New York Times Says Taylor Swift Is Bigger Than The Beatles!? WTF
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I believe that The Beatles were in fact bigger than Jesus. Can't get much bigger than that @RaceBannon @dnc !!
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It's possible, if only because the world population is much larger now than when The Beatles were around.
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I think on this measurement it is likely she is bigger.
In terms of "Share", however that would be measured, I suspect the Beatles were bigger, just because there wasn't the fracturing of pop culture then like there is now.
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I understand and appreciate why Taylor is so popular. She has some great hooks in the songs and is incredibly talented. But it's insanity to say she's bigger than the Beatles. It's not even close.
- Beatlemania in 1964-65, believe it or not, was a far bigger pop culture phenomenon than Taylor Swift. BTW it was the Beatles who invented playing rock music in sportsball stadiums.
- Rick points our the in-house songwriting genius of the Beatles
- Taylor dominates in a singles era and her albums can't touch the best of the Beatles for album only tracks
- In 2.5 years the Beatles went from I Want to Hold Your Hand to Revolver. 3 years I Want to Hold Your Hand to Sgt Pepper. That's a burst of creativity and advancing an art form that can never be repeated. It was a unique moment in history when rock was still a young genre and most of the good ideas hadn't been tried yet.
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I'd say The Beatles and Michael Jackson are the only two really in the conversation. Swift is in the conversation for say a #3 to me and that's insane given how fractured our culture is, though she probably was only able to do that by getting big before the death of monoculture.
She also loses points because she's pretty much only popular with young women where The Beatles and Jackson were also super popular with men.
One of the most interesting things to me with her is she for I think four straight albums now has really just doubled down on the music it seems she wants to do and what her hardcore fans want and not trying to craft hits and she's remained super popular and even more popular with her fans when that move 100% of the time in the past seems to have pretty much gone bad.
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Frank Sinatra at his peak could be discussed as on par or higher than Taylor Swift
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Higher and it's not even close.
The Mt Rushmore of most important American Popular Music Musicians of the 20th and 21st Centuries are:
Elvis
Sinatra
Bing Crosby
Not sure on the 4th still, but it's not T Swift. If we were to include a Jazz guy it's Louis Armstrong of Duke Ellington. Chuck Berry was far more important to the course of music history than T Swift IMHO.
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Sinatra is a good point. As is Elvis. I would say there's a good chance the top 3 is actually Beatles, Michael Jackson and Elvis. There's probably some other old times Race Bannon types like maybe Glenn Miller who had huge chunks of the national attention, it was just different with what you considered fame. Garth Brooks is way higher up on the list than a lot of people would realize too.
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One thing I think that's super interesting about Swift's fame is I think she only could have become who she is and the level she is became coming through country music. I know that statement would get a lot of Swifty types frothing at the mouth but if she came through traditional pop music she would be labelled not sexy enough to be a regular pop star or shuttered into the like acoustic girl corner which has a low ceiling. Country actually had a long long history of presenting women artists as more general stars without having to have them be sexy and she was able to build with that.
I'm rambling but levels of fame is one of my sweet spot targets now that Washington football was buried and Lanning is building an SEC monster out west.
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When we watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan my mom said
They're no Frank Sinatra
