How the Beatles Made History and Shaped Pop Culture

Introduction

Everyone knows their names, even if one never cared for their music: Ringo, John, Paul, and George. Just 15, 16, and 17 respectively, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon came together in 1958 — young but passionate musicians from Liverpool, England, who wanted to play jazz, blues, and folk music on improvised instruments. By 1962, they had added Ringo Starr to the group. With Starr on drums, the group's first single "Love Me Do" hit the airwaves and changed the face of pop music forever. Beatlemania became a phenomenon, and the Beatles themselves became "more popular than Jesus," as Lennon put it four years later to a London journalist (Runtagh).

The Beatles surely did make history — whether they were ever actually bigger than Jesus was a controversial point. They had more number one singles than any other British band or artist, and their 17 number ones were beaten only in America by Elvis's 21 (Vincent). For 14 years, "She Loves You" was the best-selling single of all time. The band pushed the boundaries of studio recording, and as Kevin Murnane has pointed out, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was "a perfect storm of musical and recording creativity" that produced an 11x Platinum album. The band used four-track recording and bounced tracks one, two, and three to the fourth, where more tracks were added to fill the final track with as much sound, as many instruments, and as many musical expressions as possible. It was just one of the innovative ways that the Beatles made history. This paper explores that and the other ways in which the Beatles left their mark on modern pop culture.

Who Were the Beatles?

The Beatles became a huge cultural phenomenon at a time when the Baby Boomer generation was coming of age. It was the 1960s — a decade of social and sexual revolution (Jones). The members of the Beatles were themselves born during the wartime period: "all six boys were born during that conflict" (Laing 10). The effects of war and violence had a haunting impact on the young men who made the most popular music in the world, in a post-war youth culture that developed as a reaction to the symptoms of the Cold War that followed World War II in the 1950s and 1960s (Laing 10). The youth culture was made up of war babies and Baby Boomers who wanted emancipation from the culture that had fostered the war era — a culture that seemed still in play, even in the 1960s and 1970s, with Vietnam drawing heavy criticism from the hippie movement and the youth movement in America.

In physical terms, the Beatles were very young when they made it big — barely in their mid-20s at the peak of their fame. They went from being four mop-headed British youths in dress jackets and ties to poster boys for the Hippie Generation, with long, shaggy hair, sideburns, beards, denim pants, and bell-bottoms. For their second-to-last album, Abbey Road, released in 1969, the quartet was photographed crossing the street, and that image was used as the album cover. As David White notes, it was controversial to say the least: "The controversy over the album cover sprang from the rampant rumor that the ambulatory line of pop stars represented a funeral procession, mourning the departed Paul McCartney. John Lennon religiously led the procession in a heavenly white suit, Ringo Starr followed in black as the mourner, George Harrison clad in denim would be the gravedigger, and Paul McCartney, barefoot, out of step, stood as a seemingly animated corpse, a member of the walking dead" (6). Thus, for their final album cover as a band, the members represented more than their iconic selves: they represented something mystical, something beyond their own celebrity and fame — something otherworldly and meta. They were already post-themselves; they had become so big, so famous, so fast, that there was nowhere for them to go but their own separate ways before the decade that made them famous drew to a close.

In psychological terms, the Beatles were still just trying to figure things out — barely adults when their first single topped the charts. The fame, adulation, success, money, and media attention changed them, challenged them, and forced them to respond in different ways. They went to India and chanted Hare Krishna. They grew their hair out and fit right in with all the other young people of the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War on college campuses. Were the Beatles really trendsetters, or were they simply following the trends set by the uber-trendsetters in Laurel Canyon? Whatever the case, the Beatles were not shy about voicing their opinions. At the height of their fame, they were struggling with their own personal identities, and by the end of their tenure as a band they were in full transformation mode: "In September 1969, Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, arrived as a house guest at Tittenhurst Park, John Lennon's estate in England. 1969 was for John Lennon a year of intense search for social and personal liberation. He had already been to the Maharishi and later would enter primal therapy and left-wing politics. He was in a major transitional period; he had married Yoko Ono in March" (Krishna). The others were moving on as well, each attempting solo careers with varying degrees of success. Harrison and Lennon turned to Eastern religion. Lennon would be assassinated before long by Mark David Chapman. Yet the legend of the Beatles lived on. They were considered the quintessential pop band: they defined the genre, made it what it was, and pioneered all the modern pop sounds.

In emotional terms, they handled their success rather well. No one fell irreparably into drug use or committed suicide. No one wound up in jail. They became disillusioned with what they could do musically as a band, each wanting to explore different approaches. However, prior to their breakup they were the hottest act anywhere in the world. The press called it Beatlemania: they were met by screaming fans throughout the mid-1960s. Their youth, their clean-cut looks, and their pop music — which was, as they themselves admitted, essentially drawn from the canon of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly (Sheff) — all came together in a fusion of just the right ingredients that the world was looking for in the 1960s. Fun, fresh, and subtly rebellious yet not so overtly anti-establishment as to alarm many mothers, the Beatles filled an emotional void that the 1950s had opened and that the harder-edged rock 'n' roll of the 1970s had not yet crawled out of.

The Beatles represented something real, authentic, vital, and relevant for the youth culture in Britain and America. They resonated because their music was poppy yet original in the way it tinkered with traditional sounds and styles. The Beatles would later embrace the "beat scene," and Lennon would even be called a "bohemian Teddy boy" by McCartney (Laing 17) by the end of their time together. But in the beginning, they were straight out of the 1950s rock scene — they sprang from the same musical loins as Elvis in many ways. The King was simply American and the Beatles were British; that was the main difference. Elvis had already gone platinum before the Beatles made their big splash in 1962. Elvis essentially set the stage for the Beatles: the hysteria, the screaming young girls, the adoration and adulation — it was all part of the culture by the time the Beatles arrived in America. Yet the Beatles whipped it up even more. Whereas Elvis was only one man, there were four Beatles.

The Beatles were unique still further in that they were supported by their parents in their musical endeavors. They were so young when they started out that it could hardly have been any other way. They were not beach bums or professional musicians or Laurel Canyon projects like the Doors; they were four very young, talented musicians who could absorb and reproduce the styles of music that were making waves at the time. Their early beginnings, nurtured by parental patronage, contrast sharply with the notion that rock 'n' roll always created a large generation gap. In their case, their parents gave their children "encouragement" to follow their musical ambitions (Laing 17). Unlike other British acts that would follow — particularly punk groups like the Sex Pistols — the Beatles had none of the anti-establishment verve now so frequently associated with the spirit of rock 'n' roll when they first started out. They looked like every other young band — smart, snappy, and handsome — but their songs were zesty and full of the pop sound that drove audiences wild. That was why they succeeded from the start. There was nothing anti-establishment about them in the beginning; they were very much of the establishment. It was only as the culture around them evolved that the Beatles truly embraced a counter-culture status.

John and Paul, the stars of the Beatles, came from families that had "a history of professional music-making" (Laing 26), which helped to shape the group and point them toward the music-making pop artistry and iconic status in youth culture that they would achieve. Even before they were the Beatles, some of them were the Quarrymen — the original band that Lennon started at 16, which Paul joined, and later George as well. But in the Beatles, together they found their voice, a voice that would grow and morph over the years. Prior to their vast promotional activities, however, they were still producing their first hit single, which came in the early 1960s: "Love Me Do" (Laing 26). There was nothing revolutionary about this hit, but it was pure pop that catered to the rock 'n' roll tastes of an era that had not yet grown into the protest era to come.

The Beatles were emblematic of the emerging youth culture in the post-war era: supported by their parents, yet partaking in a cultural shift that would gradually drive a wedge between their generation and the one that had worked to support them. This was a gradual shift, but its roots were planted in the kitschy pop hits of those early formative years, which put the Beatles on the radar. From there, their talents — and their hair — grew to great lengths, mirroring the dissatisfaction of youth with their elders' campaigns against the peace and love that the group and its audience would promote through their music and their philosophy of living throughout the 1960s.

Their Works

The Beatles released seven studio albums from 1963 to 1966 before retiring from live performances. The final five studio albums, plus the Magical Mystery Tour of 1967, marked a new direction in their sound as the group became more experimental. The first seven studio albums were:

Please Please Me (1963), With the Beatles (1963), A Hard Day's Night (1964), Beatles for Sale (1964), Help! (1965), Rubber Soul (1965), and Revolver (1966).

The sound on these records was mainly poppy, though by Revolver the group had begun to experiment with psychedelic rock in songs like "She Said She Said," which was described as having an acid-tinged sound and featured lyrics such as, "She said I know what it's like to be dead." This song was reminiscent of the music and poetry culture of the times. Acid had arrived on the scene, and it was only natural that a group as counter-culture as the Beatles were becoming by the mid-1960s would embrace the psychedelic drug culture too. Also on the same album, however, were hits like "Good Day Sunshine," which was reminiscent of the Beatles' early poppy sound. Notably, the latter was penned by McCartney; the acid-tinged, psychedelic song was penned by Lennon.

As the two main creative forces in the band, this marked difference in styles on Revolver was an indication of the rising tension in the band and the two different directions the songwriters wanted to take their work. Lennon wanted to get more experimental. McCartney was more traditional and conventional in his approach. Another Lennon song on the album, "Tomorrow Never Knows," was as trippy as "She Said She Said" and featured lines like, "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream." With songs like these, the Beatles crossed over from warm pop to psychedelic pop. But it by no means determined their entire future trajectory; they remained highly musical, as Sgt. Pepper's, Abbey Road, and Let It Be all demonstrated. To the end, McCartney remained the most conventional of the four, penning "Let It Be," "Get Back," and "The Long and Winding Road" on their final album.

"Revolution 9" on the White Album was an example of how experimental the Beatles were willing to get. The eight-minute track is more like a modernist art piece than a conventional song — with no melody, harmony, or rhythm, just snippets of sound forming a collage from various sources: news media, symphonies tuning up, radio waves, people talking, one sound fading and blending into another, or several sounds layering on top of one another. The album also featured "Helter Skelter," McCartney's raw rock 'n' roll entry in the vein of The Who, and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," another poppy McCartney tune. Lennon's "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" also appeared on the album — an ironic title given that Lennon would be shot dead two decades later. "Let It Be" was the group's most spiritual song and, again, one penned by McCartney and reportedly despised by Lennon, who felt it was far too churchy to count as good music (White).

Conclusion

If there is one band that embodies the spirit of popular music in the 20th century, it is the Beatles. Beloved of many — though not by all — their range allowed them to create some of the most enduring hits of the latter half of the 20th century as well as some of the most compelling musical experimentation ever committed to record. They embraced the counter-culture once it got underway, and their fame and status enabled them to give that counter-culture additional momentum. They starred in films, became bigger than Jesus (as Lennon believed — though he did not anticipate that the remark would cause such a stir; he even satirically clarified that had he said television was bigger than Jesus, people probably would not have protested nearly as much), and they topped the charts with one release after another. They made history because they were the biggest band ever to hit a stage, and throughout the 1960s, they were, in the fullest sense, the music.

Works Cited

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