Originally Posted by clutnuckle

"Absolute bottom of obscurity"... How exactly is what they did the 'absolute bottom' when you've just stated four artists who have gone beyond what they did experimentally? And those are just general experimentalists... Plenty of other rock bands of the era still went far beyond The Beatles' level of experimentation. The absolute bottom they are not.

Also, plenty of psychedelic sixties bands had a similar sound to The Beatles. Many of them were also very popular. A few years later even, many bands started the whole psychedelic-rock flare up again in a commercial setting, mimicking many of The Beatles' trademarks and getting plenty of recognition for it. Perhaps not at the Beatles level of success, but they were being heard, and it's also not fair to bring popularity too deeply into this as Beatlemania did most of the work for them. Thus, they really weren't drastically different from many other pop acts at all. In the late 60s, many artists got famous off of The Beatles' rush and nobody really even cared about the mild differences in between the two artists.

To claim that The Beatles deserve a place in history for doing half of what other musicians of the time did, except while in a spotlight, is really demeaning to those who actually went the extra mile. I was reading a section of a history book the other day actually, that talked about the rock music of the 50s and 60s in order to show how it affected the people of the time, and all it could really discuss was their popularity. The utter RIOTS they created among fans. Mind you this same book had an entire section devoted to how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring made people go bonkers based off of its visceral, shocking performance. Whether or not The Beatles deserve it is up to you to decide, but they're easily going down in history as a successful band, and not one that inherently pushed any envelope.