Revolution in the head
the Beatles' records and the sixties
by Ian MacDonald · first published 1994
3mentions
0recommended by
2HN commenters
2010–2025first – last mentioned
100% neutral
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Ian MacDonald in 1994, at the ending of Revolution in the Head: > Arguably pop music, as measured by the singles charts, peaked in early 1966, thereafter beginning a shallow decline in overall quality which was already steepening by 1970. While some will date this…
on “Every top 5 song from 1958 to 2016” ↗…The rest came from the sum of the parts of the record as a whole. [They] rarely thought long about their lyrics. This is, of course, about John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s. (Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties) This is how pop music has worked for nigh-on fifty years.
…book is from 1985, still pretty solidly in the pre-Internet mass-media world, illustrates that the cultural-decline issue probably isn't really, or mostly, a computer or even a consumer-Internet problem. Revolution in the Head is another book of the same kind of cultural pessimism, also from (basically) the pre-Web era.
on “Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?” ↗