The Beatles and Lists

Forthcoming on this blog is a list of just about all of the studio-recorded Beatles songs (excluding their BBC recordings), with them ranked from top to bottom according to MY tastes. I decided to do this after watching VH1's show of their own list of the 100 top musical acts of all-time. I confess that I only saw the final hour when they were going through the top ten. I could guess ahead that acts like Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and of course the Beatles would be revealed to be at the top. But I was astonished that, after Elvis was presented to be only at #7, Prince was ranked ahead of the King at #6. This artist, also known as The Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, is in my opinion one of the supremely overrated acts in the history of pop music (and that's saying a lot). And coming in ahead of Presley? Ouch!

So as VH1 approached #1, it occurred to me that this station might pull a fast one this time and dethrone the Fab Four in favor of the late Mister Moonwalk. When #2 was shown, I breathed a sigh of relief: Jackson was there, and the Beatles made it through another year of this highly subjective scrutiny. Then I thought why do I care what others think? And then the preposterous thought boomeranged back: maybe others care about what I think! Hence, the upcoming list of my favorite Beatle tunes.

I do think that it is interesting that the Beatles are supposedly the top act of all time, since I hardly ever hear any of their music played on my sorry radio anymore. But that's O.K. with me: I have just about everything of theirs on MP3 and can even play out all of their songs in my head, I know them so well.

Everyone who followed popular music during their childhood always carries the memories of those songs and artists as personal markers of the events in their lives which happened while growing up. For me, the Beatles played a major role in my childhood. Hearing various songs conjures up vivid memories of things going around me at various times during the 1960's. How about you? Whom, if anyone, did you listen to in your youth?