The Beatles and Wikipedia

When I was a child, I always had a sense of living in the shadow of the '60s (a decade I mostly missed, having been born in '68). Most of my knowledge of the '60s came from books about the Beatles. Since these books about the Beatles were about the Beatles, the main focus was, quite naturally, the Beatles. I formed a view of the situation where the '60s were largely about the Beatles. These books would always emphasize the unprecedented sales and influence of the Beatles. I eventually formed an idea of the Beatles as the biggest cultural sensation in human history, and certainly the biggest thing to ever happen in popular music.

I had this notion, I think, that, in the '60s, nobody went more than a couple of hours without thinking of the Beatles. Not even LBJ, probably, when he was preoccupied with what was going on in 'Nam. After all, even 'Nam could only be understood through the lens of the Beatles.

When I got a little older, a few things happened. For one thing, I read a few books about the era that weren't books about the Beatles, which probably gave me a sense of proportion I hadn't previously had. For another, Bob Dylan came to seem much more significant to me in that era. Also, I was at some point introduced to the weird "Beatles or Stones" dichotomy--like the equally weird "dogs or cats," you were supposed to choose one. And for a while there it was much hipper to choose the Stones. As far as singing and songwriting skill, they were clearly overmatched, but they were a little grittier, and in some ways more masculine, and they had more blues and rootsiness in their music, or at least they had these things in such a way that they sounded more natural with them. I don't think I ever preferred the Stones, but the fact that so many people did seems significant.

Anyway, I'm not sure what it was like to live through the '60s, or what the significance of the Beatles was. There were people who broke some of their sales records and things who rarely, if ever, entered my consciousness while they were doing it. But maybe it wasn't like that back then, it was perhaps all newer and rarer.

I am pretty sure that the Beatles are the only band or artist that this is true of: if you go to their Wikipedia discography, there is an entry for every song on every album. I'm not sure how that came to be, or what it means. A lot of Beatles fanatics are Wikipedians? Or such people are heavily represented because of their prevalance in the world at large? I don't know...