard or have heard of More of The Monkees than Sgt. Pepper despite the fact that the Monkees sold more records in 1967? The Beatles aren't influential to our culture (I'm not talking about the English language - Shakespeare's importance is far more reaching than that) simply because they sold a lot of records (far more than The Monkees have, incidentially, despite the arbitrary selection of the one time they didn't) - they are influential because they shaped the way the very culture thought about reality. Without the Beatles I would be hard-pressed to argue that the Western world would have been quite so cynical about certain power structures.


Yeah, and why is Einstein considered so great when there were so many other great scientists at the time? And people go on about Shakespeare but no one mentions Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe. Just because these people played a crucial role in shaping Western civilization as we know it, and just because they informed the very nature of our reality, that's no reason to make them seem more important than they actually are.

Nonetheless...Ol' Adolph chose Pet Sounds over Sgt Peppers.

And so do I. :p

The Beatles WERE all that though.  And several times/for several reasons.

NO ONE else in the music biz...even our heroes here...[sorry Adolph]...can legitimately make that claim.  [although they did really and truly create a myth about California which still has 5 or 6 of its centipede legs left to stand on.]

I prefer the Beach Boys and Brian...but I am in the minority.  In 8 short years the Beatles changed everything...and it wasn't a myth.

What does "changing things" have to do with quality of music?

no never mind this is dumb

It doesn't except it's something that's tangible to evaluate. Quality of music is subjective - therefore you shouldn't even begin to talk about "overrated" or "underrated" when it comes to quality.

Talking about it only a personal matter, I find the Beatles just wear thin after a bit.  I had a Beatles phase, like many, where I listened to them solely for a couple of years.  But it wore off and the appeal doesn't return.  Of course, I've had phases with lots of other bands, but the top ones among them, I can return to and their albums can hit me just as strongly, and, as time passes, kind of newly.  The Beach Boys have never really lost their lustre, and Dylan's works seem to grow as I do.  I find an inexhaustible quality with those two.  But the Beatles I find exhausted, and I've tried time and again, but I can't help being ultimately finished with them.

Umm. I think WWII and the Cold war did more to make the west "cynical to certain power structures" than the Beatles. I think it's grossly unfair and laughable to act like they created the counterculture single handed when in reality it had already been going on for 6 months to a year before they jumped on the bandwagon.

Einstein? A better comparison would be Edison. Someone who got all the glory and accolades while the superior genius, Tesla, goes unsung except to the people dedicated enough to seek him out.

By your guys definition, Miley Cyrus and Beiber are great art because they shaped our culture and so many people listen to them too.

Wait till Adolph finds out that Hal Blaine is Jewish...

Really? If that's the case then why was their virtually no major reaction against, say, the Korean War or even the early stages of the Vietnam war when Kennedy was carrying it out? There was virtually no public opposition to these things. So by 1962, the cynicism that you see as coming out of WWII and the Cold War was, as far as I can tell, virtually non-existent. You don't begin to get a serious reaction against Vietnam until 1965 and even then it's a slow creep until 1968 - more than 20 years after the end of WWII.


I didn't say they "created the counterculture" but they definitely helped create the kind of society that was prepped for counter-cultural acts. The minute that the kids went hysterical over these long-haired working-class guys who went against all the standard conventions of how public figures were supposed to act was the minute where it became a legitimate, mainstream social act to actively go against the kind of norms that had to that point been largely tacitly accepted.


I'm not sure how they have shaped our culture. Today, it's pretty rare that an artist can shape a culture - things have been far too commodified for that. You see, it's a nuanced and complicated issue.

By the way, I'm not saying The Beatles are an example of great art. I am simply saying it's a astounding absurdity to refer to someone as overrated who has had the kind of influence on culture that they have had. By the standards of the critical intelligensia, there isn't a single rock and roll band that would qualify as great art. You talk to some serious scholars of music and you tell them that people compare Mozart with Brian Wilson and they don't know whether to start laughing hysterically or weep.

-edit- (worng thread)  :P

maybe Hitler will comment on this...

Clearly it's not.


Well yes, how else does one form an opinion of a band?

We could argue just have much The Beatles helped shape modern culture but that has exactly zero to do with why Rolling Stone thinks that out of the ten best albums ever made five of them are by The Beatles. If that's not a definition of overrating something I don't know what is...

Just because 1000s of 12 year old girls the world over screamed like mad at the mere sight of them back in 1964 does not influence how I rank their work against other artists - I'm sorry, my brain just doesn't work that way.

I'm starting to think that we're not going to change each others minds on this one..  :lol

Made a few videos myself, even got a page for my former YouTube page on the main wiki for Downfall Parodies. One of the videos includes his thoughts on The Beach Boys, among other artists. But I quit years ago, before I even joined this forum. The repetitiveness takes it's toll on you. Have no intention of going back.

OT but Tesla wanted to supply the entire world with self renewing electricity for free. Oddly enough, no power company would fund his research.

Umm... it's kind of a drag to visit a BB message board, and repeatedly see a thread with Hitler in the title at the top of the list of threads. Just sayin'...

I definitely don't form my opinion of bands this way. I could never think that if millions of critics think differently than I do that it must be they are who are wrong and me who is the true arbiter of what's good and what's bad. I like what I like, and I don't consider the possibility that if someone disagrees with what I like then they must be "wrong." To be honest, I think the very notion of "overrated" and "underrated" is one of the worst ways of evaluating anything and it's also very self-congratulatory.


I truly hope not. Cultural impact should have some bearing on how one evaluates art.


Unfortunately, most criteria for evaluating music is meaningless. Certainly there is nothing in the world that could allow us to conclude that, say, The Kinks were better than The Beatles. What we do know is that The Beatles music is far more important than anybody else's on that list, with the exception of Bob Dylan who comes pretty close. And while I'm sure it's nice to reduce The Beatles importance to 1000s of 12 year old girls screaming, the reality is that they changed the very fabric of Western civilization in a way that no other band did in the 20th Century.

But again, you are arguing that massive cultural impact = 5 of the top 10 best albums of all time. Is it wrong for me to question journalists that claim that there was nothing better before or after The Beatles?

These are honestly fantastic! there's a bunch of other music ones too

Rolling Stone has 5 Beatles albums in the all-time top 10?  I don't bother with Rolling Stone anymore.  It's been about 30 years since 'they' mattered to me even a bit.  So?  The Beatles have some GREAT albums.   Hard to pick the best.  Depends what day it is.  Rubber Soul?  Revolver?  Too much filler on the White Album to allow that to be considered.  #9 repeated 'til suicide becomes a consideration knocks it right out of the running immediately.  Abbey Road...Side 2 is pretty darned good but there are moments on side 1 that interfere.  Sgt Pepper?  Meaningful then...but due to 'effects' with a shelf life...maybe not.  So maybe its only Rubber Soul...or Revolver.  Ask Adolf.

The Beach Boys have a couple...Pet Sounds is glaringly obvious.  Summer in Paradise?  Maybe top 20? ;)

There are well over 3,000 members here.  If we all submitted our personal all time top 10 albums lists for compilation by...some 'lucky' guy...I doubt that there would be 2 lists  the same.  If I gave 'him' my list tonight...I'll bet that it will have changed at least a touch by my next birthday.

The ONLY Top 10 that counts.  The only one that's right is yours.  [and mine]

And, of course, Adolf's. :lol

Maybe I've missed a more recent list but the one that I have looked at shows 4 of the top 10 best albums. And, the fact is, someone has to be best. If there was a list of best plays ever written, I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespeare had 4 in the top 10, even if I may think there were plays that were better.

And it's not just journalists who are claiming this. The Rolling Stone list was decided by a very long list of contributors, including many musical peers, that included: Lou Adler, Beck, Rodney Bingenheimer, Hal Blaine, Jackson Browne, Solomon Burke, Jerry Butler, Jarvis Cocker, Wayne Coyne, Cameron Crowe, John Densmore, Dr. John, Fats Domino, Phil Everly, Chris Frantz, Richie Furay, Art Garfunkel, Gerry Goffin, Ellie Greenwich, Chris Hillman, Lenny Kaye, Carole King, David Leaf, Stephen Malkmus, Ray Manzarek, Christine McVie, Mo Ostin, Andy Paley, Johnny Ramone, Robbie Robertson, Rick Rubin, John Sebastian, Pete Seeger, Paul Shaffer, Allen Toussaint, Jeff Tweedy, Richard Wright, and many many others who made this decision collectively.

Thanks for posting both of these. I thought the "Hitler reacts" was especially good. Let's just hope Adolf enjoys NPP!

Hitler, one of the evilest human beings ever, as they say also loved dogs and children.  And the Beach Boys.

(http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/applause.gif#applause%20300x225)

VDP posted a screencap from this video on his Twitter account today.

Love it ! Love knowing that roughly 98.37% of folk who watched it went "Andrew WHO ?"

Hitler loving dogs - he tried out the poison on his GSD though.

Perhaps as a music lover Adolf is now suffering the worst music on a very long term basis as punishment for his sins.  Sgt Pepper is certainly too good for him - he would probably hate Punk and rap and All You Need is Love doesn't sound like his sort of anthem either. So I wish him those.

SIP and GIOMH on a loop.  ;D

Going off-topic here, personally I feel there are no "evil people", just "evil deeds". While Hitler's actions spawned more evil deeds than probably anybody else in the history of mankind, I couldn't honestly claim I never did anything I would have to call an evil deed judging by my own ethical views. Also, a person with the most evil intends has to do good deeds to the people he depends on.

I imagine blasting Klezmer into his hole might be appropriate also.

Here's one I just made:

http://captiongenerator.com/31667/Hitler-Has-Wife-Troubles