I might have come off as too harsh. I don't mean to make any "dumb" claims, but I am concerned that I am missing out on something great. ... I just want to know what exactly the Beatles do for those that like them. Is it a feeling of nostalgia that keeps you coming back?
No nostalgia is involved for me. The band had been broken up for seventeen years when I was born, and for twenty-three years when I fell in love with them. I heard them at a young age and came to the determination that I had never heard anything like that music. It immediately appealed to me. Almost twenty years later, I have never looked back.
It sounds like you're looking at the band like a science experiment.
Well The Beatles are often regarded as a band you're required to like to have any sort of taste in music, so I don't think its that surprising.
I don't think anybody should be
required to like the Beatles. That's a silly thing to say... no music is objectively good or bad. What pisses me off on occasion is how people immediately dismiss them because their taste lies far away from the Beatles' style, without stopping to look at history and seeing how ALL POPULAR MUSIC since they entered the scene has been shaped DIRECTLY by the Beatles' music.
Let me give a few examples:
-breakaway from a strict 14-songs-per-LP format
-breakaway from the A and B-sides of the single being included as part of the LP
-breakaway from the "pop single must be 3 minutes or less" rule
-song lyrics printed on the record sleeve/liner notes
-use of the double-LP format
-songs on albums segue into one another, instead of having three seconds of silence inbetween
-recording studio trickery (not relying on extensive number of tracks, session musicians, or Wall-of-Sound)
-use of the iii chord
-extension of popular song forms
-the idea that the artist themselves write the songs, and the product must be high-quality
-use of the music video for promotional purposes
-live concerts in outdoor stadiums
I disagree with those folks saying the early music of the Beatles is nothing special. Yes, their sound matured tremendously as the 60's went on. But the early singles are what made them famous, and there are some darn good "deep cuts" on the early albums.
Part of what made the Beatles so famous (aside from shrewd management strategies by Brian Epstein and just plain good fortune!!) is the universal appeal of their music. It was popular, literally, ALL OVER THE WORLD. Even today, they continue to have surges of popularity (
Anthology TV series, McCartney's world tours,
The Beatles 1,
Rock Band and the 2009 remastered CDs). They just won't go away!! The only other band since then with anything close to that kind of worldwide appeal, IMO, is U2.