10 Perfect Rock Songs That Changed Music History

There's hardly any ground that has been covered in rock and roll that the Beatles didn't at least have a hand in starting. While most fans might want to remember them as the lovable moptops that got their start on the Ed Sullivan Show, the back half of the '60s saw them innovating left and right, from the weird jazz sounds that you would find in a song like Michelle to practically inventing genres like art rock and heavy metal on tracks like I Want You (She's So Heavy). Once they were free from the road though, A Day in the Life was the peak of what John Lennon and Paul McCartney could do together.

Framed as a story with Lennon reading the paper and getting more and more fatigued with the world, the song takes a moment to build, creating a sense of chaos as the orchestral arrangements behind them slam up against each other before we're dropped right in the middle of Paul's morning, with a happy tune and a pep in his step as he runs to catch the bus and daydreams at work once he gets high on the roof.

If you look at both of these stories back to back, they may as well be taking place on two separate planets, but those two opposing sides are what made the Beatles' partnership work so well. Paul may have focused on making a career of happy pop tunes and John may have wanted to take his audience to places they've never been, but when those two forces rubbed up against each other, you could feel the rock world turned on its axis.