Last week, The Beatles made headlines twice, and the news wasn’t exactly good. First, Atlanta rappers Migos landed 14 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, tying a seemingly unmatchable record—most simultaneous chart entries by a group—set by the Fab Four in 1964. Two days later, the internet freaked out when legendary producer Quincy Jones called the Beatles “the worst musicians in the world” in a shockingly candid Vulture interview.
It doesn’t matter that Paul McCartney, who Jones dismissed as the “worst bass player” he’d ever heard, placed third on Bass Player magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Bass Players of All Time. Or that streaming has made it possible for album cuts to attain the kinds of lofty chart placements once reserved for ubiquitous radio singles. The combo of Migos’ chart takeover and Quincy’s viral takedowns (he also slagged off drummer Ringo Starr) were the latest examples of how the mighty Beatles legacy is being rewritten in the social media era.
The curious rivalry between Migos and the Beatles began long before the Atlanta trio placed more than half of Culture II on the Hot 100. Migos leader Quavo may have instigated the whole thing on 2013’s “Hannah Montana,” wherein he raps, “I’m in London with the plug, gettin' the same car as the Beatles.” By the fall of that year, “Migos are better than the Beatles” had become a meme, and in 2014, Fader used “migos-definitely-better-than-the-beatles” in the URL for its Migos cover story. That same year, Quavo told MTV “only social media” can tell who’s the superior pop group. By that metric, Migos seemed way ahead.
The debate went primetime at the 2017 Golden Globes, where Donald Glover called Migos “the Beatles of this generation” while accepting the Best Series award for his FX show Atlanta. Glover even referred to them as “the Migos,” a variation of their name that invokes generations of successful rock bands, from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the Strokes and the White Stripes.
Glover didn’t say Quavo, Takeoff, and Offset were better than John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and that’s because he didn’t have to. Simply making the comparison between a flashy Southern trap group and the most beloved rock band of all time was enough to highlight a cultural shift precipitated by numerous factors. Chief among them is rap’s position as America’s dominant form of popular music. Another is the power of social media to amplify the voices of people not generally heard from in the mainstream media—namely young people of color. It’s also a megaphone for trolls, and while they may have had a hand in the meme, Glover said what a lot of people were thinking. The very next day, Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100. The song it replaced atop the charts: Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.”
Like Glover’s pronouncement, “Black Beatles” isn’t the sound of anyone coming for the Beatles. It’s not like Chuck D blasting Elvis Presley for being racist on 1989’s “Fight the Power,” a song that actually changed people’s perceptions of a rock icon. “Black Beatles” playfully name-checks McCartney and his late bandmate John Lennon, and Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee has declared himself a fan of the British legends. He spoke to Rolling Stone about how Sir Paul offered him words of wisdom before Migos blew up, and expressed genuine excitement over McCartney taking part in the “Mannequin Challenge” spawned by “Black Beatles.” Yet the very existence of a song called “Black Beatles” was a challenge to 50 years of deeply entrenched pop orthodoxy.
In the decades following their 1970 breakup, the Beatles never came close to fading away. Contrarians would say they preferred the Rolling Stones (or more pretentiously the Kinks), and critics occasionally tried to poke holes in their mythology, but nobody challenged their status as pop godheads. Punk, grunge, Britpop: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were all influenced by the Beatles. With a video inspired by the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on Ed Sullivan, OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” might’ve carried the same unspoken now-it’s-our-turn message as “Black Beatles,” but the music is more than a little Beatlesque.
All along, the records kept selling. In the mid-’90s, the Beatles topped the Billboard 200 albums chart with all three volumes of their Anthology series, and with 2000’s 1 collection, they enjoyed another cultural moment. The remastered greatest-hits set went No. 1 all over the world, earning the group a new generation of fans (now in their 20s) and making a lot of baby boomers with disposable income very happy. In 2002, McCartney hit the road for the first time in nearly a decade, and 16 years later, he’s still filling arenas from New York to New Zealand.
People keep showing up for a reason. Along with Bob Dylan, the Beatles revolutionized pop music in the ‘60s by creating an environment where artists were expected to write their own songs. They arrived before the counterculture, when “love” still meant “Love Me Do,” and then defined the hippie era with songs like “All You Need Is Love,” a more universal look at pop’s favorite four-letter word.
The best thing about the Beatles was how they never stopped changing. From their early mop-top rock ‘n’ roll rave-ups sound to the Dylan-indebted folk introspection of Rubber Soul to the psychedelic twinges of Revolver and old-timey brass flourishes of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles were always onto the next thing. With the help of producer George Martin, they experimented with feedback, backwards tape effects, string orchestration, and so much more. And yet no matter how weird Beatles got, they retained the tunefulness and likeability that sparked Beatlemania in the first place. They were the platonic ideal of a successful band, and the many well-known plot twists in their story have inspired countless parodies.
But these are things you might not know—or even care to know—if you’re growing up in the ‘10s, devoting way more of your bandwidth to the Internet than to classic rock radio (which now includes bands like Green Day on its playlists). If you’re a 15-year-old in 2018, you may only know the Beatles as a bunch of “non-playing motherfuckers,” in Quincy’s words, whose Billboard chart records are totally up for grabs. If you remember Rihanna’s 2015 single “FourFiveSeconds,” you may also remember asking, “Who’s Paul McCartney?”—a reasonable question (or a funny troll) given McCartney’s limited role in the finished product. Kanye’s handling of that collaboration—speeding up Paul’s guitar and vocals to the point where you can barely recognize him—suggests Macca had more to gain from a Ye’ collaboration than the other way around.
Which is not to say the Beatles are in danger of being forgotten. They do big numbers on Spotify, and there are thousands of tribute bands all over the world that faithfully perform their catalog like keepers of a sacred gospel. But in five or 10 years, when the generation of white and black kids raised on Migos and Rae Sremmurd start having families, they won’t hand down the Beatles in quite the same way their parents or grandparents did. It doesn’t even matter whether Migos stay popular or cede the spotlight to some other Beatles for their time and place. For some, Paul McCartney will go down as that guy who stood really still in a “Mannequin Challenge” video. The rest of the world kept moving.
