What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

135. It's OK if you can't discern and enjoy those characteristics. Many can.

On the surface "I Want To Hold Your Hand" is deceptively straightforward and regular in design. Its high-level form is a standard two-bridge model with only one verse (and no solo) intervening between the two bridges. Similarly, its phrase lengths appear for the most part to be symmetrically even, and its back-beat for long stretches sounds closer to conservative pop than rebelliously hard rock.

And yet, by the same token, just about everyone of the Beatles' early trademark tricks of the trade is to be found within it: the abrupt syncopations, non-intuitive two-part vocal harmony, falsetto screaming, an occasionally novel chord progression, even some elided phrasing. And of course, don't forget the overdubbed handclaps!

Perhaps it is just this paradoxical contrast between familiar and more daring elements that is at the heart of the song's phenomenal success.

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/iwthyh.shtml

Before them, pop music might have had its rebellious aspect, but the Beatles opened our ears to a range of sounds both past their prime and revolutionary, unknown to our culture and, in the end, the new definition of it.

It actually started with their first American hits, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” in that post-JFK assassination winter of 1964. The hooks and chord progressions were original, the harmonies thrilling without striving for sweetness. Rougher voices would emerge soon enough, but only after John Lennon and Paul McCartney established that you didn’t have to sing super-pretty to be popular.

http://www.pressandguide.com/articles/2014/02/09/life/doc52f5591ecf5de142802974.txt