Most overrated Beatle song ?

The recording of Hey Jude is one of my favorite tracks of all time. Seriously, top 10. It's so stately and Paul's voice is really emotive on it. I'm not as in love with the ending as I once was (I sometimes - gasp - skip to the next track on the playlist before the end), but I remember several times being at a party or at my high school job or in some other public place in my youth and it was really impossible for anyone to be anything but happy as that part of the song played. I think that gets lost in these days when music listening is mainly a solitary activity.

The song itself has been entirely played out - mostly by Paul - in the past 25 years and, even though he has an entire crowd singing along at the end doing in real life what he originally hoped to capture on the record, it really never achieves it for me (except the first time I was in the crowd doing it, which is kind of the point I guess). Makes the ending feel goofy now even when you go back and listen to the original. Now you get the mental image of a stadium full of teary-eyed grandmas waving their flip phones because no one carries a lighter anymore. This is why I'm usually out before the end of the record these days.

He doesn't sing it right live, either. If you listen to it on a live album, it's virtually emotionless, just there for the spectacle. On Tripping the Live Fantastic is sounds like a dirge. Plus, he now thinks that "the movement you need is on your shoulder" is the most important line or something when he was right and John was wrong and he should have changed it to something that made sense.

That record, though - still great.

 

Too many to list..that being said most of mine are Paul's tunes.

 

I Want to Hold Your Hand

 

another overcriticized Lennon song ...

is it possible to recover from the initial shock of hearing "I'd rather see you dead, little girl / than to be with another man" (a stolen line!) from John Lennon at the start of "Run For Your Life"? I think John put a lot into this one and then later disavowed it because while he could get away with just about anything at this point (e.g. "now that I know what I feel must be right, I'm hear to show everybody the light"!), this seemed over the top, even for him. and while that opening is jarring, the song develops well from there. consider the following:

a lively snarling lead vocal

great rocking guitar sounds with beautiful lines and a taut incisive lead break

fabulous 4 part harmonies on the chorus

great percussion - dig that tambourine

catch you with another man and that's the end-uh, little girl

excellent rhymes, notably -- sermon rhyming with determined! and --- note the word dead ending the couplet with a thud!
let this be a sermon I mean everything I said / baby I'm determined that I'd rather see you dead-d-d.

finally, the juxtaposition below could easily have been an accident, but what a brilliancy!
you better keep your head little girl or I won't know where I am - start
you better keep your head little girl or you won't know where I am - end

thematically, this song fits well in John's jealous tradition (you know that I'm a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind), which includes such notable compositions as Not a Second Time, You Can't Do That, If I Fell, This Boy and culminates in the mighty Jealous
Guy.

 

Always found the "end-uh" annoying. Well, the whole song.

 

Yesterday
And I Love Her
Michelle

 

I don't think any are "overrated", but I think some are OVERPLAYED. And there are some which tend to get "underrated", even in Beatles' circles.

 

One of the greatest verse melodies of all time.

 

"Blackbird." Words cannot describe how I loathe this precious garbage. Everybody else seem to adore it, though. For the life of me, I can't figure out how the travesty managed to sneak into the second to last round of the White Album weakest link thread.

 

Quoted for truth.

Also - people who obsess on things they don't like, instead of what they do like, have their priorities scrambled.

 

This---not even The Beatles, but Paul solo.

 

Other way around. Paul wanted to change it and John told him to keep it because it was perfect.

 

I agree - it was perfect. Which I've always felt even before Paul revealed it came from John. It's partly in the WAY that Paul sings "shoulder" the second time, as if he's underlining it and driving it home. "You've already got what you need to achieve the goal that you want -- it's all right there for you to channel". Once I learned from Paul that John said not to change the line, I felt vindicated.

 

IMO the most overrated is Tomorrow Never Knows. There was a big "weakest link" thread here of Beatles songs, and apparently the collective wisdom of SH.tv is that that song is the greatest in the Beatles' catalog. I don't get it.

 

FTFY

 

Time's up. The House wins.

 

"Dear Prudence", apparently.

 

No ..... it's not. It's a perfectly horrid melody. I rank it right up there with Love Me Do. The lyric, the melody, the whole thing is just embarrassing.
the record is one of those many cases where the record is way better than the raw material. Same with Surfer Girl. Perfectly dreadful. But ... the arrangement
is so nice, I find the record quite listenable in spite of it. Forgive me for being dictatorial about it, which is quite ridiculous. It's all personal taste of course. But
Yesterday is an interesting case even for me personally. The record, the performance and the arrangement both, make for such a nice record. Yet, the actual
words and music? ugh!

 

Interesting point/question. Does the fact that it was a #1 hit reflect "how it's rated"
Well, there are a number of issues. If the answer is yes, than when we say "how it's rated" we really mean "how it was rated at the time of release"
and I have a feeling what the OP had in mind is more how the track is thought of TODAY, or alternately, over the last fifty odd years.
But, let's consider even how it was rated at the time of release. Does the fact that loads of people bought it reflect a high rated song at the time?
So maybe a million or so people bought the single in the US at the time. But 40 million people were listening to pop radio AT LEAST! And they
all had opinions about the song whether they bought it or not. There are records I bought that I lost interest in after a month or less. There are records
I never bought that LOVED. So ..................

 

Yesterday. It's a fine song, but it's not Paul's best with The Beatles, Wings or solo. And he holds it in such high regard, while many of his other songs (especially from the Wings and solo years) are much better but in inverviews Paul will say something like "I just listened to song ____ or album ____ from my solo career the other day, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was", just giving songs from that era a backhanded compliment.

I know he's proud of Yesterday due to all the covers and the air play it get, but I don't think it's his most "complete" song, which I've seen him say in multiple interviews. What about songs like BOTR, Tug Of War, Another Day, Daytime Nightime Suffering? They all seem to be complete songs, lyric wise, and that's just a few.

I agree with John in the Playboy interview when he said (and I'm paraphrasing) "It's a lovely song and no I don't wish I had wrote it." "It doesn't really go anywhere, the guy loses his girl and wishes it was yesterday, the song never resolves itself." Again I don't have the exact quote in front of me but this was the basic gist of it.

 

Hey Jude and Blackbird.

 

Strawberry Fields Forever - zzzzzzzzz

Revolution 9 - proves the point that Lennon could do absolutely whatever he wanted and it would be worshipped...

 

Hello, Goodbye.

 

Pure contrarianism. "Yesterday" was covered hundreds of times primarily, if not exclusively for the melody. It's one the most loved melodies of all time.

Melodies are fickle things though. They can wear out if heard too many times.