Any close listening to musical groups soon establishes the fact that as composers and performers the Beatles repay attention altogether more than does any other group, American or English. They offer something for nearly everyone and respond to almost any kind of interest. (pp. 120-21)

More aloof from politics than the Stones, their topicality is of music, the social predicaments, and especially the sentiments traditional to folk songs and ballads. Maybe the most important service of the Beatles and similar groups is the restoration to good standing of the simplicities that have frightened us into irony and the search for irony; they locate the beauty and pathos of commonplace feelings even while they work havoc with fashionable or tiresome expressions of those feelings. (p. 124)

One of the Beatles' most appealing qualities is … their tendency more to self-parody than to parody of others. The two are of course very...