Once upon a time, a fat, spectacled, pleasant amateur song parodist sold millions of records with what middle-aged college grads thought were witty musical critiques of Sixties life and culture. His name was Allan Sherman, and one of those witty songs was this:
Therein lies some useful lessons which we all should absorb:
1. What seems like a valid opinion today might well seem incredibly stupid to virtually everybody later.
2. Venturing outside your expertise is always risky.
3. Everything seems obvious in hindsight. In most cases, it was anything but.
4. Yesterday’s wit is tomorrow’s ignorance.
5. Whether your opinion is going to make you look like a prophet or a fool is often nothing but moral luck.
6. Criticizing someone for views proven invalid by subsequent developments no one could have foreseen is consequentialism, and unfair.
7. People will do it anyway.
8. We are all Allan Sherman. We just don’t know how.
It’s hard to imagine now that John, Paul, George and Ringo are icons and deserving ones, but back in 1964 it was considered wise and clever to make fun of their hair, their fans and pronounce them untalented hacks. At the beginning of the British invasion, many sophisticates regarded the Beatles as indistinguishable from the legendary Dave Clark Five, and a passing fancy no more significant that the hula hoop.
Mock them now at your peril. Your time will come…in fact, it probably already has.
Ethics Alarms 
I always think about this:
“We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”
With those few belittling and dismissive words, Harrisburg’s Patriot & Union newspaper – the Patriot-News’s Civil War ancestor – earned itself an enduring place in history for having got Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address utterly, jaw-droppingly wrong.
http://blog.pennlive.com/gettysburg-150/2013/11/lincoln_gettysburg_address_har.html
Excellent example!
Risking the wrath of other commenters I’ll say it: The Beatles are overrated.
I won’t deny they are influential: the original boy band, the stadium megaconcert, pop as a cultural influence, all of this and more is due to the Beatles… but their music (and their lyrics), OH GOD! A lot of their songwriting is either sappy or outright senseless, and most of their music is repetitive, boring, or both. They are no better than any other pop band, they just managed to hit the right sensibilities of the time.
There, I said it… and I won’t even try to defend it, go ahead and dogpile on me. 🙂
Can’t argue taste. I do believe, however, that when there is a popular culture phenomenon, you can’t say it’s luck. Something special clicked, and there’s no denying it.
I think it’s cute.
I didn’t like the Beatles much when most my peers were into Beatlemania. Their silly pop songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “Love, Love Me Do” were made for hysterical 14 year old girls. They demolished the hard edge rock and roll had had in the 50s and was only recovered by the Stones. Their *Rubber Soul* album was somewhat better but I never bought a Beatles album and never will!
“Hallo Momma, hallo Papa…”
Remember when Sherman was on the Ed Sullivan Show and forgot the words to his own song?!
If we’re going to talk about re-evaluating over hyped ’60s phenomena, can we turn to Robert Zimmerman please? What a cynical S.O.B. who made a fortune giving an entire generation what he’d cleverly determined they thought they wanted to hear. Brilliant, but a soulless chameleon right out of tin pan alley (which is probably unfair to the tin pan alley guys who were just trying to make a living).
It will be forever wise and clever to make fun of their fans.
Are the Beatles really geniuses? “My Sweet Lord?” “Band on the Run?” “I’d love to turn you on?” “We all live in a Yellow Submarine?”
I’ll take Allan Sherman’s traditional Yiddish/Jewish wise-crackery any time. Certainly more enduring and human than anything Lennon and McCartney made a fortune off of.
And how much of the drug culture is attributable to the boys from Liverpool going to India and goofing around with sitars and other things?
You might actually have chosen Beatles songs. (Harrison solo and steal; Wings, one line from the greatest pop song ever, and a self-described children’s song..) That’s like saying John Wayne was flop because he made The Conquerer, The Long Trail, Rooster Cogburn and The Greatest Story Ever Told.
“The Greatest Story Ever Told”
But John Wayne DID do the Alamo…
Ahem. “The Long Trail” was Wayne’s first feature film! “The Conqueror”, admittedly, was a dud. Wayne’s appearance in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” was a brief cameo. And what the hell was wrong with “Rooster Cogburn”??
It’s awful in every way. It’s a shameless and inferior rip off of “The African Queen,” it turns Rooster into a cute parody of the nuanced character from True Grit, it was directed by a hack, the dialogue was contrived, and it undermined the academy award winning performance by Wayne in the first film. It was one of those vile sequels that made you wonder if you were wrong to like the first film. Wayne hated the film, though Kate Hepburn and Duke enjoyed working together.
It was also a flop.
Yes, I’m aware of the many “parallels” between it and the “African Queen”… including Miss Hepburn’s presence! I still enjoyed the byplay between two old professionals (who had never worked together before) in lighthearted self parodies. Being the lowbrow sort, the entertainment value was enough for me!
The lesson to be learned via the example of Allan Sherman might well be learned again the hard way by Americans of the future, about any one of a number of things …
– National debt? WHAT national debt?
– Government too BIG?! POOH!
– Silly gun nuts! Everyone will be SO much safer, if the Second Amendment is abolished and only government employees have guns.
– Sharia law? WHAT Sharia law?
– Ingles? Que?