The Three Songs That Changed Pop Music

Given the utter nonsense that made it to Number One in the latter half of the 1960's, to say these songs changed pop music is maybe just plain wrong. What I really mean is that these songs changed what people who took pop music seriously expected from themselves if they were songwriters and from songwriters if they were fans. In fact, you could argue that these three songs created pop music as art. There are excellent articles on Wikipedia, which I am not going to precis. I'm old enough to remember when these songs first came out.

Like a Rolling Stone was like nothing I had heard before, but I got it instantly. I didn't even notice it was 6:03 long. What I noticed was the lyrics, the sound, the fierce condemnation in Dylan's voice. It was so far ahead of anything anyone else was doing, I don't think we compared it to anything else. It was just there.



And then there was Eleanor Rigby. I have a quiz question that goes "What Number One hit was sung to the accompaniment of a string quartet and was about the last days of a lonely churchwarden?" Put like that, you get the impact it had. Huh? String quartet? "All the lonely people / where do they all come from"? What kind of Number One is that? It would not get out of the studio today. When I heard it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Still does. It's a punk-rock 2:09, with pace, sadness, tension and humanity. Suddenly "pop" music seemed capable of genius.



And then came Good Vibrations. 3:39 of multi-tracked, fast-changing, danceable love song about a girl he doesn't know who make him feel wonderful. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is a bloated piece of self-indulgence by comparison - and modelled directly on Good Vibrations. Everyone loved this song: kids, parents, hipsters, teachers and squares. The production values were way over anything anyone had done, the quality of the writing was clearly of a different order to everyone except Lennon and McCartney, the singing just flawed enough to be beautiful.



Yet it was the self-consciously weird Whiter Shade of Pale that convinced The Parents that pop music could be serious. The Bach samples, the references to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and ancient Greece, the mystery of the lyrics and the lugubrious tone and pace.



The parents just didn't get it. Not really.