rock, insect, death dwarf—shoot!

There are two types of people in the world: Beatles people and Rolling Stones people.  Which type of person are you?

I don't buy it, by the way, but it's not entirely meaningless.  People do tend to have strong opinions in either direction, like, "Yeah, they're both great, but obviously the Beatles are better than the Stones," or, "obviously the Stones are better than the Beatles."*  Then of course there's the joker-card answer that I seem to remember the Strokes' Julian Casablancas giving in an interview c.2002: that there are two kinds of people in the world, Beatles people and Rolling Stones people, and he's a Velvet Underground person.  And that's not necessarily a pretentious answer.  In addition to being pretentious, maybe the Velvet Underground answer is actually kind of a sane compromise.

Start by pretending that the Rolling Stones only ever released two albums, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed.**  Then listen to "Love in Vain" (chosen at random, almost); listen to it loud, or with headphones on.  I submit that the Beatles are better songwriters*** but that when you just listen to the bands—not the songs, see, so much as what I want to call the texture—well, that's when I can best understand the Stones people's point of view.  You can lose yourself in that instrumentation.

Yes, yes, taste is relative—but that's almost misleading in this case because there are different standards: it's not like a continuum that different people see differently but totally different contests, totally different worlds.  What makes the Velvet Underground so good?  It took me years to figure it out, and I got to it this way: first I saw how near-perfect their third, self-titled album was; next I saw how amazingly nasty and brutal and awesome White Light / White Heat is; and then I figured out that Velvet Underground x White Light = Velvet Underground & Nico—at which point, about six years after I first listened to it, I finally came to appreciate that album.  (It's true, and it's funny: the second and third albums are basically distillations of aspects of the first.)

But so what am I trying to say, here?  Maybe I'm just trying to use the Velvets to justify the Stones, by way of "texture"...in which case really I'm only talking to Beatles people.  Are the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones closer to each other than either is to the Beatles?  Somehow I want to say no.  Is it that Lou Reed and Lennon/McCartney seem smarter to me than Jagger/Richards?  Does that make any sense?  Listening to the Beatles or to the Velvet Undeground kind of makes me think I could have an interesting conversation with those guys, and I don't particularly get that impression from the Rolling Stones—with them it feels more like I could drink myself into a coma and get a disease.  Not that that wouldn't happen with the other guys (in fact I sort of assume that if I spent time with Lou Reed in the late 1960s he would hurt my feelings and probably break my time machine), but I feel like it isn't all that would happen.  You know?  Not that I have anything against Mick Jagger...

Aw, who gives a shit.  Listen to whatever you want.

* Correct answer: the Beatles are better than the Stones.

** Oh, no reason.

*** Theory B: When comparing the two bands in terms of how good they are, you can go back and forth, but once you introduce genius into the picture, insect beats rock again and again and again and again, landslide, no contest, like, are you kidding me?