Who Was Worse?: Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry Sing The Beatles

They’re too young to remember the Beatles, and that’s probably why both Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry were willing to cover a couple of the Fab Four’s big hits in recent high-profile performances. Most of their fans are young, too, so the performances were met with mostly positive responses. Some music purists, however, were not as kind with their critiques.

Miley chose to cover “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for last week’s Billboard Music Awards show. She took the stage for a pre-recorded performance of the song alongside popular indie band The Flaming Lips. The performance was predictably filled with confetti, tongue wagging and skimpy outfits, and it was also predictably weird. Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne has been self-consciously weird for much longer than Miley has, and he didn’t disappoint here, wearing a bodysuit and banging enthusiastically on a cymbal. The performance itself, though, was sluggish and monotone.

In a way, Katy Perry’s performance of “Yesterday” at the Grammy Salute to the Beatles in January was even weirder. Perry took a basic approach that was appropriate for the song, but it also showcased her vocal limitations—and her changing of the song’s pronoun genders raised some eyebrows, too.

Neither performer got a resoundingly positive response for her take on the Beatles, but both escaped relatively unscathed from performances that would have drawn outrage 20 years ago. But what do you think? Did these young stars successfully update the Beatles for the 2010s?