(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 7 March 2026 20:00, UK
The Beatles weren’t just a band; they were a complete cultural phenomenon. Whether you love them or hate them, they’re impossible to escape. You could try to avoid listening to a single song by the Fab Four again, but their influence would still find you.
It is too looming and vital not to. It’s not even so much about the songs that Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Co directly wrote and released during their remarkably short stint as a band. It’s about the broader influence around them from the evolution of rock and roll, opening its arms to blues, folk, punk and beyond, to the simple yet seismic impact they had on celebrity culture.
Really, the second Beatlemania hit, the world was changed forever. Being famous took on a whole different meaning, the potential for a band seemed to triple, and on every level, what it meant to be a musician seemed to take on new heights as the ceiling was raised to the sky; now the limits seemed boundless. So whether you like their music or not, there’s no denying that.
Jack Black likes the music. In 2007, he even played Paul McCartney in the ridiculous Walk Hard movie, but even that silly parody was clearly done with love. However, he is mostly amazed at the band because of that immeasurable impact.
“When you think about rock at its origin, and you think of the Beatles and millions of kids screaming as loud as they can and running as fast as they can towards the Beatles,” he said to Rolling Stone, truly positioning the band at the pinnacle of the musical world.
To him, they were completely defining of their genre, their era and even what it meant to be famous as he added, “There’s no one who is that kind of lightning rod, who commands that kind of power and has that kind of creative magma.”
However, there is maybe one other band he might set on their level, at least positioning them as peers in terms of mass cultural impact. If The Beatles defined things in the 1960s and ‘70s, Black looked towards the 1990s, and the next band that changed everything, stating, “I contend that the last band to really have that kind of power, I’m gonna say, was Nirvana. Who since Nirvana has been as big as Nirvana in that way?”
It would be easy to draw a thick and clear line between these two bands, but in reality, one could never have existed without the other. Without the rock and roll moments the Beatles defined, music likely never would have evolved through that to punk into the grunge sound Kurt Cobain and his band came to represent. Just as the Fab Four epitomised their genre, Nirvana undeniably did and still do the same.
They also had the same seismic impact, influencing not just music but broader worlds of fashion, film and beyond. They’ve been a blueprint and an essential influence ever since – and there are very few groups who can genuinely boast that and it means something in a serious and undeniably way. Similar to the Beatles, you could actively avoid Nirvana’s music forever, but you still would never escape the impact Kurt Cobain had.
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