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FORA.tv SERIES: The Beatles: Rock Band's Newest Stars, The Best of City Arts & Lectures

Malcolm Gladwell at City Arts & Lectures

City Arts & Lectures
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farber2 Avatar
farber2
Posts: 60
Posted: 01.24.09, 06:50 PM
I don't know. I just like this guy and the basic premis.
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AlienIquirer Avatar
AlienIquirer
Posts: 48
Posted: 01.25.09, 10:23 AM
True, the Beatles were well prepared but so are hundreds of bands that play in obscurity without ever being "successful".

I think M. Gladwell should look into "syncronicity" that only Carl Jung took seriously.

What happened with the Beatles is that everything fell in place as if it was meant to happen.
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savageb Avatar
savageb
Posts: 67
Posted: 01.26.09, 01:17 PM
Gladwell is right. It's not that he's questioning the Beatles talent, but what made them so great was those "10,000 hours" of playing in that strip club in Hamburg.
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farber2 Avatar
farber2
Posts: 60
Posted: 01.27.09, 06:26 PM
mozart, agassi, etc. as long as you use the term prodigy right, it exists sometimes.
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colling0 Avatar
colling0
Posts: 0
Posted: 02.11.09, 10:52 AM
We try so hard to make complicated things simple, to reign them in so we can wrap our intellect's arms around them. I'm guilty of it daily. What makes the Beatles the Beatles is a myriad of circumstances, efforts (lots), musical inclinations and talent, happenstance, relationships, etc. It can't be reduced to a formula. I love Gladwell and read all his stuff, and Blink has been a great confidence booster for me, but this looks to be a searching for , that has become an oversimplification, no?
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Newspeaker Avatar
Newspeaker
Posts: 36
Posted: 03.11.09, 01:36 PM
that is precisely what makes gladwell's work so appealing - it addresses complex questions with simple and clever answers, derived from various, interesting disciplines and experiments. the key is to enjoy them, as such, while realizing there is actually much more to the answers than he offers. gladwell admits this. it is also necessary when aiming for the general audience, as he does.
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dongee Avatar
dongee
Posts: 1
Posted: 09.11.09, 01:24 PM
First he says “meritocracies are rigged”. Then he says the Beatles became great by “playing eight hour sets, seven days a week, for months at a stretch.”

Sounds inconsistent. What am I missing here? BTW, I’ve never heard anyone else say the Beatles were prodigies.
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VeganBoy13507 Avatar
VeganBoy13507
Posts: 1
Posted: 09.13.09, 09:50 PM
His book insists that all success is based on an insane string of circumstances, and that there were defiantly better musical groups that simply didn't get as lucky.
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MikeRoberts Avatar
MikeRoberts
Posts: 1
Posted: 10.15.09, 10:47 AM
I think that with the Beatles, they would have probably been successful to some degree(as least John and Paul would have, I think. However, it was this series of beneficial co-incidences that allowed them to find that niche and springboard them onto that international stage...beyond that, it was simply that they were better at foreseeing what the public was going to find interesting.
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thecamlayton Avatar
thecamlayton
Posts: 1
Posted: 11.17.09, 10:51 PM
@Dongee I think the point was that, as with the success of the hockey players, so too the success of the Beatles is generally misapprehended by people. The Beatles' hard work is what "rigged" their gigantic success, but you never hear that story just as you never hear about most pro hockey players being born in Jan., Feb., and Mar.

The Beatles suck. :-P
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