Men, Masculinity and the Beatles

Martin King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Rockmusik

Drawing on methodologies and approaches from media and cultural studies, sociology, social history and the study of popular music, this book outlines the development of the study of men and masculinities, and explores the role of cultural texts in bringing about social change. It is against this backdrop that The Beatles, as a cultural phenomenon, are set, and their four live action films, spanning the years 1964-1970, are examined as texts through which to read changing representations of men and masculinity in 'the Sixties'. Dr Martin King considers ideas about a male revolt predating second-wave feminism, The Beatles as inheritors of the possibilities of the 1950s and The Beatles' emergence as men of ideas: a global cultural phenomenon that transgressed boundaries and changed expectations about the role of popular artists in society. King further explores the chosen Beatle texts to examine discourses of masculinity at work within them. What emerges is the discovery of discourses around resistance, non-conformity, feminized appearance, pre-metrosexuality, the male star as object of desire, and the emergence of The Beatles themselves as a text that reflected the radical diversity of a period of rapid social change. King draws valuable conclusions about the legacy of these discourses and their impact in subsequent decades.

1 Why the Beatles? A Rationale

DOI: 10.4324/9781315594958-1

Introduction

Why the Beatles? For many they are an aspect of British cultural history whose superiority and peerlessness needs no debate: Macdonald (1994: 1), for example, states: ‘[a]greement on them is all but universal: they were far and away the best ever pop group and their music enriched the life of millions’, while Evans (1984: 7) sees them as ‘the most important single element in British popular culture in the post war years’. The main aim of this introductory chapter is not to debate the ‘best ever’ discourse, although this is part of their cultural significance, but rather to explore some of the discourses, both academic and popular, that surround the Beatles as a cultural phenomenon and, therefore, to provide a rationale for the use of the Beatles as a case study through which to reflect on changing representations of men and masculinities in the 1960s, the period in which they were active as a working group.

As the most photographed, talked-about men of the decade they provide, it will be argued, a suitable case study in the study of men and masculinity. This chapter will establish their global popularity and cultural significance in this period (and beyond),¹ and unpick some of the claims made by Inglis (2000a) and others that the Beatles were an historical event, cultural phenomenon, musical innovators and role models for young people.

¹ Inglis (2000a: xv) provides an authoritative summing up of their career:

On one level the story of the Beatles is deceptively easy to relate, not least because it has been retold, reproduced and reinvented on so many occasions. John Lennon met Paul McCartney in Woolton 6th July 1957, and shortly afterwards invited him to join his group (then known as The Quarrymen). In 1958 McCartney introduced Lennon to George Harrison: these three remained the nucleus of the group amid numerous variations in personnel (of which the most important was Stuart Sutcliffe's membership from January 1960 to June 1961), changes of name (Johnny and the Moondogs, The Silver Beatles, The Beatles), and a performing history largely confined to Merseyside (with occasional spells in Hamburg) for the next five years. At the beginning of 1962 they agreed to place their management in the hands of Brian Epstein, a local businessman. In August of that year, several weeks after the group had accepted a provisional recording contact with E.M.I.’s Parlophone label, drummer Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr. In October 1962, Love Me Do, their first official single, was released and was a minor chart entry; and in February 1963, Please Please Me became their first British Number One. In January 1964, I Want to Hold Your Hand was their first US Number One, and for the rest of the decade the Beatles dominated popular music around the world. They toured extensively until August 1966, when they elected to abandon live performances in favour of studio work. Epstein died in August 1967, and in 1968 the Beatles established their own management and recording company, named Apple. In April 1970, after increasing involvement in individual projects, the group effectively disbanded.

Facts and Figures

Fifty years after their first single, Love Me Do, rose to number 17 in the UK charts in 1962, the Beatles remain as famous as ever, and the words of press officer Derek Taylor announcing their break-up in 1970 still seem to ring true: ‘The Beatles are not a pop group, they are an abstraction, a repository for many things’ (Sandbrook, 2006: 724). With record sales topping half a billion (including 17 UK and 20 US number ones), their iconic images continue to fill TV screens whenever the 1960s are mentioned: frozen in time stepping down from their plane at JFK in 1964, cuddly mop-tops surrounded by screaming fans, cool and groovy in their mid-sixties roll-neck and shades incarnation, resplendent and moustachioed in Sgt Pepper costumes, hirsute on the Apple rooftop in 1969. Googling the Beatles in 2011 gives you 23,200,200 hits (Jesus gets 206,200,000, more of which later).

Two are dead and two are living, but their fame as the Beatles seems undimmed. The phenomenal, and surprising, amount of newspaper coverage generated by Linda McCartney's death in 1998; George Harrison's death in 2001; Paul McCartney's marriage to Heather Mills, the resultant fatherhood and messy high-profile divorce; the release of a remixed version of 1970 album Let It Be in 2003; wranglings over the Apple name and access to downloads and the eventual high-profile ad campaigns by Apple (Inc.) at the end of 2010 mean that they continue to make front page news in the early part of the twenty-first century. Their existence as a recording group only lasted for an eight-year period, yet the texts that remain to document the global phenomenon that was the Beatles, including books and articles, both popular and academic, music, films, magazines and the ‘official’ history now available in the Beatles Anthology book (The Beatles, 2000) and accompanying DVD (The Beatles, 2003), provide evidence of an extraordinary male cultural phenomenon of the 1960s or, indeed, of the twentieth century.

Their rise to global popularity and their high visibility worldwide around 1963/4 is discussed later in this chapter. Their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the US in 1964, seen by 73 million Americans, and their occupation of the top five slots in the US Billboard Chart in the same period are two key events in establishing their global profile (Kot, 2006). Their first US tour can also be seen as a key event in the establishing of British youth culture as a global cultural force. The mid 1990s saw the release of the TV Anthology documentary and accompanying CDs. In November 1995 they were the biggest selling act in the US, with the first two Anthology CDs selling 24.6 million copies, accompanied by back catalogue sales of 6 million. Over 50 per cent of buyers were teenagers or in their twenties. Similarly with the release of the #1 album (a collection of UK/US number one hits) in 2000. As the new millennium began, they were top of the Billboard US Chart with 30 million sales worldwide; again, the biggest purchasing group was in the 16–24 age band, with people over 40 only accounting for 25 per cent of sales (Skinner-Sawyers, 2006).

The demographics provide an interesting insight into the continued popularity of the music. They were and are an extremely popular musical phenomenon. But what else were, and are, the Beatles? As early as 1964 they had already become, in the modern parlance, a ‘brand’, instantly recognisable, expanding from just being a pop group by branching out into films, TV appearances on comedy shows (with Morecambe and Wise on Two of a Kind, for example) and ghost-written newspaper columns. There is, however, a dearth of academic work on the Beatles, despite an increasing acceptance of their historical, sociological, cultural and musical significance by the popular media and ‘serious’ music journals.

It is the intention within this book to address this issue, with particular reference to the Beatles as men and their role as a focus for changing representations of masculinities. Ideas around the ways in which the Beatles ‘helped feminize the culture’ (Stark, 2005: 2) and their role as ‘one of the 20th century's major symbols of cultural transformation’ (Stark, 2005: 2) will be examined through an exploration and analysis of their four live-action films. However, in order to understand how they came to be viewed as culturally significant, it is first necessary to examine the phenomenon of Beatlemania and the way in which their eventual emergence as ‘men of ideas’ (Inglis, 2000b: 1) is grounded in their traditional male pop-star-ness.

Beatlemania

Hysterical scenes had surrounded male stars before the Beatles (Valentino in the 1920s, Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, and Elvis and Johnny Ray in the 1950s) and has done subsequently (the Monkees in the late 1960s, the Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers in the 1970s, Take That and Boyzone in the 1990s, One Direction more recently). However, Beatlemania remains the yardstick, an alliance between the media, fans and a cultural phenomenon unlike any other. ‘In the beginning there was the scream’ states Stark (2005: 10), and he goes on to claim that the screams that had greeted Frank and Elvis seemed to increase fourfold for the Beatles, while Marshall (2000) sees the beginnings of Beatlemania as the shaping of modern celebrity, a presentation of self for public consumption that went beyond what had gone before.

In 1963, the Beatles had four number one singles, two number one albums, a 13-week BBC radio series (Pop Goes The Beatles) and had toured the UK four times. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were the right men in the right place at the right time given the social changes of the early 1960s (Sandbrook, 2006), particularly the emerging discourse of the new classes society in which intellectual activity would not be confined to one particular grouping (Mannheim, 1960).

Illustration 1.1 ‘Paul makes the Front Page' was the original caption to this picture from The Daily Mirror, November 1963. John and Paul appear enthusiastic about Beatlemania and their national fame.

Source: Courtesy of Mirrorpix.

Their supposed status as four working class lads from Liverpool,² a well-worn rags-to-riches narrative beloved by the media, was central to Beatlemania, and their youth and exuberance fitted well with the classless society discourse at work in the early 1960s (Marwick, 1998; Sandbrook, 2005; 2006). Marshall (2000: 163) talks about the ‘pleasures of personality’ at work within the Beatles and the way that this was portrayed through the new global medium of TV in particular (although their films, as will be discussed later, also provided a vehicle for this). The pleasure discourse is something that recurs in discussion of the Beatles and, again, this will be discussed later in the book. Marshall also sees Beatlemania as providing a link between fame and the artistic process, ‘a re-reading of the cultural value of fame and celebrity’ (Marshall, 2000: 170), as well as an event that united artist and fan through the phenomenon of hysteria linked to live performance. As the psychologist E.E. Sampson (1988: 5) has stated, ‘the reactions of others are required for us to be’, and Beatlemania was very much a phenomenon about the reactions of others, based on a relationship between the Beatles and their fans which was then fed back to all through the mass media. This phenomenon was populated predominantly by female fans and often, therefore, seen as feminised in itself, and linked through the disciplines of crowd theory and social psychology to weakness in the female constitution (Marshall, 2000). This is perhaps most famously illustrated by Paul Johnson's (1964) ‘The Menace of Beatlism’ in the New Statesman, a stinging attack on the ‘bottomless chasm of vacuity’ (Johnson, 2006: 53) at work in Beatlemania. This quote gives a flavour of the piece:

² The newly discovered academic interest in class in the early 1960s led, it can be argued, to a wish to create a working class discourse around a cultural phenomenon from a northern UK city (the terms Britain and UK are used interchangeably within this book). Lennon's upbringing was decidedly middle class, McCartney's slightly less so. Harrison's father drove a bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Why the Beatles? A Rationale
• 2 Social Change, the Sixties and the Beatles
• 3 Men and Masculinities
• 4 Reading the Beatles Through Their Films: The Role of Representation
• 5 It's Been a Hard Day's Night and I've Been Working Like a Dog
• 6 Help! I Need Somebody, Help!
• 7 Roll Up for the Mystery Tour
• 8 Let It Be
• 9 The Beatles' Films: Re-imagining the Englishman ' Some Concluding Thoughts
• Epilogue: And In The End
• References
• Bibliography I: Film, TV, Radio
• Bibliography II: Songs
• Bibliography III: LPs
• Index