Funny this is cancel-worthy sometimes, and in other times it's treated as a quaint personality trait.
Also, the Beatles aren't famous because I Want to Hold Your Hand sold 12 million copies. The Beatles have 50 multi-million selling singles.
I think it was mostly because he was such a self-assured prick though, and so it was easy to pile on.
But, it is clear that the inability for people to take responsibility for their actions and instead blame some bogeyman like "cancel culture" is a big problem. Enablers and others who make excuses for them are part of the problem too.
You can see this same tension in Fela Kuti fandom and scholarship, where people almost have to choose between lionizing him as a anti-colonialist or anti-dictatorship hero and downplaying negative sides so that his sociopolitical impact feels more powerful, or deploring his treatment of women as something that tarnished his whole career.
Yeah sometimes you see that in passing. Some famous people seem to get a pass especially if they are not polarizing nor brazen, as opposed to, say, someone like Donald Trump. But in the end, they hurt and abuse people all the same.
For example, almost every bio I've seen on YouTube about Richard Feynman treats his proclivity of banging his colleagues' wives as nothing more than some charming quirk or idiosyncrasy (usually to differentiate him from the bookish physicists of the time) at best, and a peccadillo at worst.
The worst description I've read yet of his behavior was summarized as: "he just loved women."
It's messed up.
The hit in question, the one that outsold any individual Beatles single was from 1976. That was a time when most people received news from around the globe in print, with most of those print publications being regional and a handful being national. Something similar could be said for radio, though some people could hear stories from afar on the shortwave bands. That was more the exception than the rule though, typically of greatest interest to those who wanted to hear voices from their homeland or those keenly interested in learning about the world. (Even then, language was typically a barrier. When it wasn't a barrier, most of the stations were propaganda machines.)
Even though your claim undoubtedly remains true, at least we live in a world where those stories can leak out.
> Many of the artists in the list below have both streaming and sales included in their totals.
At best, this is a misleading comparison of apples and oranges. At worst it's an attempt to prop of streaming as actually compensating artists when they basically don't.
Linking to the Bandcamp but they are on Youtube as well. They have new vinyl releases of some fantastic funk and soul spanning the last 5-6 decades in Africa.
> “Sweet Mother,” his 1976 one-hit wonder, had sold at least thirteen million copies across the African continent – more than The Beatles’ bestseller “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles
Unfourtunaly civil wars, the conflit in Rodhesia, and the lifestyle of Sex drugs and rock and roll in a country ravaged by AIDS, killed a lot of musicians destroyed the movement. A guy started colleccting old records and released on spotify.
of the bands, theres a great one called Witch that reminds me a lot of bands like Steppenwolf and Black Sabath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlOT_gSRE48
If you find the documentary, let me know! All I know, besides the bands (also, that "We Intend To Cause Havoc (W.I.T.C.H.)" is one of the greatest band names of all time), is that at one point they all played their shows in lock-in overnight parties because of curfew rules.
Huge aside aside, aren't these songs a little similar?
I personally don't care if it was plagiarism or not, as it introduced me to a bunch of artists I otherwise wouldn't have known, such as Prince Nico Mbarga and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.