AUTHENTICITY (IN REGARD TO MUSIC) - Essay Example

al group The Beatles, continuously alluded to his own inner struggles with authenticity from the perspective of being an industrial product within the interview recounted in Lennon Remembers. According to Lennon, the music of the Beatles’ was third-person music created to meet the demands of Beatlemania and as such was not authentic. In contrast, the music found on Plastic Ono Band, Lennon’s first album after the Beatles’ break-up, was primarily written in the first-person which reflects Lennon himself and the life of Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Lennon said in his interview, “I always wrote about me and didn’t really enjoy writing third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things. I like first-person music” (Wenner 9). Lennon was not able to reflect his own personal “self” within Beatles’ music. Instead, it was his “role” that was reflected in Beatles’ music. “Roles are not natural but artificial and are always being affected by the institution (or group) which provides them” (Sherwood, The role & the social construction of individuality, online).

Therefore, Lennon realized that his position within the Beatles, as successful as they were, was artificial and was heavily affected by the business people who consumed the products, a much bigger and therefore more powerful institution than the Beatles. Ritzer’s concept of McDonaldization applies as an explanation of the process of industrialization that took place with the Beatles’ music. Among the four characteristics enumerated, “Calculability” and “Predictability” were of greatest impact upon the Beatles.

As we saw in the short documentaries in class, the Beatles never stopped working whether they were in a hotel room or in a car on their way to perform their music. Camera men always followed every move the Beatles made, affording them with little privacy and no room for individuality. The Beatles were so powerful in that era that Beatlemaniacs were continuously