'How the Beatles Destroyed Rock-n-roll' Has anyone read this book?
It poses some interesting ideas chiefly that rock-n-roll started out with black and white performers and black and white fans but separated around the time of Sgt Peppers into white rock music and black soul music.
The book states that rock-n-roll was dance music that emphasized rhythm and that the Beatles started out in this tradition, But that changed in 1966 when the Beatles stopped touring and concentrated on recording in the studio. Sgt Pepper, the book argues, is good music but not rock-n-roll since it is not dance music and has little to no connection to rock-n-roll's black roots. James Brown started out as a rock-n-roller but was reclassified as soul as a reaction to these changes. Since that time, there haven't been very many black rock performers or fans and a white artist could have soul but still won't fit in that category. Essentially, the book states that the Beatles resegregated popular music. Billboard had dropped the separate pop and r&b categories in 1962 because they were nearly identical but brought them back by 1967 because black people were listening to soul music and whites to rock.
The author does not portray the Beatles as doing anything wrong or lacking talent and they don't really get mention until the last chapter. Most of the book details the history of American popular music before the Beatles and the cross-pollenization between black and white musicians that happened.
I look forward to reading this book in it's entirety because it's a refreshing change from the normal rock music group-think mentality of the Rolling Stone Magazine types.
= new reply since forum marked as read
... it was part of the Beatles repertoire for years. They just didn't record it until '69.
If the point of the "Get Back" sessions was to get back to their roots, then it must follow that they themselves thought they had strayed from them. Or some of them, anyway -- the whole point of the breakup was that the group had different ideas on how to shape their music.
Saying that the Beatles broke rock and roll, though, may give them more agency than they deserve. It seems that the branching of pop music into rock and rock 'n roll camps proceeded concurrently with their development, but correlation is not causality. The fact that the Beatles had so much success moving into harder rock from the "Please Please Me" sort of tune may have (probably did have) a big impact on imitators who came later, though.
It's interesting to me that so many who claim to be Beatle fans almost always claim to prefer "late Beatles" to early Beatles, as if the original Rock and Roll material that the group wrote and performed were some kind of embarrassment. Given that they earned their early success based on the merit of those early embarrassments, it seems a bit disingenuous, to me. Without "She Loves You," we're never going to get to "I am the Walrus."
I think the social conditions of the '60s had a lot more to do with the segregation of pop into "black" and "white" genres than the appearance of the Beatles on the scene. And anyway, R&B also become harder and lest "dancy" in the latter part of the decade than it was when Chuck Berry was cranking out the same tune every six months. 
I think if you look at music history from the beginning of recorded music until many decades later (classical music excepted), you can see a cycle of dance tunes giving way to more "serious" musician's music as a new generation begins to take itself more seriously than an earlier. Swing gives way to bop, rock and roll gives way to harder rock and then swings back to Disco, which while not rock, is definitely dance-oriented, rather than oriented towards virtuosity. The Beatles were able to straddle both trends, and so were a few other acts (hell, the Bee Gees were balladeers before they started doing dance music).
-- Mal
... knows something about swing. I think that musicians start to take themselves seriously after a few years, and start feeling contemptuous of "commercial" musicians who are just a few years older. Both Bird and Miles, in their ways, were arrogant SOBs. It's not a big jump from virtuoso to prima donna, although some people -- Pops, eg -- seem to have avoided it.
One thing about the Beatles was that they preferred to think of themselves as a *group*, not one front man and his supporting cast. They are actually a bit pioneering in that respect, although jazz had that tradition for years (but none of the rockers knew or liked jazz, then).
-- Mal
... though I suspect it does give notoriety to a work about music criticism. Looks like Mr Wald and I reached some of the same conclusions independently.
-- Mal
...is wrong. The art-rock stuff lasted about a year... The Beatles began 1968 with "Lady Madonna" and were seen as signaling a rock 'n' roll revival during the late 1960s.
Roll. We'll always have the J. Geils Band! 
