Who’s the Zero After Her 2 Bits on Fab 4?

Britney was feeling beleaguered. One day she was just an anonymous 19-year-old heading for the parking lot at Orange Coast College, and the next thing she knew she was a Beatles-bashing ignoramus with a tin ear.

Or so segments of my readership portrayed her Sunday, aghast that she’d found nothing to like about either “Rubber Soul” or “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” two seminal Beatles albums of the 1960s.

All poor Britney Tyner had done was take me up on my offer -- listen to the two CDs and give an opinion. I’d specifically sought out a college student who’d never heard either collection, because I wanted to see if any college student would feel the same about the Fab Four as had so many millions of us all those years ago.

Britney did not. And what she discovered is that many Beatle fans do not take kindly to someone who says the Liverpool lads’ songs “seemed to be about nothing.”

I reported her review last Friday and the public reaction Sunday. Britney walked into English class Monday, and her professor jokingly expressed surprise she was showing her face. She hadn’t seen the Sunday column, but when he read the news aloud to her and the class

Among other insults, references to “nitwit” and “moron” and wanting to “slap her upside the head” left her with a sour taste. She immediately phoned me, demanding equal time.

So there we were again this week at our same coffee shop, me feeling guilty and Britney defending her honor. “I feel like everyone has scorned me because of my opinion,” she says.

“In my opinion, if the Beatles were to come out with their songs now, they wouldn’t make it, because today’s youth is not listening, in general, to the Beatles. They listen to whatever’s new, what’s popular. Back then, the Beatles were popular. That’s what pop music is, what’s popular of that day.”

She knows other college kids like the Beatles, even if she’s surprised at that. “I never once said I speak for all college students or all teenagers,” she says. On the other hand, she says, she’s seen websites that suggest the Beatles were overrated.

Peace and love, she says. Ha! “It’s still bugging me that I was so put down for an opinion. It makes me wonder what’s going on in the world. If these people were so peace-and-love back then, wouldn’t that stick with you if they [the Beatles] changed your life?”

And then there’s the intelligence issue. “I’m very intelligent,” she says. “I’m a straight-A student and have been most of my life. I’m majoring in criminology, I’m doing ROTC, I’m going to be an officer in the Air Force. Just because I dislike a band that was popular in the ‘60s doesn’t mean I’m less intelligent than the person who likes them.”

I ask if she wishes I’d never stopped her that day in the parking lot. No hard feelings, she says. Although listening to the CDs proved increasingly painful for her on her second run-through, she thought it was a fun experiment.

And it convinced her that musical enjoyment is related to social context and a particular place in time. She conducted her own experiment: She asked her 65-year-old grandmother to listen to a CD from the late Tupac Shakur, a legend in rap music. Just as with the Beatles, Britney told her grandmother that Shakur had “changed lives” and left a lasting imprint.

Her grandma, Britney says, couldn’t make it through one Shakur rap.

And so ends our Britney trilogy. She and I vowed never to meet again for a column. However, before parting, I gave her the CD that includes only No. 1 hits from the Beatles, thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t have started her out with “Rubber Soul” and “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

But I promised her the last word to her critics. “The things that bothered me the most,” she says, “was that they were coming down on me for someone’s opinion, for someone’s taste in music. It’s just a

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.