Sgt Pepper Belated

A belated Happy Birthday(June 1st) to Sgt. Pepper and the band. "It was twenty(forty) years ago today Sgt. Pepper told the band to play";
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Strawberry Fields Forever


Beatles on the brain

..One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.

Why can we listen to certain songs across a lifetime and still find pleasure in them? Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we have learned what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities of what chord is likely to follow what, and how melodies are formed. Skilful composers play with these expectations, meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as sex or opiates do. But there is no one song that does this for everyone; musical taste is both variable and subjective.

Today the Beatles catalogue is cross-culturally loved - the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock music so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop music. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change...

At the time I was really more of a Stones fanatic but the beatles(even then) were recognized gods of a another order.

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