Where can you start with the Beatles. Easily the most famous group in the history of music, they tend to be quite polarizing. More than most bands out there, you love them or you hate them. Generally, those who dislike the Beatles tend to do so because of a feeling that the Beatles are overrated. I however disagree. When I see the Beatles, I see a band that on their merits of the quality of their work, easily deserve their place as one of the best (if not the best) group in history.
They are easily one the best songwriters in history. While some prefer Springsteen or Paul Simon, The Beatles are generally considered one of the best in history (Bob Dylan is the consensus #1). To go along with this songwriting ability, The Beatles experimented more across genres than Simon, Springsteen or Bob Dylan. All of those guys had their niche style and varied in it. The Beatles however cannot be contained into one sub-genre of what we call rock (i.e. heartland rock or folk-rock) whereas these other artists, and many artists throughout the history of music have.
There are a lot of great songwriters out there, but many stick with their comfort zone when it comes to genres. There are many genre-crossing musicians but not many are great songwriters. There are only a handful of artists who are both diverse and have good songwriting. The Beach Boys, The Who, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin are all bands with great lyrics and diversity in their music but none of these bands combine it like The Beatles. I love all these bands and they are all in my favorite bands, but none of them can hold a candle to the songwriting of Lennon/McCartney and personally, I have a lot of respect for someone who can write an excellent song.
Starting with their album "Rubber Soul" they started to deviate away from that pop sound and experimented with other genres. 3 of the first 4 tracks were very folk influenced and sounded much like you would hear from Dylan or The Byrds. Drive my car however showed some early signs of the hard rock route they would experiment with and Norwegian Wood had some of the first instances of their Indian influence, specifically Ravi Shankar.
Through the next few albums (Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, magical mystery tour, White Album, Abbey Road) they played around with the early forms of many genres we know today such as hard rock, blues rock, psychadelic, punk, and even ska. However, each Beatles album can be its own essay on music. While these later albums had more experimental sounds, they still kept the poetic nature of before, a great example being "Eleanor Rigby". Some may say they are overrated, but they are the quintessential band if you want a great blend of genre-crossing music and beautiful poetic lyrics.
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