Were the Beatles Just Lucky? 2/6

Cass Sunstein asks whether the Beatles were the beneficiaries of an information cascade or whether their success was inevitable.

To be sure, it seems implausible to suggest that the Beatles needed early downloads to succeed, or that Davies or Nash, or someone of whom we have never heard, could have been Lennon or McCartney. Of course cascade effects played a large role, and so did network effects, and so did group polarization. But these claims are consistent with what I have described as a weak or trivial account of the role of social influences. In my view, and with fear and trembling, the most plausible conclusion is that the Beatles should be seen as analytically equivalent to the very best songs in the Salganik et al. experiment, in the sense that in the end, they would almost certainly have found a way.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In fewer words, the narrator of the 1982 documentary The Compleat Beatles says that the Beatles were “lucky, playing the right clubs and meeting the right people at critical moments in their careers. But most of all they were good. Very, very good.”

I watched that clip over and over again when I started my Internet business in 1994. I took away the lesson that in order to succeed I would have to meet the right people at critical moments. I relentlessly cultivated mentors and partners. Most of the contacts that I made yielded nothing, but a few of them made all of the difference.

I certainly can tell you how lucky I was. But, on the other hand, I was trying to generate luck. I was trying to learn from the Beatles.

The 1982 documentary suggests that the Beatles had their hearts in American Rock and Roll and R&B. But only a few of their early songs show that influence. Instead, many of their first recordings owe a lot to the softer, harmony-driven sounds of the Doo Wop groups and the Everly Brothers. “Please Please Me,” their first top hit, borrowed a harmony idea (a single note sustained above the melody for several syllables) from “Cathy’s Clown.”

To hear George Martin tell it, Lennon and McCartney were terrible songwriters when he first met them. But in their Liverpool-Hamburg period in 1960-62, they seem to have composed a huge amount of material, which they were able to draw on in later years. In 1964, they filled the charts with Lennon-McCartney songs, even passing “World Without Love” to another group. I am skeptical that they went from being lousy composers as of June 1962 to the greatest hit machine of all time by early 1964.

Their music sounded fresh at the time because it was fresh. Their chord progressions and musical arrangements were far more intricate and original than those of the popular groups that preceded them.

Because they were writing their own songs, they were not simply performing someone else’s arrangement. This freed them to experiment, which they did compulsively. Every time the pop music world adjusted to their latest incarnation, they were already well on their way to a new one. They were not at all complacent, and this inspired/forced their contemporaries to take the path of innovation.

Their recording career as a group lasted just over six years. It would take other bands decades to accumulate a comparable body of work.