Ted Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Well, that’s a hard one. I’m one of these strange chronologists who believed the Beatles just got better and better. And I think you could make a case each album is better than the last. When you get to side two of Abbey Road, for me, and when they stitch together all these song fragments — these weren’t even completed songs. These were just things they had been sitting on, and they found some way to bring it all together into this album in which they had a complete suite to literally end their career on the album. To me, that’s probably the epitome of both subtlety and artistic expression. But if we look at broader trends — so in the 1960s, we have what we now call classic rock and the Beatles, also in the ’70s. The early 1980s, rap comes along. It’s still with us — maybe that’s surprising. In the early ’90s, you might say there’s electronica. But what has been since then that’s new? What’s the next big thing? Or has it stopped?…

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