Also, Slaughter and Firehouse. If they would have come on the scene a few years earlier, we would have hailed them as the saviors of hard rock and spoken of the countless bands they influenced (Kix, Trixter, Gorky Park, etc)
Greatest pop group? Absolutely. No one else comes close. Greatest group of all time? No, not in my opinion, but near the top.
This made me laugh. Dry delivery FTW. Anyway, it's impossible to say anyone is "the greatest of all time" when talking about such a subjective catagory as music. I do think it's kind of funny how so many other bands/artists like to list The Beatles as an influence when most of them have probably only heard 1/10th of their total catalog. That's always been a pet peeve of mine.
Best Pop band ever, yes. Not the best Rock n Roll band ever, that would be a knock down drag out btw the Stones and Zep.
The Beatles are the Babe Ruth of Rock-n-Roll (or popular music since the 1950's if you prefer). They made the music industry what it is, were incredibly influential in everything from music to album art to concerts to politics... not to mention fashion and society. (Elvis is Home Run Baker.) There are bands I prefer to listen to (but not many), and I think Beethoven wrote the most amazing pieces of music ever... but The Beatles, in many ways, made the modern music/pop culture/celebrity scene and are deserving of the "greatest" crown.
Side note: An argument could be made that John Philip Sousa is one of the most influential musicians in history since he more or less created the environment that placed marching bands in every high school and a lot of American musicians got their first experience to music through school bands.
I don't get nirvana myself. I mean I dig a whole bunch of their songs but I don't find them half as good as similar bands at the time... pearl jam, alice in chains, soundgarden. It must be Cobain's suicide that put this aura on them that I just don't see. You can't pick a greatest band that will appease everyone. But, as a rock band no group has touched or influenced more people than the beatles. It's not even close.
The Velvet Underground created alternative rock. They are at least tied with Zep, if not surpassing them. Nothing tops the Beatles in terms of influence on pop music for sure.
I'm not sure that the songs themselves were all that innovative. However, I would say that Butch Vig's production was very innovative. Took the gritty hard rock sound that had been forming over the past several years, and produced it about as slickly as possible using overdubs, double-tracked everything, and applied all sorts of other studio wizardry. Hence, it had a much more hi-fi sound than any other record like that of the time, and thus garnered much more main stream notoriety. Since it was the first to bring that type of music to the mainstream it was the most influential.
