The Beatles and their cultural impact

Beatles

The Revolutionary Commonness of the Beatles

The impact that the Beatles levied on the world could hardly have been predicted at a juncture in history where the alleged fad called Rock and Roll appeared to be fading. The passing of Buddy Holly, the enlistment of Elvis Presley and the blacklisting of Jerry Lee Lewis all seemed to confirm the hoary proclamations of the elder generations in both the United States and Great Britain, who believed this must to be a trend due for fast extinction. When the Beatles emerged from the gritty working class port town of Liverpool in the early 1960s, they immediately discredited this belief, revolutionizing the sound of popular music, the look of popular culture and the attitudes of the world's youth. As offered in the insightful Phillip Norman text, "Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation," this revolution would be precipitating not simply by the dramatic individuality and uniqueness of the Beatles, but indeed, also in the degree to which they appeared to actually reflect the desires, impulses and growing individuality in the youth to whom they played.

Quite indeed, Norman paints a picture of a group of young men whose own modest, even challenging roots would be shadowed by a degree of success fully unprecedented, let alone for England's blue collar masses. The commonness, some might even say that street-life nature, which produced John Lennon, for instance, would actually suit him ideally for the trials of becoming a Beatle. In his grammar school days in the Quarry Men, the group that would eventually give rise to the Beatles, Lennon is described as something of a thug. In one passage, Norman tells that "fights sometimes broke out between the musicians as they were performing, or with members of the audience whose criticisms were untactfully voices. Fights broke out also if a spectator believed a Quarry Man to be ogling his girlfriend, and clambered up among them to take revenge. John Lennon, for some reason, was always the principal target of such attacks." (28) Lennon's antagonistic nature, not in and of itself unique during the rise of Britain's 'teddy-boy' culture, would help presage his development as a musician and as a resistant symbol for his generation's disaffection from the plastic values of the prior generation.

To the point, even beyond everything else which Norman portrays in the text, the theme that seems to emerge with the greatest relevance is this idea of the various members of the group as well as of such important figures in the group's extended family as manager Brian Epstein as plagued by personal uncertainty and tragic grief. So is this best captured in the details concerning John Lennon at the time of his mother's untimely passing by an automobile accident. Norman relates of Lennon that "he had never been short of girlfriends, though few were willing to put up for long with the treatment that was John Lennon's idea of romance. His drinking, sarcasm, his unpunctuality at trysts, his callous humor, and most of all, his erratic temper drove each of them to chuck him, not infrequently with the devastating rejoinder that is the specialty of Liverpool girls. 'Don't take it out on me,' one of them screamed back at him, 'just because your mother's dead.'" (50) The cruelty and tragedy of Lennon's scenario, for one, makes him a sympathetic figure here, easily identifiable to the countless young members of post-war Britain who struggled with emotional trauma and found little in the way of empathy around them. It is easy to see why the common ground shared by individuals like Lennon and his fans would resonate with a seemingly revolutionary power when compared to the aristocratic likes of a Frank Sinatra or a Perry Como.