10 Perfect Rock Music Songs That Were Inspired By The Beatles

There’s a good case to be made that every single band that has come out since the ‘60s owes their career to the Beatles. No matter how you want to look at it, the Fab Four seem to be the first at almost everything that we think of for modern rock and roll, from not relying on blues traditions anymore to getting weird in the studio to the charisma that they had both on the stage and in the studio. We’ve all taken a few pages from the work of the Beatles, it’s just that some people are a little bit more thorough in their inspiration.

For as much as these bands have their own unique identities, these songs could have easily been Beatles songs just with another person’s name slapped on it. From the harmonic construction to the kind of guitars they used, every single one of these songs has the Lennon/McCartney sensibility all over it. This isn’t just a little bit of inspiration here and there either.

These were instances where these were just a bunch of musicians goofing around and then decided to write a complete Beatles rip-off, including shaping the melody to sound a lot closer to the classic style they pioneered. In the early ‘60s, there were already a million cases of labels throwing together Beatles copycat bands to piggyback off of the lads from Liverpool, and it seems that the tradition has done quite well carrying on in the next few decades.

The Beatles and the world of punk rock don't really feel like they belong in the same sentence most of the time. When bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols got things started in the late '70s, it almost seemed like the antithesis of what the Beatles were doing in the first place, getting away from those pop masterpieces and bringing it back to basics. Once they did admit that the Beatles had some good songs though, the next generation didn't even bother hiding their ideas.

Although Americana gave us some of the best Offspring songs like The Kids Aren't Alright, Why Don't You Get a Job practically feels like the band taking the piss out of the Beatles, framing the whole song as a bit of a satire of Paul McCartney's song Ob La Di Ob La Da. While the original song from the White Album was already a bit divisive, this is the kind of homage that makes the original sound doubly annoying, being barked out by Dexter Holland's screeching high voice and sounding closer to a children's version of what a punk rock song should sound like.

This isn't just a play on the typical Beatles kick either, with the band practically lifting the entire vocal melody and just rewriting the entire song with a few different lyrics thrown in here and there. There's always the old expression of artists wearing their influences on their sleeve, but this song just wears its Beatles influence like a mask and hopes that you don't tell the difference.