The misapprehension that the Beatles have somehow been subsumed in what came after stems from a linear conception of musical history.
When you suppose music has been progressing, you treat the earlier works as merely foundational. Preferring those older works is either nostalgia or historical curiosity at best. Any stubbornness in this regard might betray a perverse or reactionary disposition.
But when you place the Beatles in their proper context, considering what came before as well as what came after, you begin to see a clearer picture. Compare them to traditional folk ballads, consider John Dowland and Purcell, along with many others in the English musical lineage. You will find that the Beatles didn't simply build on what came before, they actually cleared much of it away.
The essence of music is not complexity or virtuosity, the genius (or spirit) resides in the "songness" of the song. All music was merely spoken in the distant past, it evolved first from poetry, which was accompanied by light instrumentation. Read a poem of Sappho and tell me if it seems rudimentary or primitive, you'll only be ousting yourself as a philistine.
Now, the Beatles are not Sappho, we don't pretend that. But they achieved a rare and luminous feat, they managed to cut through ornamentation and strike the quintessence of song. And they achieved this by doing less rather than more.
Some bands since then have achieved similar feats, Nirvana was a notable example. People often complained that their musicality was limited, or that they were "over-hyped". But Nirvana succeeded in bypassing our aesthetic and rational minds, and stirred something much deeper and much older.
Those girls screaming at Beatles concerts were having religious experiences, and I'm not speaking hyperbolically here.
Rock and Roll was not just a genre of music, it was a Dionysian frenzy that shook the world. A veritable Saint Vitus Dance that we'll never see again in our lifetimes. We might want to downplay it because it occurred for our parents and grandparents, rather than for us, but all who lived just after historic periods felt the same "surely it wasn't that special".
But it was, don't resent it, it was. And really it's a miracle, recording technology was good enough to capture their magic, while the industry was naive enough not to interfere artistically. The Beatles are a prime example of kairos, divine timing. Something interceded on behalf of mankind in that moment, who are we to downplay the magnitude of that gift?
