There are moments that change history, people that remain forever etched in our minds, and songs that manage to become the anthem of a generation. We don’t need excuses to talk about The Beatles, but we take advantage of the fact that in 2013 the UN declared January 16 as International Beatles Day, to revive a group of young people who revolutionized the music industry.
What is it that makes this group iconic? Why do we keep singing their lyrics? Why the great interest in them, even from those who were born more than 30 years after their debut?
The Beatles captured people of all ages, making them gather around their music. With songs like Revolution Number 9 and Black Bird, from the album popularly known as “The White Album” due to its blank cover, the band managed to bring together experimental sounds for connoisseurs and commercial songs for common people in the same space. Along with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they were among the first to make pop music intended only to be recorded in a studio, as this album was not created to be played live.
Songs like Strawberry Fields Forever, Revolver and Helter Skelter (experts say that this last one was an inspiration for the sound of Heavy Metal) managed to globalize niche music. They unveiled sounds from India and delved into the minds of young people who in the 1960s and 1970s were immersed in pop culture. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, for example, introduced the sounds of the SKA originated in the Antilles to homes all over the planet. In addition, with the beginning of the relationship between John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1966, it was possible to see the influence of the conceptual artist in opening the band to new ways of making art.
According to the Guinness World Records book, the song that has had the most covers in all history is Yesterday, included on the Help album, from 1965. Singers like Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga and other countless great contemporary artists have kept their legacy alive with covers such as Something, All You Need is Love, In My Life and Imagine, allowing new generations to get closer to their music, when they may not even be aware that those melodies that produce so much enthusiasm are originally from The Beatles.
A quarter century after its original release, singer Tiffany made a cover of I Saw Her Standing There, surpassing the British band and hitting the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 14 weeks, while the Beatles were only there with that same song for 11 weeks. Among the 25 most reinvented songs in history, the British have four pieces: Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, And I Love Her and Blackbird, which makes them… the musicians with the most covers in history!
Apple Corps is believed to be responsible for the band’s perpetual relevance over time- the company they formed in 1968 to manage their matters. However, Brian Epstein and George Martin were the producers and sound engineers who gave them the orchestral look and sounds for which we know them. For this reason, we can baptize Epstein and Martin as the marketing geniuses behind The Beatles.
Documentaries, movies, plays, video games and many other productions have shown that the marketing industry is a ferocious weapon when it comes to setting trends and keeping some of the greatest in history alive, through a reinvention that adapts to trends.
