Pink Floyd vs Beatles

[DynamicEagle 14]

Which band do you prefer and why so?

If this topic was already been made, then I apologize in advance.

[Hidey 2,836]

let's not do this    

 

they're both great for different reasons

[Mesme Rize 15,683]

You push me against a wall with the question.

 

I think if it was a life or dead situation right now, i would say Pink Floyd. Dark Side of the moon and The Wall are some of the best music you'll find anywhere.

[Moonlight 7,286]

If the choice is ever "____ or the Beatles"

 

I'll always pick the other band rather than the Beatles. Pink Floyd's alright by me so they get my vote.

[HunterTSN 1,444]

Oh come on, this is a cruel question!

 

I guess I have to go with Pink Floyd, only because their style is more relevant to my interests. The Beatles are still awesome though.

[Metallic Strings 185]

The Beatles are still good, but pink Floyd gets the vote from me. My favorite song is comfortably numb. Heck, look at my profile picture.

[TSD 86]

Terry Reid.

 

Apples and oranges. The Beats fall under the traditional pop umbrella, while PF was a more experimental sound. If forced to chose, Id honestly take Lennon or Harrison's solo work over either.

[Severed Dog Head 23]

I never listen to The Beatles, so... Pink Floyd.

Actually no, scrap that. Franz Ferdinand.

[Lisa 5,553]

Pink Floyd.

The Beatles are hugely overrated in my opinion. Their music is boring.

 

Pink Floyd (especially in their psychedelic songs), uses a lot of unconventional sounds and instruments, both traditional and synthesized which gives their music 'spice.'

Edited February 4, 2015 by Flitter

[Metallic Strings 185]

Pink Floyd.

The Beatles are hugely overrated in my opinion. Their music is boring.

 

Pink Floyd (especially in their psychedelic songs), uses a lot of unconventional sounds and instruments, both traditional and synthesized which gives their music 'spice.'

What is your favorite song by pink Floyd?

[Scootaloodle 1,623]

Chic

 

But since there not an option Pink Floyd

 

The Beatles are overrated to the point where it’s just infuriating, which is why I chose Pink Floyd.  

[LordSwinton 759]

I grew up listening to The Beatles so naturally I'd pick The Beatles over anything.

[Blue Moon 6,341]

Definitely Pink Floyd. I'm not a fan of The Beatles' music, but Pink Floyd is one of my all time favorite bands. The Beatles is just boring to me while Pink Floyd has some really interesting songs. One of my favorite albums of all time is by Pink Floyd too (i.e. Wish You Were Here).

 

So yeah; sorry Beatles, but Pink Floyd gets my vote.

[Vox 870]

This is a hard question to answer. Pink Floyd and The Beatles are quite different acts when you look at them from a distance. The Beatles squeezed out more catchy pop ballads and had a sound grounded in Beat, Skiffle, 1950's Rock and Roll and later had flings with Indian music to further their psychedelic experimental phase that made up much of the Sgt. Pepper album. When you look at Pink Floyd, you see them as one of the forefronts in the British Progressive Rock explosion (something that Beatles actually fought back against with their "back to basics" sound of Abbey Road and Let it Be) Pink Floyd began, not as a Skiffle band, but as a psychedelic LSD fueled space rock band that evolved into a pioneering progressive rock group. Pink Floyd didn't create catchy singles like The Beatles, in fact listening to one of their tracks will often not make much sense or even sound right, as it's usually carrying over from the track before it on the LP (the radio plays the tracks "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" from "The Dark Side of The Moon" together, as they directly carry over into one another). This is partially why their popularity never reached the level the fab four's did, they didn't get much radio play, even today.

I have to say i like both groups for different reasons. most days i'll listen to one or the other, depending on the mood i'm in. Beatles are better for just jamming out, Pink Floyd's dramatic sound and thought provoking lyrics are better for a more serious mood.

[Lisa 5,553]

What is your favorite song by pink Floyd?

 

Echoes. Mainly the beginning portion.

[CC_Maud_Pie 6,431]

I enjoy both bands but I prefer The Beatles since I grew up listening to their music.

[Metallic Strings 185]

Echoes. Mainly the beginning portion.

As I said a cajillion times, I like the song comfortably numb, but what I don't like is the YouTube comments on the song. All they talk about on those YouTube comments is druggie stuff. Don't beieve me, go look up comfortably numb on YouTube.

[Pastel 7,630]

Pink Floyd by far. But honestly I don't really like The Beatles.

[The Mint Pone 2,294]

Pink floyd. I'm not a big Beatles fan although songs like eleanor rigby and while my gently weeps are pure genius. Pink floyd are just perfection all round though. Echoes is probably my favourite of their songs, that or high hopes.

[Clawdeen 14,223]

Oh goodness this is hard since I really like both....but I think I'm gonna have to go with Pink Floyd.

[PrymeStriker 408]

The Beats fall under the traditional pop umbrella, while PF was a more experimental sound.

Pink Floyd.

The Beatles are hugely overrated in my opinion. Their music is boring.

 

Pink Floyd (especially in their psychedelic songs), uses a lot of unconventional sounds and instruments, both traditional and synthesized which gives their music 'spice.'

Ohhh boy.

 

Alright, I'm about to go on a really long tangent. Therefore, I'll be fair to the attention deficit. Basically, I think the consensus in this thread has been vastly unfair toward the Beatles. TL;DR, I would love for some of you guys to listen to any one of the following Beatles songs, come back, and tell me that it's bland pop:

 

* Tomorrow Never Knows

* Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!

* I Am The Walrus

* A Day in the Life

* Because

* Helter Skelter

* Love You To

* Good Morning Good Morning 

* Eleanor Rigby

* Within You Without You

* Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

* Blue Jay Way

* Strawberry Fields Forever

* Come Together

* I Want You (She's So Heavy)

* Revolution 9

* Maxwell's Silver Hammer

* While My Guitar Gently Weeps

* Rain

* I'm Only Sleeping

* Nowhere Man 

 

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Rant time.

 

Okay, so, to the question of the topic, I choose the Beatles. Now, I'm not going to put down Pink Floyd as a whole, because I listen to both bands and the problem is, I've only listened to around half of Pink Floyd's discography whereas I've heard every Beatles song put on record. So, even though I'd still say that Pink Floyd's music doesn't interest me as much (though they have made some really interesting music, especially Syd Barrett), considering I haven't heard it all, I can't account for their entire body of work. Meanwhile, the Beatles have and continue to inspire me artistically, and for good reason. The Beatles are one of the most inventive, distinct, and diverse bands I've ever heard. And here's the reasons why.

 

Now, I will not defend The Beatles' early work or a good chunk of anything that gets radio play as groundbreaking. I am very aware that most of what people judge the Beatles on is what songs are most accessible. "I Want To Hold Your Hand", "Twist and Shout" (which is a cover), "Yesterday", "Hey Jude", "Let It Be", and so forth. It doesn't help that most media portrays the Beatles during their mop-top Beatlemania phase anyway, and talk about how they changed popular culture, easily connecting the popular image of the Beatles to the popular sound of the Beatles. However, the band's range and depth extends far beyond what was marketable, with complex music and incredible sound. Let's start by commending some of their early work, and then work our way through the years as to see why they're so amazing.

 

I'm not one of those pretentious fucks who dismisses pop music just because it's pop music. All music is a valid form of art, and each song should be judged on its merits rather than how it ranks on the Billboard Top 100's. That said, I'm not a fan of most pop music due to it being uninspired to begin with. Most early Beatles work is no exception, clearly being made to appease a popular teen demographic with it's "love me you to dance with you, girl" lyrical depth. But where there's merit, I have to give credit. Aside from a good chunk of catchy feelgood tunes (and yes, I do like some of those), the only record that is critically worth a damn from their Beatlemania era is A Hard Day's Night.  A lot of that album has a lot of musical merit on it, but also contains a lot of marketable filler that you might expect from a "boy band." However, "If I Fell" is one of my favorite songs from their pop days because it's compositional quality is so unlike anything they'd done before, or anything they'd do shortly thereafter. The song is approached in short sections, and each of which starts and ends completely differently. The key changes constantly, and the chord progression keeps it going through constant resolves and the tensions with ease. If there's anything I'd point to during this period, it's that song.

 

But enough about the two-guitars, bass and drums shit. When the Beatles start to mature musically and start to produce lyrical potency along with musical inventiveness, that's where I show my devotion. This starts around 1965, circa their sixth album, Rubber Soul. John Lennon was becoming more of an interesting lyricist in this year after listening to a shit ton of Bob Dylan. He started to think more introspectively about his writing, and churned very personal poetry in the form of "Help!", "Norwegian Wood", "Girl", "In My Life", and most importantly, "Nowhere Man". "Nowhere Man" is what I regard as the Beatles first successful attempt at being against the pop tide. The lyrics have nothing to do with love or having fun, but instead talk about a character who's letting the world pass by him and makes it universal by comparing society to being just a bunch of pebbles in the tide. This is all brought along to some of the dreamiest music and progressions set by their most basic instrumentation. This would also inspire the other writing Beatles to think more about their lyrics, as exemplified by George Harrison's "Think For Yourself" and Paul McCartney's (with Lennon's help) "We Can Work It Out". These songs, along with "The Word" and "Drive My Car", are some of the most objectively potent music during their days as a pop band. 

 

As 1966 rolls around, the Beatles grow as individuals. The four of them are now looking outside of their image to other ideas. With McCartney interested in pop art scenes, Lennon in the psychedelic experience, and Harrison in Indian philosophies, each of them were now bringing different ideas to the table, and were no longer approaching their albums as just a sequence of songs to record. Along with controversy, hectic touring schedules, and being fed up with said touring schedules, the Beatles were just about done with the mop-top image. Revolver was their only album that year, and of the fourteen songs on that album, only five could possibly be referred to as pop rock. Their interests began to influence their writing and their sound. One of McCartney's most interesting compositions is "Eleanor Rigby," which is a baroque-classical composition musically set to the lyrics regarding two characters, Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie, who live their lives alone. In their story, each of their average days are described with poetic bliss, and at the end of the story, the two lonely characters meet at the most unfortunate time: when Father McKenzie buries the deceased Eleanor Rigby. As the lyrics explain, she was "buried along with her name," "nobody came" and "no one was saved." 

 

In contrast to the rest of McCartney's semi-pop tunes on the album such as "Here, There, and Everywhere" and "Good Day Sunshine," Lennon was hard pressed on surrealism and existential lyricism. "I'm Only Sleeping", for instance, is a psychedelic rocker regarding, similar to "Nowhere Man", someone who's keeping an eye on the world going by their window. Except this time, the music is more experimental. The song contains a backwards guitar solo, and trippy effects made with acoustic guitars to convey the feeling of trance-like bliss that the lyrics portray. Similar introspective lyrics set to acid rock are all over Revolver, as Lennon was just about done writing pop music. "She Said, She Said", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "Doctor Robert" all regard diverse subjects lyrically and intriguing guitar work musically. Meanwhile, Harrison's "Love You To", which cleverly speaks of a desire for sex behind philosophical statements like "each day just goes so fast, I turn around its past," "a lifetime is so short, a new one can't be bought," and "there's people standing 'round, who'll screw you in the ground," is set instrumentally to incredibly complex Indian raga. The Indian and psychedelic concepts combine themselves in Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows" which is a whirlwind of weird sounds, backwards music, and complex drumming patterns set to lyrics written after reading The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Do the Beatles still lack spice with this information in mind?

 

And they didn't stop there. After Revolver, they took a three month break and came back to record their 1967 psychedelic anthem, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is an album, in fact, that Roger Waters himself recalls listening to when it was released with the rest of Pink Floyd and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, sitting there with jaws dropped on the floor. Pepper is so complex and diverse musically that absolutely none of the songs on the album at the time could possibly be performed live whatsoever. Regarding the genres of the album, it constantly moves around between hard rock to psychedelic rock, baroque pop, classical, and circus music of all things just on one side of the album, followed by Indian classical, music hall, experimental rock, and psychedelic pop on the other side. And that's just musically, as lyrically, the album's subjects span from creating dreamlike worlds to philosophical teachings, along with stories of domestic abuse, runaway teenagers and day-to-day life, and from heartfelt love songs for the elderly couple to real 19th century circus show advertisements set to music. Each song was immersed in inventive chord progressions, like "Lovely Rita" and "Fixing a Hole", weird experimental sounds with tracks like "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", "A Day in the Life", and "Good Morning Good Morning", contemplative arrangements with tracks like "She's Leaving Home", "Within You Without You", and "When I'm Sixty Four", and just some overall trippy-ass shit with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Even its more pop-orientated music is of lyrical competency, such as "Getting Better", or of musical merit with the aforementioned "When I'm Sixty Four" and "Lovely Rita". The closest the record comes to pop is "With a Little Help From My Friends", but that track is made to segue with the album's thin concept of an Edwardian military band's concert performance. And the merits I just listed - lyrical competency, inventive sounds and progressions, and complex arrangements - that goes for every single track on the album. Pepper set the Beatles far away from their moptop pop and brought them into a new era of incredibly complex music that, unlike some Piper at the Gates of Dawn tracks, is not a drag to listen to. 

 

Not "spice"-y enough? Don't worry. The Beatles were far from done fucking around in the studio! Enter Magical Mystery Tour. While technically not one of their UK albums, Magical Mystery Tour is the only competent US Beatles record. It takes the six songs from their UK Magical Mystery Tour double EP and combines it with the five singles they released in 1967 for a full album of 11 tracks. For all you lyrical hard-ons out there, unlike Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour contains no "love songs." Lyrically, the album's topics span from psychoanalysis to anti-war messages as well as more character-driven stories and more dreamworld-building. While we're on the topic of lyrics, one of the album's songs, "I Am The Walrus", is Lennon's sarcastic response to the over-analyzation of lyrics, Beatles lyrics in particular. So he put a nonsense song together using fine melodic rhythm and one of the Beatles best musical arrangements. Nonetheless, the rest of the tracks are of similar merit to Pepper, including complex musical arrangements ("Strawberry Fields Forever", "All You Need Is Love"), inventive sounds way ahead of its time ("I Am The Walrus", "Blue Jay Way", "Magical Mystery Tour"), engaging progressions ("Penny Lane", "Hello, Goodbye") and so forth. These three albums, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Magical Mystery Tour, each as a whole, have the spice, the inventiveness, and the creativity that some people here claim their music lacks. 

 

By 1968, the Beatles went back-to-basics with their instrumentation, only sparsely using studio tricks and complex arrangements, as exemplified by their 1968 double-album, The Beatles, but they weren't doing it to "combat" some kind of "prog rock uprising" in the UK. Going back to basics was a decision made completely for and by themselves just like becoming experimental was a decision made completely for and by themselves. And even though they majorly went back to just performing straightforward rock and pop rock, their lyricism didn't dwindle whatsoever. They were still writing complex lyrics using more basic instrumentation. And they never got tired of experimental ideas anyway. The Beatles is nicknamed "The White Album" because the cover is completely blank aside from their name being printed on the front. One of its tracks, "Revolution 9", is an 8-minute avant garde sound collage. "Helter Skelter" is one of the first heavy metal songs. So they were still open to abstract and unusual ideas. However, it was on this album that the Beatles were essentially breaking up, so complex music became almost impossible when 3/4 of your band didn't even want to work with you. They went even more bare-bones with Let It Be, but that's a terrible album.

 

Their last hurrah was their final album together, Abbey Road. After in-fighting on The Beatles and Let It Be, they put aside most of their differences to put in one more good album. While Abbey Road lacked a lot of the experimental sounds that clouded Revolver, Pepper and MMT, it had all the variety and all of the complex music topped with fine lyricism. This is as close as the Beatles come to a progressive rock album (though they've done plenty of prog rock on previous works). "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" is blatantly prog rock, and is full of experimental work despite being one of the heaviest rockers since "Helter Skelter". Again, there's very little pop music on this one, the closest of which being "Something" and "Oh, Darling!". Even "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", considered by many to be a boring, uninspired music-hall diddy from McCartney, is incredibly unique and fun by being a joyful song about a serial killer and using interesting sounds in the mix. "Come Together" is similarly as heavy as "I Want You" and "Here Comes the Sun", "Because" and "Sun King" hark back to the Beatles' psychedelic period by being three trippy-as-fuck songs. All capped off by a kickass nine-track rock medley to finish the Beatles spicy career together. 

 

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I say all this to prove and explain, in my words, why I think some of the comments made against the Beatles is unfair, and why they're my favorite band. I understand why some people aren't as familiar with their experimental work, though, as the music that gets the most airplay and media attention are, indeed, the rather bland ones. However, the Beatles depth spans far beyond a "traditional pop" stamp. Hell, they span even beyond their four approximate periods of "pop rock", "folk rock", "psychedelic rock", and "progressive rock." The Beatles knew no boundaries. They made a variety of different songs, spanning multiple different genres, and it was never just one outing. What you could consider pop music from the Beatles is just under one half of the body of work they put out. The other half is all kinds of weird and unique works, jumping around from Indian classical to ragtime, island ska to heavy metal, country to power rock, psychedelic to piano ballad, and beyond. That's why I even prefer the Beatles over Pink Floyd. There's so much different and unique music to listen to, and considering they (with the help of producer George Martin) arranged, wrote and composed all but 23 of the 224 songs they recorded (those 23 being American rock'n'roll standards recorded during Beatlemania), I'm constantly reminded of the genius that these "four lads from Liverpool" really churned out. The Beatles will always be my biggest inspiration artistically and personally, and those are the reasons why.  

 

 

Sorry to necrobump.