Beatles on December 27, 1963, the London

¶ … Beatles

On December 27, 1963, the London Times reported, "The social phenomenon of Beatlemania, which finds expression in handbags, balloons and other articles bearing the likeness of the loved ones, or in the hysterical screaming of young girls whenever the Beatle Quartet performs in public" (Beatlemania pp). Thus, Beatlemania was coined and today can be found listed in the majority of dictionaries. Beatlemania hit the United States with a vengeance after the group performed at the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 (Beatlemania pp).

The Beatles were one of the most influential much groups of the rock era, that initially affected the baby-boom generation of Britain and the Untied States during the 1960's and later the rest of the world, and with global sales exceeding 1.1 billion records, they were the most successful group (Beatlemania1 pp). Although they were originally famous for light-weight pop music, as well as the extreme hysterical reaction they received from young women, their later works achieved not only popularity, but critical acclaim that is considered unequaled in the twentieth century (Beatlemania1 pp). Eventually, they became more than recording artists, branching out into film and political activism, especially in the case of John Lennon (Beatlemania1 pp). The Beatles achieved an iconic status that went beyond mere celebrity, with such far reaching effects that it would be difficult to exaggerate (Beatlemania1 pp).

Beatlemania began in the United Kingdom and exploded following the appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States, on February 9, 1964, launching the band into a worldwide phenomenon with worshipful fans, hysterical adulation, as well as denunciations by culture commentators and others such as Frank Sinatra (Beatlemania1 pp). Some of this can be contributed to the confusion over the sources of their music, and some of it was simply an incredulous reaction to the length of their hair (Beatlemania1 pp). A similar confusion was evinced in 1956 over Elvis Presley by commentators who were unaware of the tradition of blues, R& B. And gospel out of which Presley emerged, as well as his on-stage moves (Beatlemania1 pp). Nevertheless, the band's popularity was regarded by the Liverpool band members, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, with both awe and resentment (Beatlemania1 pp).

Mikhail Safonov, writer, broadcaster, and senior researcher at the Institute of Russian history at St. Petersburg, writes in a 2003 article for History Today, that the Beatles did more for the break up of totalitarianism in the U.S.S.R. than Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Adrei Sakharov because neither the novelist nor the physicist had an audience in the Soviet Union like that of the Beatles (Safonov pp). According to Safonov, the Beatles cultivated a generation of freedom-loving people throughout Russia, a country that covered one-sixth of the Earth's surface, and that "without that love of freedom the fall of totalitarianism would have been impossible, how ever bankrupt economically the Communist regime may have been" (Safonov pp). He writes that the first song he heard on Leningrad Radio was A Hard Day's Night, and shortly after, someone gave him recordings of that song and Help, which had been brought in from France, and for many Russians, this is when Beatlemania began (Safonov pp). Beatlemania took a variety of forms in Russia, but is was not the type that was seen in the West, since in the U.S.S.R., the Beatles were proscribed, thus fans were forced to hide their worship of the group (Safonov pp). It became the fashion to have Beatles hairstyles, however young people were stopped on the street and forced to have their hair cut for them in police stations (Safonov pp). Yet, writes Safonov, "the more the authorities fought the corrupting influence of the Beatles, the more we resented this authority, and questioned the official ideology that had been drummed into us from childhood" (Safonov pp). The whole world had already fallen in love with the Beatles, so the more the government persecuted them, the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of the Soviet ideology (Safonov pp).

Despite the forecasts of the imminent collapse of the Beatles popularity, they became more and more of a phenomenon in the cultural life of the entire planet, something impossible to ignore, and gradually the bans were removed (Safonov pp). The first song to be released in the U.S.S.R. was Girl, which was included in a collection of foreign popular music, however, the Beatles' name was not listed (Safonov pp). And in the 1970's, after the group's break-up, records with just four Beatles songs appeared in the U.S.S.R., but were credited simply to a vocal-instrumental group (Safonov pp). The Soviet authorities committed so many sins against their people that these musical misunderstandings seem to be childish prattle, but, write Safonov, "it was these misunderstandings that sometimes hurt the most, forcing people to feel in these small details the full extent of the inhumanity of the regime" (Safonov pp).

Safonov recalls that Soviet citizens started to be aware that the individual is highly valuable, and individuality is in itself one of the most important values of life, and this was such a contradiction to the socialist message of the primacy of the collective that, once a person became educated in the culture of the Beatles, he discovered he could no longer live in lies and hypocrisy (Safonov pp).

Thus, Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society because a person brought up with the world of the Beatles, with its images and message of love and non-violence, was an individual with internal freedom.(Safonov pp). Although the Beatles were not political, they slipped into every Soviet flat, packaged as tapes, and did something that was not within the power of Solzhenitsyn nor Sakharov, for they helped an entire generation of people to grow up in the Soviet Union, and created a non-Soviet generation (Safonov pp).

Thirty-eight-year-old Ken Wall, program director of Little Rock, Arkansas, rock outlet 100.3, says that he is not a huge Beatles fan until he hears Nelly doing Strawberry Fields (Sinclair pp). Beatlemania is quietly exploding among a significant segment of today's youth population, because for a new generation, the band has become the alternative to all the once-alternative stuff that has since become the mainstream (Sinclair pp). In other words, the Beatles, today, are developing into something entirely unexpected -- "young America's biggest cult band" (Sinclair pp). Mark Hoppus of the group 'blink-182,' believes the Beatles are still relevant, for they changed the landscape of music forever, they are both geniuses and heroes, thus they will always remain relevant (Sinclair pp). And like most underground phenomena, the new Beatles cult appears to have grown organically (Sinclair pp). Most kids enter music by listening to whatever is on the radio, whether hip-hop, punk, or classic, then says Marc Weinstein of Amoeba Records, they go for other stuff, and the Beatles is one of the first groups they investigate (Sinclair pp). Charles Freund writes that the term 'the sixties' describes the transformation of a type of cultural 'fandom' into a type of social and political identity, of which the Beatles managed to remain at the center of this phenomenon, if not ahead of it, as long as they existed (Freund pp). And their fans, primarily the leading-edge boomers, became what they beheld, and a part of the Beatles is within each of them (Freund pp).