Let's say that Paul, John and George never meet each other back in secondary school. The Beatles never form.
Musically and culturally, what happens to the world now?
Musically and culturally, what happens to the world now?
What If: Beatles Never Form
- Thread starter ZombieSlayer54
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The Dude
Banned
How dare you say something like that! Music would not be the same if it weren't for the Beatles! Without them, pop music would have fallen into mindless drivel far before it did normally, and rock as we now it might not have come to be at all. Frank motherfucking Sinatra called "Something" the best love song ever made! That is not light praise!
I'm afraid the greatest love song of all time is by the same band I mentioned a little earlier. It's called "Anthrax". And The Beatles made just as much drivel as any modern pop band. when was the last time you listened to all of Revolution No. 9?
The Dude
Banned
Revolution 9? Drivel? Oh, wait, your a metalhead. Now it all makes sense. Please go off and headbang until you get brain damage and kindly leave us music lovers alone. Seriously, has any album by Anthrax ever been played by just about every radio in the country for about a year? Also, have they sold 1 billion recordings? I thought not.
Oh god, no. I'm no metal head. The song is named Anthrax, and it's by Gang of Four. You know, sort of invented post-punk. Next you're going to diss Joy Division? Step off, hipster.
The Dude
Banned
Oh, I thought you were talking about the band Anthrax. Sorry, my mistake. Anyway, I am no hipster, and the point about 1 billion records still stands.
And who are you going to make fun of next? Dylan? Hendrix?
I'm sorry to say this, but as much as I like the Beatles, this is the only real answer to the OP so far.
Quantity of sales is no way of measuring quality. May I remind you that George Bush won 2 elections? And of course I won't make fun of Dylan or Hendrix. They were extremely talented individuals who revolutionized music. But on a forum where we regularly discuss how to make history somehow worse (considering we live in a universe where the Holocaust happened, that's a daunting task), pretending that the Beatles never getting together is a tragedy seems somewhat silly. The Beatles were just a band. Jesus is just a spanish boy's name. As I said, no Great Men.
Edit: I don't mean to offend any Christians. It's a blanket statement, is all.
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Beatlemania never happened.
The British invasion of rock musicians to North America never happened.
No English rock & roll solo artist or group ever became an international sensation.
The Carnaby Street mod fashions never got beyond Carnaby Street.
Long hair on men never came into fashion during the second half of the 20th century.
Bob Dylan did not go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The last folk festival took place in 1972 due to lack of interest.
The dominant Top 40 music throughout the 1960's was Surf music and Soul music. Acid-Rock never evolved. Folk-Rock never evolved. Heavy Metal music never evolved. Disco music never evolved. Reggae music never evolved. Rap and Hip-Hop music never evolved. Country & Western music never evolved into twang rock.
Elvis Presley maintained his crown as the King of Rock with a phenomenal comeback in 1965.
Stadium concerts never evolved.
Filmore West and Filmore East never became music venues.
Woodstock and Isle of Wright music festivals never took place.
Haight-Ashberry scene in San Francisco never happened.
The psychedelic 60's never happened.
No hippies. A small minority of aging beatniks faded away during the 1960's.
The drug culture never happened. Marijuana was popular within the black community and never crossed over to the white baby boomer generation.
The feminist movement never happened. No bra burnings. No N.O.W organization. No Roe vs. Wade. No sexual liberation.
No anti-(Vietnam) war movement. On the contrary, the baby boomer generation came of age in the late 1960's U.S.A, embracing the conservative, nationalistic, anti-Communist positions of their parents.
The Vietnam war ended with a Communist defeat in 1972 and the unification of the North and South.
The civil rights movement in the U.S. continued as it had in our time line. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April 1968.
Robert Kennedy was not assassinated. He ran for the U.S. presidency two times but lost to a Republican candidate both times.
The Sino-Soviet War commenced in 1972 over a border dispute and continued as a conventional war until 1982. Both regimes collapsed within five years.
Cuba was invaded by the U.S in 1974 and Fidel Castro was and his Communist regime was removed from power. The Soviets blinked. They were pre-occupied with China at the time.
No Microsoft. No Apple Computer. The first personal computer was introduced by IBM in 1994.
The U.S. space program accelerated. On 4 July 1994, Michael J. Smith, USN, became the first Earth man to land on Mars.
And, best of all, NO YOKO ONO
I've just scratched the surface...
Any other unlikely popular names emerge in music, Western culture in this time line? What new musical forms emerged? What has been going on in the Third World? The Muslim world?
The British invasion of rock musicians to North America never happened.
No English rock & roll solo artist or group ever became an international sensation.
The Carnaby Street mod fashions never got beyond Carnaby Street.
Long hair on men never came into fashion during the second half of the 20th century.
Bob Dylan did not go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The last folk festival took place in 1972 due to lack of interest.
The dominant Top 40 music throughout the 1960's was Surf music and Soul music. Acid-Rock never evolved. Folk-Rock never evolved. Heavy Metal music never evolved. Disco music never evolved. Reggae music never evolved. Rap and Hip-Hop music never evolved. Country & Western music never evolved into twang rock.
Elvis Presley maintained his crown as the King of Rock with a phenomenal comeback in 1965.
Stadium concerts never evolved.
Filmore West and Filmore East never became music venues.
Woodstock and Isle of Wright music festivals never took place.
Haight-Ashberry scene in San Francisco never happened.
The psychedelic 60's never happened.
No hippies. A small minority of aging beatniks faded away during the 1960's.
The drug culture never happened. Marijuana was popular within the black community and never crossed over to the white baby boomer generation.
The feminist movement never happened. No bra burnings. No N.O.W organization. No Roe vs. Wade. No sexual liberation.
No anti-(Vietnam) war movement. On the contrary, the baby boomer generation came of age in the late 1960's U.S.A, embracing the conservative, nationalistic, anti-Communist positions of their parents.
The Vietnam war ended with a Communist defeat in 1972 and the unification of the North and South.
The civil rights movement in the U.S. continued as it had in our time line. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April 1968.
Robert Kennedy was not assassinated. He ran for the U.S. presidency two times but lost to a Republican candidate both times.
The Sino-Soviet War commenced in 1972 over a border dispute and continued as a conventional war until 1982. Both regimes collapsed within five years.
Cuba was invaded by the U.S in 1974 and Fidel Castro was and his Communist regime was removed from power. The Soviets blinked. They were pre-occupied with China at the time.
No Microsoft. No Apple Computer. The first personal computer was introduced by IBM in 1994.
The U.S. space program accelerated. On 4 July 1994, Michael J. Smith, USN, became the first Earth man to land on Mars.
And, best of all, NO YOKO ONO
I've just scratched the surface...
Any other unlikely popular names emerge in music, Western culture in this time line? What new musical forms emerged? What has been going on in the Third World? The Muslim world?
Ah, well then. I'm more the "Informs children about Santa being their parents" sort. It's a living.
We're talking about a group that started off as some smalltime cover band playing in seedy West German bars (they were singing Burt Bacharach tunes, ffs) and ended up a decade later experimenting with distorted guitars and some pretty solid beats, full orchestral accompaniment, and drugs-- hell yes they had a strong influence on the shape of rock music and probably some other things.
To be sure, there were other groups out there at the same time-- The Who and The Rolling Stones are the obvious examples, but there were countless other groups. None of them had the same sound or audience as the Beatles (the 'Stones tended towards a more blue-collar audience that probably would've been Punk fans a decade or two later, fr'ex). It's hard to pinpoint exactly how such groups would've influenced mainstream Anglo-American music sans Beatles, but there surely would've been musical differences.
The Dude
Banned
Excuse me, what? Most of the early ones were plausible, but then with the 10 year Sino-Soviet war, and the first man on mars in the 90's, how the hell does that happen?
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