Beatlemania over the World - Essay Example

The idea of what was ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ in society was greatly altered in a relatively short period and like no other time in at least 100 years. Because of the art and popular music of the 1960s, people today have a higher level of tolerance for alternative forms of lifestyles and artworks. The most influential musical artists of this or any generation were without question the 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 1960s. 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. 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 which displays the Beatles’ sense of innovation also displays touches of irony in selections such as ‘When I'm 64’ and ‘Lovely Rita’ while still effectively invoking the Music Hall style. The melodramatic ‘She's Leaving Home’ represents the widening gap between parents and their children, a universal reality of the mid-to-late 1960s in a song where “the string arrangement is closely related to the meaning of the text” (Thurmaier, 2003).

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” (Thurmaier, 2003). 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’, “the influences that shaped their major, later output, most of the music for which they are best known, emerges from an antique pop style”¬ (Freund, 2001).

For America, the Beatles could not have emerged at a better time. The Beatle's 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 have never been quite the same. The Beatles’ influence directly affected music, art, fashion, philosophy, and culture from that time throughout the remainder of the 1960s and the band remains iconic still today. 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 songwriting. 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.