the anatomy of a post-help! hit (progression of genre breakdown)

After a short break, I'm back with the next step of the anatomy project. Here's the progression of genre breakdowns. You can read each song categorization in the posts below. For a description of the project that this is a part of, click here.

While all of this information is available in previous posts, I've displayed it here graphically, in order to help you conceptualize it. In the next post, I'll consider this breakdown, and the commonalities in individual singles' characteristics, and present what I think is the anatomy of a post Help hit.















What can we conclude from these graphs?

Well, first of all, Revolver is the only album with songs in every category. Second, while the categories are admittedly quite broad, it's surprising (to me, at least) that we don't see more diversity across the board. I'll delve into this more deeply in the next post, but I think this whole exercise reinforces the reality that, while the Beatles pushed the boundaries of what rock/pop music can be, they remained--with the exception, perhaps, of George's ragas--steadfastly a rock/pop group that conceptualized music within that universe, while pushing the creativity of that universe to its limits.