I hate to be that guy who is all "My band is the Beatles" because I know it can come off as such a clique, but too bad. I am going to be that guy.
Maybe its a context thing. I know so many people that grew up with the Beatles, and so they aren't a huge thing for them. I never grew up listening to any decent music, the most interesting CD in my parents house was a best of The Doors CD, which I did kind of get bored of after a while.
The point is, I didn't have any musical influences forced upon me from an early age, and like a lot of teenagers, I found myself drawn towards music that at best can be described as "Angsty and anti-social" and at worst can be described as "Green Day"
So anyway, I went through my mid teens listening to a lot of stuff by the Vandals and Nirvana, and in general, having taste in music that wasn't particularly melodic or intrinsically dynamic. I got into a lot of metal in my mid-late teens, and by the time I graduated high-school, I'd started to grow tired of it, and I was wondering if there was really much music that was worth listening to. Now, I had listened to some Beatles. In fact, I had listened to a lot of stuff that I would come to love in the future, but none of it had really ever clicked with me and hit me in the face and said "I AM AWESOME, THE SHIT, SUPERB, LISTEN TO ME". I guess maybe I just didn't really have an appriciation of melody. I had sat around listening to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds getting stoned, as a matter of course. (I hated that fucking song then, and I still hate it now)I had heard Twist and Shout and I Wanna Hold Your Hand on the radio. In fact, I had heard a pretty decent chunk of old Beatles on 4KQ at various points, but then one day, something changed.
Pretty much, to cut a long story short, for various reasons, I had bullshitted myself into a corner where I pretended I was actually a Beatles fan in order to get into a ladys pants. I realized that I would have to actually listen to a Beatles record in its entirety in order for this to be even moderatly successful, so I bought the first one I could find.
The first one I could find was Revolver. From the moment Tax-man came on, I didn't quite understand what was going on. The bass was carrying the melody, the rhythm was bouncing like mad, and the lyrics were so much more intriguing than anything I'd ever heard (A potent combination of LSD and Tool had pretty much destroyed my ability to interpret subtleties in lyrics by this point) and I couldn't believe this was the band so many people I knew had described as banal, overrated trash.
I dunno, maybe because I was never heavily exposed to the Beatles like a lot of folks, I was able to see it in a lot more of an innocent light, like one of those screaming teenage girls in the black and white TV spots. The point is, that this was the first music I was ever exposed to that had real melody, basslines that weren't just constant root notes being played with simplistic rhythms, married to the bass drum. I mean, there are bands that I like more than The Beatles, but there is no way I would be able to enjoy those bands nearly as much nowadays. Somehow, something about the Beatles clicked that part of my brain that really enjoys music into gear, and I owe them my allegiance for life as a result.
You know, even though they're dropping like flies.
Oh shit I have been going on for pretty long huh? I could probably just ditch those first few paragraphs and it wouldn't matter but oh shit I am doing it again
Long story short, Lady Madonna, Lovely Rita and Got To Get You Into My Life are the two songs that make me happy, no matter what kind of fucked up shit is going down. I really want all these songs played at my funeral, especially the last one, for that perverse sense of irony.
