The Eternal Beatles (How did the group develop over the span of their career) - Essay Example

The Eternal Beatles The Beatles, considered by many to be popular music’s most historically important band, continues to evoke intrigue and fascination from a social point of view while their music, even today, appeals to people of all ages more than 30 years after their last album was released. The Beatles were the embodiment of the 1960’s. They began their career as one type of band and ended as quite another altogether. This is the theme of their development, how they transformed from seemingly carefree suit and tie wearing lads who created innocuous, relatively simple songs to counter-culture icons widely perceived as leaders of a societal revolution. For America, the Beatles could not have emerged at a better time. The Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, served to effectively end the period of deep and seemingly endless mourning the country experienced following John F. Kennedy’s assassination the previous November. Since then, the country and the world has never been quite the same. The Beatles’ influence directly affected music, art, fashion, philosophy and culture from that time throughout the remainder of 1960’s and the band remains iconic still today. The February Ed Sullivan Show attracted 73 million viewers, 60 per cent of all American viewers, the largest ever television audience. That same month, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ became the Beatles’ first record to make it to number one on the U.S. singles chart and by the next month the ‘Fab Four’ held the top five spots and six of the top ten positions in Canada.1 Their first national tour in the U.S. during August and September that same year, they “performed before more people than any other artists in the history of American pop music including Elvis Presley.”2 In 1964, Americans would spend more than $50 million on sales of Beatle-related merchandise as estimated by The Wall Street Journal.3 The Beatles did not reinvent music, they merely drew from sounds and styles that were currently popular in the United States. Based on this perspective, the Beatles’ renowned fame in the United States was built around their capability to reconstruct accessible, widely recognized American musical traditions. “Rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly), soul (Arthur Alexander, Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson), early Motown (Marvin Gaye, the Miracles), and the pop compositions of Goffin and King were the principal components of a music that was ‘saturated with inter-textuality.”4 All four members originally played in ‘skiffle’ bands, a predominantly British phenomenon which utilized combinations of North American jazz, blues and folk traditions. By 1966, the Beatles were developing their music into more of a rhythmic style rather composing melodies that simply rhymed words to the background of a steady beat. In addition, rather than writing lyrics that generally expressed the sentiments of love-struck teenagers, they were also writing an ever-increasing amount of songs that told stories. They were beginning to extract upon music popular in Britain at the time and away from American influences. The more they developed as musicians and songwriters, the less they tried to emulate Beach Boys type harmonizing as they continued to integrate the fundamentals of rock’n’roll into their music.5 The Rubber Soul album (1965) is hardly considered the Beatles’ best work but it was a distinct turning point in their music style. “It signaled their intention to make more grown-up music.”6 With the release of Revolver in 1966, the Beatles had fully made the transition from being the voice of teenagers’ hormone induced emotions to the voice of a generation that changed the political, social and moral conscience of many societies throughout the world to the great benefit of many generations to come. In, Revolver, the Beatles exhibit a legitimate aptitude for invoking thought, producing unique characters and describing vivid circumstances by the suggestion of cleverly inserted images, a perfect example being “Eleanor Rigby,’ a Bronte novel in miniature, unrecognizable as a rock number.”7 The majority of the album’s songs are melodious and meticulously arranged and offer “unusual imagery, surprising allusions, and verbal riddles in its songs such as ‘For No One,’ ‘She Said, She Said,’ ‘And Your Bird Can Sing,’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ It (Revolver) invited not only a rock listening, but a literary listening.”8 One of the innovative album’s biggest hits, the ‘Yellow Submarine,’ reaches far beyond the normal parameters of popular music. Sgt. Pepper’s (1967) is widely considered, specifically by rock musicians of the time, to have transformed the music world. It was developed principally from the melodies and metaphors of the Victorian Music Hall style favored by the working class. The Beatles developed the material with a literary awareness. Two songs from Sgt. Pepper that clearly display the Beatles’ sense of innovation also display touches of irony in selections such as ‘When Im 64’ and ‘Lovely Rita’ while still effectively invoking the Music Hall style. The melodramatic ‘Shes Leaving Home’ represents the widening gap between parents and their children, a universal reality of the mid-to-late 1960’s in a song where “the string arrangement is closely related to the meaning of the text.”9 The practice of depicting words through musical imagery, “goes back to at least the Renaissance but is relatively uncommon in rock music. Indeed, the corny, melodic sentimentalism of the antique Music Hall repertoire was a rich vein for the group, and they were never to abandon it.”10 While the Beatles continued to generate heavier rock songs such as ‘Come Together’ and ‘Revolution’ and they engaged in some musical experiments on the White Album that were ‘something completely different’,11 “the influences that shaped their major, later output, most of the music for which they are best known, emerges from an antique pop style.”12 The Beatles were more than just inquisitive regarding all styles of music as they constantly reinvented their own works by introducing creative influences from numerous cultures, most notably Indian. This broad experimentation is one of many features of their work that separates them from their colleagues’ music. Experimentations and deviations from the norm was evident in most of the later Beatles songs, for example, ‘Your Mother Should Know,’ ‘All You Need Is Love,’ ‘Penny Lane,’ ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’ ‘Maxwells Silver Hammer,’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ and many more including the entire ‘B’ side of Abbey Road (1969). The enormous influence that the Beatles had on popular music and culture was and still is historically profound. They introduced the concept album and helped to bring about personal expressions into a music field that generally used a prescribed concept for song writing. The band’s evolving persona, from the original 1964 ‘Beatlemania’ days through the end of the decade, either guided or mirrored the period’s changes within society. The Beatles remained the focal point of this phenomenon, if not ahead of it, as long as they existed. The Beatles’ heritage is monumental and they are universally known to be the most influential musical artists of the last century, arguably of all time. This is because the Beatles encouraged an entire generation to imagine itself differently. Footnotes 1 Beatles #1 hits the weeks of 1964: I Want to Hold Your Hand Feb 1 – March 14; She Loves You March 21 – 28; Cant Buy Me Love April 1 – May 2; A Hard Days Night Aug. 1 – 8; I Feel Fine Dec. 26. “Hot 100 number-one hits of 1964 (USA).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. March 11, 2006. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 9, 2006 . 2 Inglis, Ian. “The Beatles are Coming!” Popular Music and Society. Vol. 24, 2000. 3 Ibid. 4 Weinstein, Donna. “The History of Rock’s Past Through Rock Covers.” Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman (Eds.). London: Blackwell, 1998, p. 141. 5 Freund, Charles Paul. “Still Fab: The Beatles and their Timeless Influence.” Reason Magazine. June 1, 2001. 6 Young, Jon. “This Bird has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribune to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul.” Mother Jones Magazine. January/February 2006. 7 Freund, (2001). 8 Ibid. 9 Thurmaier, David. “The Beatles as Musical Experimentalist.” Phi Kappa Phi Journal. Sprint 2003. 10 Ibid. 11 ‘And now for something completely different’ was an often used phrase in the British television series ‘Monty Pythons Flying Circus’ that ran in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. 12 Freund, (2001). Works Cited Freund, Charles Paul. “Still Fab: The Beatles and their Timeless Influence.” Reason Magazine. June 1, 2001. “Hot 100 number-one hits of 1964 (USA).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. March 11, 2006. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 9, 2006 . Inglis, Ian. “The Beatles are Coming!” Popular Music and Society. Vol. 24, 2000. Thurmaier, David. “The Beatles as Musical Experimentalist.” Phi Kappa Phi Journal. Sprint 2003. Weinstein, Donna. “The History of Rock’s Past Through Rock Covers.” Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman (Eds.). London: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 137-51. Young, Jon. “This Bird has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribune to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul.” Mother Jones Magazine. January/February 2006. Read More