I repeat, it’s not that you are wrong, but you bring the discussion to topics that end up lacking a specific relevance regarding the Beatles, and I don’t think this is the place to delve into them. When I speak of courage, I’ve exaggerated a concept.
First of all, the Beatles must be historically contextualized: the period from 1965 to 1970 was a historical time when young people started wanting to surpass parental models, attempting to break down the barriers of modesty and the prevailing puritanism of the post-war era. They aimed to challenge traditional bourgeois values; it was a world light-years away from today. Perhaps some find it hard to understand that Jagger's screams, singing about libido, were like blasphemies in church. Rock conveyed this extraordinary and unrepeatable youth fervor; it was its soundboard.
Dissonance, for example, was a symbolic choice, a rejection of the given world. In an era when rock music was used as a weapon, the Beatles used it like a music box. The Beatles were conciliatory; modern mothers began listening to them with their daughters, something that never happened with the Rolling Stones, who were regarded as akin to beasts of Satan. They did not represent that historical phase at a time when, as never before, rock and history went hand in hand. A title like that of a Spirit album, The Family That Plays Together, tells more than all the latest Beatles records.
For this reason, in my opinion, they were a pop band, which doesn't mean they couldn't have been a decent pop band; indeed, they undoubtedly were. Look at John: if the Beatles have one quality, it's their rather varied songbook. The point is that the myth surpasses the truth when someone claims that they were avant-gardists, the first to do everything, the best, the greatest geniuses of all time.
Having courage means genuinely risking unpopularity, means risking not being understood; the entire history of art should have taught something about this. Take The Velvet Underground and Nico, and there you go, do you remember "There She Goes Again" or "I'll Be Your Mirror"? What do those songs seem like to you? They seem to me like incredibly catchy songs appreciable by any idiot on the face of the earth; they are charming little tunes, earworms (although it's worth noting that Lou Reed's singing style was not exactly conventional, so a certain reluctance to listen might have been provoked back then).
The proof that the Velvet Underground could write excellent little songs is there; you know, The Velvet Underground and Nico didn’t sell much, probably twenty times less than the first Backstreet Boys album (though it did pick up over time).
Now, do you think the Velvet Underground wouldn’t have sold a lot more if they had made an entire album of songs of that type, with perhaps banal lyrics? I would say yes, and do you think they didn’t know that?? If they had wanted, they could have made an entire album along those lines, but they didn’t. Don’t look at how famous it is today; that work remained in the shadows for several years.
So what, were they idiots or perhaps masochists? NO! Very simply, they were a self-referential band that had the courage to risk commercial failure, sacrificing it at the altar of the freedom to express their creativity. And in that album, you find "Heroin," you find "The Black Angel's Death Song," "European Song," not exactly songs for a less demanding average audience. Those songs represent courageous choices.
A courageous song today would be a song that offends homosexuals, for example… Then yes, the Beatles updated themselves by absorbing various influences, but one thing is to be influenced, another is to be conformist. It wasn’t the Beatles who pointed the way as believed, but rather they followed it. The Beatles allowed themselves to update only when others had already taken the responsibility to introduce certain sounds or themes to the masses.
And come on, you’re not stupid; the Beatles weren’
