Not everyone loved The Beatles.  Here are three early criticisms of their music:

After their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Lawrence Laurent offered the following explanation on February 12, 1964, as to what was going on: “They are, apparently, part of some kind of malicious, bi-lateral entertainment trade agreement.  The British have to sit through dozens of dreadful American television programs.  In return, we get The Beatles.  As usual, we got gypped.  Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”

George McKinnon, writing in the February 16, 1964 edition of The Boston Globe offered this advice: “Don’t let the Beatles bother you.  If you don’t think about them they will go away and in a few more years they will probably be bald.”

Conservative writer William F. Buckley didn’t hold anything back while writing about the Beatles in his syndicated column on September 9, 1964:  “The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful.  They are unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.”