New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles

Things We Said Today

Kenneth Womack, Katie Kapurch, Kenneth Womack, Katie Kapurch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137570130
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Beatles are probably the most photographed band in history and are the subject of numerous biographical studies, but a surprising dearth of academic scholarship addresses the Fab Four. New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles offers a collection of original, previously unpublished essays that explore 'new' aspects of the Beatles. The interdisciplinary collection situates the band in its historical moment of the 1960s, but argues for artistic innovation and cultural ingenuity that account for the Beatles' lasting popularity today. Along with theoretical approaches that bridge the study of music with perspectives from non-music disciplines, the texts under investigation make this collection 'new' in terms of Beatles' scholarship. Contributors frequently address under-examined Beatles texts or present critical perspectives on familiar works to produce new insight about the Beatles and their multi-generational audiences.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Kenneth Womack and Katie Kapurch (eds.)New Critical Perspectives on the BeatlesPop Music, Culture and Identity10.1057/978-1-137-57013-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Making It New with the Beatles

Kenneth Womack¹

(1)

Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ, USA

End Abstract

By the time the Beatles made their legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, their new sound and novel images had already cast a spell over British audiences, a mesmerizing effect that the rest of the world would soon experience. And after 50 years, this enchantment has hardly begun to wane. Television specials commemorating the anniversary of the Fab Four’s invasion of the USA are only one recent sign of their unrelenting popularity. Since word of their breakup spread across the globe in April 1970, the Beatles have re-issued and re-packaged their albums and films, but the past two years alone have seen the reissues of boxed sets such as Live at the BBC, The U.S. Albums, and The Beatles in Mono Vinyl, suggesting a never-ending stream of “new” Beatles products.¹ Indeed, the Beatles have remained ever new, a theme reinforced by Paul McCartney’s recent album of the same name.

With New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today, the essayists in this anthology explore “new” aspects of the Beatles. As a whole, this interdisciplinary collection situates the band in its historical moment of the 1960s, but argues for the artistic innovation and cultural ingenuity that account for the group’s lasting popularity today. Along with theoretical approaches that provide a bridge between the study of music and perspectives from non-music disciplines, the texts under investigation make this collection “new” in terms of the (already) long history of Beatles scholarship. But why the Beatles? Why now? As Walter J. Podrazik asks about the Beatles in his insightful Preface, “How did they do it?” And more importantly, “How do they still do it?”

As with the thinkers in New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles, writers about music and popular culture have long attempted to understand the mystery at the heart of the group’s longevity. But in truth, there is hardly anything mysterious about their ability to eclipse the staves of time and memory. Their resonance as a cultural artifact certainly owes its success to the explosive nature of their emergence in those heady days of the early 1960s, not to mention the bandmates’ apotheosis as four flatly defined types: with John being cast by the media and fanzines alike as the “smart one,” Paul as the “cute one,” George as the “quiet one,” and Ringo as the “funny one.” Yet in the end—beyond the West’s fascination with the Summer of Love, with hallucinogens, with the promiscuity and permissiveness that the group towered within and above during the latter half of the 1960s—the Beatles remain decidedly liberated from the temporal boundaries of that epoch, never quite descending into the quagmire of nostalgia acts and transitory cultural ephemera.

The Beatles’ ability to enjoy a kind of rebirth and discovery across successive generations is owed primarily to the resounding nature of their music and, secondarily I would argue, to the circumstances of their disbandment. Through one recording after another, from 1962 to 1969, they embarked on a creative journey that took them, along with their intergenerational audiences, from the relatively primitive “Love Me Do” single and Please Please Me (1963) album through a series of landmark recordings, not to mention a treasure-trove of standalone 45-rpm classics: from the brash originality of A Hard Day’s Night (1964), the folk-tinged breakthrough Rubber Soul (1965), the eclectic wunderkind Revolver (1966), and the psychedelic brilliance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) to the multifarious chef d’oeuvre The Beatles (The White Album, 1968) and the timeless sublimity of Abbey Road (1969). As artistic fusions go, there is simply nothing like the Beatles. The Fab Four’s creative trajectory explodes into being in 1962 and goes continually up, up, up into the rarest of air indeed. And then, to the Beatles’ (and fate’s) great happenstance, they would exit the stage as a working creative unit … forever. And unlike so many of their generation, their passage into the waiting arms of history would be permanent. A quartet of largely successful solo careers in the 1970s created an interregnum of sorts, only to be followed by Lennon’s senseless murder in December 1980.² Unlike, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd—who manage, periodically, to reunite in spite of the loss of much of their core membership, including lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt, to an October 1977 plane crash—the Beatles have never regrouped as an ersatz nostalgia trip down memory lane. Even the Anthology series and the “Threetles” reunion in the early 1990s were carried out with deliberate and carefully choreographed reverence for their legend. This aspect of their post-disbandment years reached its zenith with the mega-successful Beatles 1 compilation (2000) that, to date, has netted sales eclipsing more than 31 million units worldwide.

In twenty-first-century business terms, the Beatles have branded themselves extremely well, establishing their name as representative of a blue-chip musical corpus waiting to be discovered by new legions of listeners with each passing year. In this fashion, they can be understood as being invariably new, always waiting in the wings for new listeners across virtually every demographic (perhaps their greatest coup) to fall under their spell. It wasn’t always this way, of course, as the Beatles and their advisors had to endure a number of painful lessons—sometimes more than once—on their road from novices to mature businesspersons. Even with Brian Epstein and a team of London economics luminaries at their beck and call in the mid-1960s, they made a number of financial blunders—such as the underselling of their merchandising in the USA via the “Seltaeb” fiasco in 1964, their inability (in the wake of Epstein’s untimely death in August 1967) to consolidate their wealth and energies to secure their publishing rights, and a seemingly endless succession of poor branding choices in the 1970s and 1980s (the faux-1950s kitsch of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Music compilation [1976] and the opportunistic Reel Music [1982] collection, to offer but two examples). And then there was McCartney’s notorious outflanking in 1985 by Michael Jackson in the battle for control of the Lennon-McCartney songbook.³ But the Beatles and their financial team clearly learned from these early missteps and by the early 1990s had adopted a measured approach to their product, understanding implicitly that their most significant asset was the music itself. In spite of a spate of business blunders in their early and mid-period, they already possessed the most important commodity in their arsenal: ownership of the master recordings of their songs, which they have shrewdly stewarded across generations of consumers, while at the same time carefully guarding them through every legal means at their disposal. It is, in one very salient sense, the most significant aspect of their capacity for remaining invariably new: their signal control over their creative output, the recorded revenant of their art.

This collection addresses these and myriad other questions regarding the Beatles’ remarkable and endlessly regenerating “newness”—posited, it is worth noting, in the very same sociocultural moment in which the band’s unparalleled phenomenology blazes past the half-century mark. As an evolving art object, the Beatles have been the subject of critical inquiry for nearly five decades. The band’s historians often credit Wilfred Mellers’ Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973) as the inaugural entry in the canon of Beatles scholarship. While music bookshelves are littered with a wide range of biographical and discographical works, top-drawer critical and academic works devoted to the band have been few and far between. In terms of musicology and textual analysis, the gold standard is marked by Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (1994), Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (1988), and Walter Everett’s prodigious two-volume study, The Beatles as Musicians (1999, 2001). Thanks to significant strides in establishing primary scholarship through the work, most notably, of Mark Lewisohn, Beatles scholarship has enjoyed a remarkable trajectory in the new century. Anthologies such as Ian Inglis’s The Beatles, Popular Music, and Society (2000) and Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis’s Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (2006) afford readers with general introductions to the hermeneutic possibilities of Beatles study, while collections such as Russell Reising’s “Every Sound There Is”: The Beatles’ Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll (2002) and Olivier Julien’s Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (2008) provide a vital bedrock for close readings of the band’s Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band albums. Yet as these anthologies demonstrate, the time is right for engaging with the Beatles in a truly interdisciplinary nature as befits the critical fashion of our age.

In this vein, the present volume’s contributors operate from a variety of critical vantage points, by turns exploring the band’s impact upon such larger issues as history, artistry, fandom and education. It is worth noting that the present collection deliberately draws upon The Ed Sullivan Show as a key cultural touchstone in the making of the Beatles as a global phenomenon beyond Great Britain. Indeed, the Beatles’ phenomenal success during and after their astonishing American debut in February 1964 made it possible for the group’s mass exportation across the world, particularly given the size and impact of the US spotlight upon virtually any cultural explosion—whether it be the Beatles, or Star Wars, or Beanie Babies, or Harry Potter, or, well, you name it. This was especially true in the early 1960s, when the American marketplace was riveted by unparalleled disposable income and population growth in the wake of the postwar boom years. The present collection’s seeming Western centricity is clearly valuable in terms of addressing the enduring impact of the early days of American Beatlemania upon our collective understanding of the Beatles’ original emergence as a pop-music export—as leading the charge of the mid-1960s British Invasion. Yet at the same time, our contributors are careful to recognize the more global concerns associated with the band’s phenomenology, especially in terms of their chief songwriters’ nostalgia for exploring (and exploiting) their Englishness and their own childhood memories of the British postwar era, as well as considerable attention to Harrison’s overt attempts to temper the group’s sound and aesthetic via Eastern music and philosophy. In this way, this collection offers a knowing reminder that the Beatles, quite literally, no longer occupy any set cultural space or time. In a very real and abiding sense, they belong to everybody, everywhere, all of the time.

In the anthology’s first subdivision, entitled “The Beatles in/as History,” Matthew Schneider recontextualizes the band within the bounds of British sociocultural history in his essay “‘Getting Better’: The Beatles and the Angry Young Men.” In his innovative reading of the band’s output, Schneider sees the Beatles as working within the tradition established by the Angry Young Men movement in Great Britain in the mid-1950s. For Schneider, the movement’s influence is at the core of the group’s signal shift from “cheery pop stars to socially conscious rock poets.” Drawing upon a host of exemplars across the band’s corpus, Schneider reveals the ways in which the Beatles increasingly deployed the tone and style of satire and other literary motifs emblematic of the “angry decade” of the 1950s during the bandmates’ formative years.

In a similar vein, Kathryn Cox’s “English Gardens, Mystery Trips, and Songs Your Mother Should Know: The Beatles and British Nostalgia in 1967” addresses the group’s influence upon, and reaction to, British nostalgic impulses in the mid-1960s. Drawing upon the insights of such theorists as Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Svetlana Boym, Cox demonstrates how the universe of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour is “not only a world of modernizing psychedelia, but also a world deeply rooted in nostalgia.” Through her readings of the group’s work, Cox affords readers a knowing understanding of the Beatles as rewriting the reality of the postwar world of their forebears to shift toward a created world that “reveled in the mythology and memory of World War II and the postwar dream.” The first subdivision is rounded out by Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith’s “Blackbird Singing: Paul McCartney’s Romance of Racial Harmony and Post-Racial America,” which problematizes the songwriter’s ongoing sentimentalized and facile perspective on US race relations. For Kapurch and Smith, McCartney offers a Romantic vision of racial harmony in such songs as the classic “Blackbird” and later solo hits such as “Ebony and Ivory” and “Say Say Say.” As Kapurch and Smith observe, this “optimistic outlook is definitional to the concept of ‘post-racial’ attitudes in America and is especially problematic because it obscures recognition of ongoing political, social, and economic inequalities and injustice experienced by people of color.” In particular, Kapurch and Smith demonstrate the manner in which McCartney’s oversimplified perspective “exposes the persistence of post-racial attitudes in US audiences, white Baby Boomers in particular, who want to believe the gains of the Civil Rights movement have been successful.”

In the anthology’s second subdivision, entitled “Artistry and the Beatles,” contributors examine the ways in which the Beatles’ artistry impacted and influenced other artists, as well as the manner in which it shifted across their careers both as bandmates and later as solo artists. In “Beatle Country: A Bluegrass ‘Concept Album’ from 1966,” Laura Turner takes particular issue with an album of Beatles cover songs by the Charles River Valley Boys, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based bluegrass revivalist band. With Beatles songs recast in a bluegrass mode, Beatle Country highlights a number of key questions about the Beatles’ own role in the burgeoning folk movement, as well as the ways in which Ivy League-educated, Massachusetts folk-revival musicians chose to rework Beatles songs with a sound originating largely from southern Appalachia. For Turner, Beatle Country offers a revealing new lens for understanding the Beatles’ rapid rise to fame, especially within the context of Lennon’s notorious religious statements that drove waves of anti-Beatles sentiment across the USA, especially in the American South. In a new reading of the Beatles’ 1967 masterwork, Gabriel Lubell’s “Spatial Counterpoint and the Impossible Experience of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” draws upon the recently remastered mono version of the album in his exploration of its sonic intricacies and their relation with spatial perception. For Lubell, the “musical/spatial content of each song acts in counterpoint against the structure, lyrical content, and presentation of the album as a whole,” thus resulting in a “confusing sonic geography that thrives on the often-paradoxical nature of such interactions.” In this unique study of the album, Lubell highlights the fashion in which Sgt. Pepper establishes “an experiential parade” that capitalizes on the listener’s imagination as a means of creating a “quasi-psychedelic experience.”

In “Blue Jay Way: The Imagery of Pure Consciousness in Select Beatles Songs,” Gayatri Devi explores the group’s evolving artistry through an examination of the interplay between the lyrical and aural imagery in Beatles songs engaging with the natural world. For Devi, “the auditory imagery, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Making It New with the Beatles
• 1. The Beatles in/as History
• 2. Artistry and the Beatles
• 3. Fandom and the Beatles
• 4. Teaching and Writing the Beatles
• Backmatter