25. Meet the Beatles - The Beatles.

  Listening to this album, I have a sense that I am quite familiar with these songs. It is not just listening to songs by the same artist over and over again, this is essentially the same album as the one reviewed in the last post, "With The Beatles." So, as promised, I am going to explain why I thought that album's ranking of number 420 was a little bit low.

 Here is why. The track listings are exactly the same with the exception of the differences. Duh. "Meet The Beatles" includes only three tracks that were not on "With The Beatles".  Two of these tunes are "I Want To Hold Your Hand", and "I Saw Her Standing There" (borrowed from the first album). In my opinion, this trumps all five of the cover tunes on the other album. Throw in "This Boy", which isn't bad, but after the energy of the aforementioned tracks, it seems like a bit of a downer, and there is an excellent argument that "Meet The Beatles" is a marginally better album.

 That being said, they are essentially the same albums, again with the edge going slightly to "Meet the Beatles". But the ranking for this album was number 59! The previously reviewed album, as you recall,  was number 420. The disparity in rankings is huge, which illustrates the inherent problem of creating a list like this. You cannot please all of the people all of the time. Even with the cross section of musical experts that were polled to get the entries for the list there are still variables which cannot be controlled. "Meet the Beatles" is essentially the same album as "With The Beatles"; but it is an album issued in the US to catch up with the craze that the Beatles were creating overseas. So the consensus of the experts can be concluded to be that these songs are worthy of inclusion in the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, but the actual rankings are affected by which collection of the songs the voter had in their mind as the album containing those tracks. The staggering difference in rankings shows that regional marketing and availability of the music must be considered a factor in the selection of albums for the list. And this particular disparity indicates the presence of a bias toward American recordings. Now, this is strictly conjecture, I'm not saying that if two albums were tied for a spot, that Rolling Stone would give it to an American artist over a British artist, but the magazine is an American publication, and the market for music in the US is comparatively huge, so it makes sense that a bias, likely an unintentional bias, would exist. This could account for omissions from the list of artists with huge regional followings, but not the clout to significantly crack the American market; or the inclusion of American albums that make you wonder if they really do belong on the list. It is all subjective and suitable for debate. I found this interesting and thought it merited discussion.

  I think "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is still one of my favourite Beatles tunes. When I was a kid, I remember listening to a German version of the song, to the point where I could sing along, making noises that sounded like the German words the Beatles were singing. At that point in my life, Hamburg was something Dad would grill up on the barbeque at the cottage. I much prefer the English version of the song, however I do smile when I think of rocking out with the headphones on screaming along in pseudo-Germanic gibberish. It must have been quite a show.

 Buy it here.