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New The Journal of Beatles Studies launches to establish The Beatles as object of academic research

Dr Holly Tessler , programme lead for the University of Liverpool’s new The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage MA , is launching The Journal of Beatles Studies – a brand new open access journal published by Liverpool University Press .

The Journal of Beatles Studies is the first journal to establish The Beatles as an object of academic research, and will publish original, rigorously researched essays and notes, as well as book and media reviews.

It establishes a scholarly focal point for critique, dialogue and exchange on the nature, scope and value of The Beatles as an object of academic enquiry and seeks to examine and assess the continued economic value and cultural values generated by and around The Beatles, for policy makers, creative industries and consumers. The journal also seeks to approach The Beatles as a prism for accessing insight into wider historical, social and cultural issues.

Co-edited by Dr Holly Tessler and Paul Long at Monash University, the journal will be published twice a year, with the inaugural issue being in September 2022. The journal is sponsored by the University of Liverpool library.

Dr Holly Tessler and Paul Long said: “We are really excited to launch The Journal of Beatles Studies.

“We intend the journal to be a hub for research, discourse and debate about the Beatles, with an emphasis on new ideas and emerging perspectives.

“Sitting alongside the University of Liverpool’s new MA degree, The Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage, as well as its new Yoko Ono Lennon Centre , The Journal of Beatles Studies is another exciting new space for the academic and cultural study of the Beatles that they and their legacy so richly deserve.

It is sometimes daunting to consider how interest in the Beatles continues unabated, nurtured by new books, films and of course the endurance of the band’s music itself and its presence across radio, film, television and the digital sphere.

“Equally prodigious is the range of scholarly attention to the meaning of the Beatles and responses to their cultural legacy and continued creative inspiration which is truly global in its reach.

“A desire to map and make sense of this field of production prompts the founding of The Journal of Beatles Studies which provides an international, inclusive, interdisciplinary focal point for ideas, exchange and quality research.”

Clare Hooper, Head of Journals at Liverpool University Press said: “We are really excited to be launching The Journal of Beatles Studies.

“The journal will be an extremely valuable resource for all scholars with an interest in the subject and it’s fitting that the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of the Beatles will begin life in Liverpool.”

For more information please visit:   www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/r/beatles   

More World’s only Masters in The Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage launched

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The Beatles and Globalization in the Sixties

This paper discusses the way The Beatles contributed to changes in youth culture worldwide in the 1960s. It deals with the role of hippy counterculture (Mariska van Schijndel) and the Vietnam War (Rosalie Vaarten), the influence of technological developments and media after World War II (Karlijn Raaijmakers), the role of language (Aniek van den Brandt) and the use of music and sounds from different cultures (Naomi Dominicus). The paper shows that globalization is not just a phenomenon of the Internet Age, but also took place long before the Internet even existed.

Introduction

Globalization is a ‘catchword’ to refer to a certain historical phase in which interconnectedness and mobility acquired unexperienced global scale levels (Wang et al., 2013: 1). These historical phases, such as the colonial era and the post-Cold War era, are times of ‘deepened globalization’ which lead to the creation of a new  world order (Wang et al., 2013: 2). As a result, we are now living in a world greatly defined by “ intensified global flows, both in volume and in speed, of people, goods, capital and symbolic social, political and cultural objects including language and other semiotic sources ” (Wang et al., 2013: 2). Social scientists often refer to globalization as something that has – next to terrorism – dominated the world since the last decades of the twentieth century (Wallerstein, 2004: 1). By stating this, social scientists imply that globalization is a new phenomenon. Many scientists study globalization in the context of the Internet Age, but in reality globalization is something which also took place long before the Internet emerged (Wang, 2013: 1). Many popular singers of the 21st century enjoy their worldwide popularity for a great part thanks to the internet. Through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other social media, they can easily have an influence on people around the world.               

In the 1960s, The Beatles became extremely popular around the globe, and they had a great influence on youth culture, way before the internet was invented. How did The Beatles contribute so greatly to changes in youth culture worldwide in the 1960s?                                                                                            

This paper discusses social, cultural, political, linguistic and technological factors that created ‘global patterns’ of cultural and social behaviour and that made it possible for The Beatles to contribute to changes in youth cultures around the globe in the 1960s. We will look at the social and cultural upheaval of the hippie counterculture, the political upheaval during the Vietnam War, the technological and media developments after World War II, language, and the use of music and sounds from various cultures around the world.

Trendsetters in the Hippie Counterculture

‘Counter’ by definition is an opposition or defence against something. A counterculture is the result of a reaction to a certain culture with a contradictory opinion or action. Counterculture is “ the tradition of breaking with tradition ’’ or “ crashing through the conventions of the present ’’ in order to ‘ ’open a window onto that deeper dimension (…) of the truly new in human expression and endeavour ’’ (Goffman and Joy, 2004: 17). In a counterculture, the participants exchange controversial ideas and innovations, pushing themselves into a new territory in which they hope others will follow (Goffman and Joy, 2004: 10). The focus of a counterculture is not the political, but the ‘ ’power of ideas, images, and artistic expression ’’ (Goffman and Joy, 2004: 10). In examinations of radical youth culture of the 1960's and 1970's reference is often to a ‘hippie counterculture’, which insists that ‘hippies’ and ‘counterculture’ have the same definition (Starr, 1985: 239). Though this is not the case, as hippies were a subgroup within counterculture.    

Under the influence of protest movements of students and young people, the hippie movement developed in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. During this period, international connections broadened and intensified, which resulted in the fact that this movement and its ideas could quickly spread throughout the United States as well as the rest of the world, mainly to Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Besides, the background of Western European countries was similar to the United States, which also resulted in young people participating in protest movements and feeling attracted to the ideas and innovations of the hippie culture (Oved, 2012: 4).

In this counterculture, hippies rejected materialism, competitiveness, militarism, rationality, and Western religions and creeds (Becker, 2007: 24). Furthermore, they opposed to all authority, from school rules and parental authority to the formalities of the courts (Falk and Falk, 2005: 188). Instead of following the mainstream materialist society, which they called the ‘plastic society’, hippies tried to create their own alternative society with alternative values and way of life (63). Their ideal community was based on peace, equality, harmony, sexual liberation, drug use, and most importantly: love (Becker, 2007: 24-25).                       

These cultural shifts created a generation gap between the youth of the 1960s and their parents. The teenagers regarded the materialist society as ‘the hallmarks of their parents’ generation’ (Misiroglu, 2015: 113). Therefore, Jerry Rubin’s quote ‘ ’Don’t trust anyone over thirty ’’ became famous among the youth. The Beatles managed to participate  in the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s by capturing the spirit of the hippie counterculture.

Just ‘ordinary’ boys

The Beatles were the proof for hippies that society does not require any authority in order to be successful. All four were just young ‘ordinary’ boys from England’s hinterlands, of whom none had an easy youth. Lennon’s and Starr’s parents divorced when they were young, McCartney’s mother died when he was only 14 years old, and Harrison grew up in a house which had an outdoor toilet and heat from a single coal fire (Harrison, 1980: 21). Lennon’s relationship with his parents after the divorce was bad: his father was out of sight for the next twenty years and Lennon ended up living with his aunt and uncle instead of his mother (Lennon, 2005: 11). Since the age of twelve, Starr was not able to go back to school as he had to spend too much time in hospitals because of health issues. Their background proves that they were just like anyone else, but still were able to achieve huge successes. Besides, as mentioned above, hippies rejected all forms of authority. Their background showed them that society does not need school rules or parental authority in order to achieve something big in life. Also, the fact that ‘ordinary’ boys had so much success by creating their own songs without any help of the music industry, gave young people around the world hope and optimism for their future (Misiroglu, 2015: 67).

Lyrics capturing the ‘hippie spirit’

The Beatles wrote songs which captured the ideals of the hippie movement. In their song All You Need Is Love , they criticize the material culture by implying that you do not need any money, authority, or traditional rules; the only thing that is important, is love. From then on, ‘love’ became “ the catchword of the hippie culture in the 1960s ” (Falk and Falk, 2005: 188) and “ the central motif of Hippie immanent philosophy ” including an “ all-embracing love for mankind ” (Hall, 1986: 181).

The hippies wanted to reach sexual liberation by spreading the message of love. Therefore, they often referred to the sentence “ make love, not war ” (Falk and Falk, 2005: 188). Again, The Beatles captured this dream in their lyrics. The phrases ‘ ’Why don’t we do it on the road? / No one will be watching us / Why don’t why do it on the road? ’’ ( Why Don't We Do it in the Road? ) and ‘ ’She’s a big teaser / She only played one night stands ’’ ( Day Tripper )   directly refer to the ideal of sexual liberation of the 1960s.

In additionto sexual liberation, the hippie community was also based on drug use, as ‘ ’love were drugs of all kinds ’’ and ‘’ getting high was the symbol for final liberation’’ (Falk and Falk, 2005: 188). The Beatles often referred to this feature of the hippie community in their lyrics, for example in their songs With A Little Help From My Friends and Mystery Tour : ''I get by with a little help from my friends / I get high with a little help of my friends'', '''Roll up / And that's an invitation  Roll up for the mystery tour''  . Not only in their lyrics they encouraged drug use, but also in their own behaviour. In an interview for the Independent Television News in 1967, the newscaster asked Paul McCartney if he had ever taken LSD, to which his answer wass he did about four times. Still McCartney did not think he encouraged his fans to take drugs by telling the truth, because he believed ‘ ’that is up to the newspapers, to you, the television ’’. He even stated that he did not want to spread the word about drugs. Even though McCartney was right about the impact of media on society, The Beatles were aware of their huge impact on youth. John Lennon even stated in an interview with the London Evening Standard in 1966 that The Beatles are ‘ ’more popular than Jesus ’’ and therefore have a greater influence on the youth than Christianity.     

The young people with the same 'hippie spirit' came together at concerts and music festivals. These concerts and festivals created the sense of ‘togetherness’ among hippies in their own alternative community. They functioned as gathering points and created ‘ ’a feeling of belonging to a widespread movement ’’ (Oved, 2012: 61). The Beatles were trendsetters in this, as they provided the first United States tour (Oved, 2012: 60).

The Beatles’ lyrical content, behaviour, drug use, and world tours made them the ‘ ’trendsetters in everything, from clothing to hairstyles to recreational drug use ’’ (Misiroglu, 2015: 68). Parents feared that The Beatles had a bad influence on their children ‘ ’with their long hair and loud music’’ , and some parents even considered the four members dangerous (Davies, 2014).

Youth Rebellion during the Vietnam War 

The Vietnam War was a war during which the communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong fought against the South of the country, which was supported by the United States. In 1973, the USA stopped supporting South Vietnam and as a result the South collapsed in 1975. The communist army took control of Saigon and ended up winning the war. Vietnam became a united, communist nation state. The Vietnam War led to global protests and rebellion, especially among the youth. This political upheaval caused by the war is something that The Beatles stimulated and played a part in as well.

Influence of the television on the Anti-War Movement

In the 1960’s, around the time of the outbreak of the war, television was introduced in many American and European households. The introduction of this new medium caused drastic changes and revolutions (Emerald Group Publishing, 2004). Through this new medium, people could suddenly follow everything that was happening all over the world. Many see the television as “ one of the most important phenomena ” in current cultural globalization (Kuruoğlu, 2004: 2). Also, it was an important cause for American citizens – but also for people in other places in the world – to get involved in the Vietnam War, even though it was taking place in a country almost 9,000 miles away from the United States. 

The Vietnam War was connected to globalization because television allowed people from all over the world to see the horrific things that were happening in Vietnam from their homes. Due to the progress that globalization made with the invention of the television, not only the population of Vietnam and the American veterans, but also the rest of the world became concerned about the war and formed opinions about it.

This global involvement led to rebellions and protests all over the world, especially by the ‘protest generation’ (Giugni, 2004: 180), which was the youth of the 1960’s. The United States were obviously violating the human rights of the Vietnamese people, but also their own soldiers were suffering in Vietnam. Many soldiers died and the ones who did come home often had to deal with  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or disabilities. Many people objected to these violations and the horrific images they saw on their television, and started protesting against the Vietnam War: 1968 became a very turbulent year (Lamb, 2016: 333).

The Beatles’ popularity and their political opinions

Liverpool was a centre of popular culture in the 1960’s. Not only The Beatles, but also many other pop groups had their home in Liverpool, as well as the Liverpool Poets, a group of Poets influenced by the hippie culture. The hippie culture ‘ ’featured communal living, drug use and so on; The Vietnam War, racial unrest and the pressure to adapt to pre-established norms frustrated them…The Liverpool Poets wrote extensively on the subject of love, war and peace ” (Li, 2014: 69). While the antiwar demonstrations were going on globally, The Beatles wrote songs in which they expressed their opinion on the war and talked about it in interviews: “ The Beatles had done a fairly good job following Epstein’s advice to not answer questions about American politics, but they could resist no longer. They came out against the Vietnam War at a press conference hours before their final New York concert ” (Leonard, 2014).

  ‘Make Love, not War’

The Beatles leaned, as discussed in chapter 1, strongly towards the hippie ideology of ‘make love, not war’. The myth of worldwide love, that was alive in the 1960’s, “ centered in some way around the Beatles and connected with what we would now call youth culture or the counterculture ” (Burns, 2000). Back then there was a real need for such a ‘love myth’ in America to work against the ugly realities of the Vietnam War, and people began to see The Beatles as the face of this idea. Many of their songs aligned with this ideal of love and peace from the hippies, like All You Need Is Love , or Revolution in 1968 (Burns, 2000). This song was written by John Lennon and came out in the United States on August 26, 1968, on the first day of “ the frightening climax to a year of violence ” (Platoff, 2005: 244). This climax had been triggered by horrific images of Chicago police beating up anti-war protesters, delegates and news reporters that, one night, were shown on television. It led to mass protests and violence for days on end. Lennon later stated that he set the song out at this time on purpose, to give his opinion about revolution. Also, he consciously made the choice to release the song “ as a single: as a statement of The Beatles’ position on Vietnam and The Beatles’ position on revolution ” (Platoff, 2005: 246). However, Lennon stated this twelve years later in an interview and nothing in the lyrics verifies that the song is really about the Vietnam War, so this was probably not the case. Still it is pretty obvious that people who heard the song automatically made this connection, especially keeping in mind the timing of the release. Also, it is understandable when you look at the lyrics:

You say you want a revolution,

Well, you know

We all want to change the world.

You tell me that it’s evolution,

But when you talk about destruction,

Don’t you know that you can count me out.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate,

All I can tell you is brother you have to wait.

The Beatles have never released a song that was clearly about the Vietnam War, although some of their songs from the time seemed to fit perfectly with the topic. Another example of such a song is Strawberry Fields Forever , which came out in 1967, again written by John Lennon. The song is meant to be an “ expression of life’s absurdity ”, which is very fitting for the troubled times that the world was going through. “ John Lennon shows no bitterness or anger at the fact that “nothing is real” … though he does seem to be critical of people who don’t acknowledge the absurdity of reality, evident in the lines, “Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see” ‘ ’ (McClary, 2000: 10). This could be interpreted as him believing people shouldn’t close their eyes when it comes to war; as if he thought it had to be acknowledged how wrong and absurd everything about it was. Because they were so popular all over the world, their message reached lots of people. It is therefore likely that songs like these have been a stimulating factor in the anti-war movements, or at least helped shape many people’s opinions about the war.

Technological developments after World War II

When World War II ended in 1945, society got back into a stage of recovery, slowly getting back into an upwards spiral again. The destruction that the war left was being fixed, which made production and employment rates rise (Eichengreen, 2007: 59). People were able to celebrate their freedom again. During the war, technology had developed a lot, because it was necessary to make better weapons, tanks, etcetera (56). After the war, these technological inventions continued, but for different purposes (56). Instead of weapons and tanks, people invented LP’s and Compact Cassettes, which will be discussed below. These new forms of ‘cultural technology’ opened up a lot of doors for other cultural developments, such as theatre and music.                                                  

Globalization got a huge boost, because these developments made it possible to, as everyone does on social media nowadays, ‘share’ a lot more. Culture was able to spread faster over the entire world, which made it easier for artists, such as musicians, to get the recognition they wanted.            

This brings us back to our main topic: The Beatles and their influence on youth culture. How did post-war technologies make it possible for The Beatles to grow their fan base so much that nowadays people still recognize their influence?

Commercial television

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, near the end of World War II, most television programming was stopped for some time (Abramson, 1987: 3). It was only in 1946 that these television stations went back on the air (18). But now, something had changed; television was used more and more for cultural purposes instead of war purposes, such as propaganda. The popularity of the TV increased really fast in many countries and in the sixties, most families owned a television (24).               

 The Beatles benefited from the rise in popularity of television by getting promoted on television and doing live performances. They appeared on the American television show The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time in 1963 (Frontani, 2007: 31). This was a very big event which drew a lot of attention from fans, which were mainly young women and teenage girls. 1963 was the year of their breakthrough and television obviously played a big part in this breakthrough, as they could now reach more people in different countries all over the world. This is also an obvious example of the world becoming more global and having better communication channels, because of these technological inventions.                                                                          

After The Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show , everyone was very impressed, so much that they were asked to appear on various other television and performing shows (Frontani, 2007: 32). This increased their popularity all around the world. They also made several movies, one of them being A Hard Day’s Night , after their album with the same title (Frontani, 2007: 77). These were all very big steps on their way to fame.

From phonograph to LP record

When the phonograph was invented somewhere around the 1870’s, no one, including its inventor Thomas Edison, really saw its (commercial) potential (Tschmuck, 2006: 2). The phonograph ended without the actual practical applications being realized (Houston, 1888: 44). However, in 1887 an inventor called Berliner invented an improved version of the phonograph called the gramophone, which was the start of some great developments (Houston, 1888:4444-45).                                                                  

The music industry evolved slowly but surely and 60 years later, the LP record, also known as the long playing vinyl or gramophone record, was introduced, in 1947 (Eargle, 2003: 371). It would become the most popular form of consumer audio until the CD was introduced. 

The LP record is obviously an example of how new technologies increased globalization and made it easier for bands like The Beatles to become more famous around the world. Their first three LP’s made them very successful and known by many people. Time progressed and so did the quality of their LP’s, both in sound and in the music itself. They started doing fewer covers and more originals. Since most families had a record player in the house and the LP record had not been around for that long, many people bought The Beatles’ LP’s, which made them gain a large audience. After their 1965 LP record Rubber Soul topped the charts, they started ‘’taking over the world’’, from the United Kingdom all the way to Australia and America (Kurt, 1998: 9-10). Youth would almost beg their parents for ‘the next LP from The Beatles’. Their success was made possible through all these technologies.

The start of the digital revolution  

Two other steps in technology that had a big impact on the world were the Compact Cassette (also known as Music Cassette (MC)) and the Compact Disc (CD). The Compact Cassette arrived in the early 1960s, but it took some time for it to gain popularity (Tschmuck, 2006: 150). There was more interest in the CD when it got invented in 1979. It was described as the ‘child of the digital revolution’, which began in the early 1980s and it was a new step to the technologically developed society we live in now (Tschmuck, 2006: 151). After four years, the CD gained popularity and it became more clear that this digital revolution was actually starting.

The Beatles already split up before the CD arrived, but yet they hugely benefited from it. Almost everyone owned a CD player and bought CDs from The Beatles as they had better sound quality than the LPs and cassettes. The Compact Cassette has a comparable story with the LP record we discussed above. It created a more global world and made The Beatles able to share their work more with the public, since most people had a cassette player and used it for many years. This new technology made artists like The Beatles able to spread their music around the world really quick.      

Singing Songs in Other Languages than English

The Beatles sung most of their songs in English, but sometimes they added some elements of other languages in their songs as well. The song Michelle is known for the French sentence: ‘ ’Michelle, la belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble ’’ and in Sun King The Beatles added some Spanish, Portuguese and Italian words next to the English lyrics. The most famous non-English songs are the songs The Beatles translated into German in 1964. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ became ‘Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’ became ‘Sie Liebt Dich’. But why did The Beatles decide to sing songs in non-English? And did it actually take their career to a higher level?

The spread of the English language

If you think about it, it is not strange that The Beatles translated their songs in other languages. In the last century, the English language has become a worldwide language, but that certainly did not happen suddenly. Political, economic, social and cultural changes have affected the linguistic landscape in Europe in the 20th century. Through for example internationalisation and large scale-migration the use of English by non-native speakers of English has increased a lot. English music also stimulated the globalisation of the English language. The spread of English has been (and still is) a long-term development, so back in the 1960’s this had not gone as far is it has nowadays (Cenoz & Jessner, 2000: 1). Therefore, in the 1960’s, many people on the continent did not understand the English language very well. For many listeners, however, it is important to understand the lyrics of a song, because lyrics are an important form of communication with the audience. There is even a theory that claims that song writers tend to regress to a more basic form consciously to please the listeners, because a song that is easy to understand reaches a bigger audience than a song that is difficult to understand (Pettijohn II & Sacco Jr., 2009: 298). In other words: a song needs to be understandable, otherwise the listeners won’t be reached. So, to reach a bigger audience for their music, the producers of The Beatles thought it was important to put some international elements in their songs and to even translate some of them.

Language and identity  

Most researchers agree that language and identity are inseparable: ‘ ’Identity constructs and is constructed by language ’’ (Norton, 1997: 419). But the fact that many people speak the English language, does not mean they identify with it. Researcher J. House stated that ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) is a “ language for communication ” rather than a “ language for identification’’ (as cited in Canagarajah, 2006: 199). In other words, multilingual speakers will not feel a cultural affinity with the English language if it’s not their native language. But that does not mean cultural affinity is not important, on the contrary. House shows this with the example of how the revival of German folk music ( Schlager ) could be a reaction against the spread of English pop music; people do not just leave their native language behind and that can be seen in the music industry. Knowing that, we can say that translating Beatles songs has definitely had some influence in the spread of the fame of The Beatles around the world, because people identify earlier with songs that are sung in their native language.

As said, the two most famous non-English songs of The Beatles are original English songs, fully translated in German. The Beatles had an orientation on Germany from the beginning. They had some very early gigs in Hamburg, so Germany had met the phenomenon of ‘The Beatles’ already at an early stage of their career. But even though the German people already knew them and their songs, Odeon, the German branch of EMI (the parent company of the Beatles' record label, Parlophone) thought that The Beatles' records would sell better in Germany if they were sung in German.

Translating songs in that way is not a strange phenomenon. Back in the 1960’s many big artists and producers made German versions of their songs for the European market (Flippo, 2016). Even though The Beatles detested the idea of translating their songs in German, the project still went ahead. Two songs were translated: I Want To Hold Your Hand  and She Loves You . The translations, Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand and Sie Liebt Dich , were released in Germany in 1964. It is obvious that the songs hardly changed in content; it is just the language that has changed.

A wider public

The German songs did pretty well in Germany, so they surely helped to reach a big audience in Germany. ‘Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand’ and ‘Sie Liebt Dich’ a fifth and seventh place in the West German Media Control Singles Place (the German hit-parade). But, the original English version of 'She Loves You' reached first place in the German hit-parade. It even became The Beatles’ best-selling single worldwide. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ ended on the seventh place, just like the German version. So even though the German producers of The Beatles were sure that the songs would only sell if they were translated in the German language, in the end the English versions of the songs turned out to be just as or even more successful.

But, other than the translated German versions, which did well, ‘Michelle’, the song with the French elements, actually was extraordinarily successful in France and Belgium. In both countries, it reached first place in the national charts. It must be said though that ‘Michelle’ was an overall hit, so the success was not specific to countries with French as the main language. Michelle was also very successful in Britain itself and in other European countries. The song even won the Grammy Award for the Song of the year in 1967, so whether the French elements really had an impact on the song’s success in French-speaking countries, is very hard to say.

Did it work?

We can suppose The Beatles released records in different languages in order to achieve a wider public. The translating of songs had ‘globalization’ of The Beatles as a purpose. It is hard to say how much those non-English songs helped spreading the fame of The Beatles. Looking at the identification with songs, you could say that translating the songs definitely must have had some influence on the globalization of The Beatles. But the English songs were in general just as successful (or sometimes even more so) than the songs with elements of other languages. That does not mean the non-English songs did not have any influence at all. The effect of singing in German, was that for some people the message of the song became more clear, because English back than wasn’t as widespread as it is today. Next to that, the translated songs surely were valuable for a part of the non-English public, because they did – just as a lot of English songs – very well in the European hit charts. As the record producer of The Beatles, George Martin, later said about the German translations of The Beatles-songs: ‘‘ They (The Beatles) were right, actually, it wasn’t necessary for them to record in German, but they weren’t graceless, they did a good job’’ (Lewishon, 1988: 38).

More than just Popular Music

The youth culture of the sixties created a bridge between the growing group of students and the new possibilities in their spare time by using music. The joy the youth experienced in listening to music became the highly needed counterpart to their stressful school life. Hand in hand with this development went the rise of popular music and nightlife (Tillekens, 1998:293-294). Roy Shuker describes popular music as follows: “… it consists of a hybrid of musical traditions, styles, and influences, with the only common element being that the music is characterized by a strong rhythmical component, and generally, but not exclusively, relies on electronic amplification ” (Shuker, 2016:6). Popular music created an environment in which young people could meet each other and express their feelings in a whole new way. The freedom and responsibility the youth took by choosing music, clothing and where to meet prepared them in one way or another for their independent adulthood (Tillekens, 1998:294).

As part of the developments of youth culture in the sixties came The Beatles. The group started off playing popular music, which at the time was rock ‘n roll. With over 200 songs produced between the release of Love Me Do in 1962 and their disbanding in 1970, The Beatles played a significant role in the development of youth culture (Inglis, 2000:35). In order for their music to stay interesting they had to try something new once in a while and keep up with the time. As the rock ‘n roll period fades, so do the hard edges of their music. And together with the change of popular music goes a change within people; their rough edges also fade. How was it possible for their music to be so popular among youth around the whole world, and not only in Western countries in which people lived in similar cultures? 

Borrowing from different genres

The Beatles innovated new styles for their songs and developed together with their time and public (Inglish, 2000:40). They innovated these new styles by borrowing from different genres, but they never really moved from one genre to another; the group would always stick to their popular music. By using all these different genres in their songs they created a wider public around the world (Pedler, 2003:256). For instance, Yesterday ( 1965) was their first song to make use of classical music elements, even though it was not their first song to use orchestral strings. Gould says: “ The more traditional sound of strings allowed for a fresh appreciation of their talent as composers by listeners who were otherwise allergic to the din of drums and electric guitars. ” (Gould 2007: 278)

Indian sounds

In August 1967 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru, gave a series of lectures at the London Hilton about Transcendental Meditation. On the 24th of August, The Beatles, except Ringo Starr, attended the lecture and had a moment for themselves with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi afterwards. Inspired by his Eastern Philosophy they decided to participate in a meditation course by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, in February 1968. Starr and McCartney were the first to leave, with Lennon and Harrison following a few weeks later when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was accused of sexual misconduct. The Beatles’ had lost faith in him; this can be heard in the song Sexy Sadie (1968) in which ‘Sexy Sadie’ equals Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and they sing: “She made of fool of everyone. Sexy Sadie. However big you think you are. Sexy Sadie. ” Despite this incident, The Beatles’ stay in India gave them a lot of inspiration and resulted in one of their most productive periods as songwriters. They have said they wrote more songs than could fit one single album (Joe, 2009:1-4). Therefore, many of the songs on the album ‘The Beatles’, also known as The White Album’ , (1968) and some further songs were written during and/or about their course in Rishikesh. The album got mixed reviews when it was released. Some critics found its songs unimportant or discriminative, but others praised Lennon and McCartney for their song writing. Despite that the album got mixed reviews, it was the best sold double album at the time (Joe, 2008:5).

George Harrison in particular was very fond of the Indian styles of music, even before their trip to India. When Rubber Soul was released in 1965, the world was surprised by the second track Norwegian Wood, as it was the first popular song in which a sitar was used. A sitar is an Indian stringed instrument with a very unique and slightly psychedelic sound. As innovative as the sitar sounded, it was only used to back up the acoustic guitar. Although the song still had a traditional Western melody, it was inevitable that such experiments would be done more in popular music from now on. The Beatles’ next album Revolver  (1966) contained the song Love You To , which was George Harrison’s first song to be composed entirely on the sitar. One of the most complex songs in Harrison’s Indian-field is Within You Without You  (1967) in which Indian instruments – played by Indian musicians – as well as a Western string ensemble are playing. This song uses traditional Indian rhythmic patterns together with Western popular music. Besides the influences on their music, the Indian influences are also found in their lyrics. In My Sweet Lord  (1970) for example, Harrison mentions a few Indian Gods and movements (Guerrero, 2015:34-36).

Conclusion 

Globalization created new forms of social structures around the world. The transition from industrial society to a transnational networked society, meant that people became more and more interconnected with each other. This network society emerged from cultural, social, political and technological processes. In the same period, The Beatles became immensely popular around the world. 

In culture, a new global community – the hippie counterculture – emerged because of the intensified international connections and similar social backgrounds. The Beatles played a big role as trendsetters in the hippie counterculture movement of the 1960’s by including the ideals of the alternative culture in their songs and expressing these ideals through their behaviour and looks. In this way, they were able to contribute to changes in youth cultures.

The global political upheaval about the Vietnam War by the young protest generation – which the hippie counterculture movement was part of – greatly benefited from the introduction of the television and the fact that more and more households got this new medium in their homes. This made it possible for them to follow what was happening in Vietnam. Even though none of The Beatles’ music overtly refers to the Vietnam War, their messages in the songs fit perfectly with the ideology of the protest generation (‘Make love, not war’). Also, the singers were not afraid of expressing their political opinion every now and then. Because of their immense popularity worldwide, their lyrics and political opinions reached the youth around the world and could change the way they looked at the world around them.

After World War II, as a consequence of technological developments and television becoming more and more popular people could watch The Beatles from their homes. The Beatles also made use of other new technologies like LP’s and CD’s which were sold worldwide. By using these technologies, The Beatles were able to expand their (young) fan base around the world, and therefore were able to change the way they act and look at the world through their cultural and political messages.

In order to achieve an even wider public, The Beatles chose to release records in different languages. Even though the English songs were just as successful as the non-English songs in the European hit charts, it became easier for the public to understand The Beatles’ messages on the Vietnam War, drug use and other ideological messages. 

By looking at the sounds and types of music The Beatles chose, it explains why their music was interesting and different for countries all around the world and not just in Western countries. Popular music, which became and still is especially popular in Western countries, created an environment in which young people could meet each other and express themselves. By borrowing elements from different genres, especially Indian sounds, The Beatles’ were able to keep their music interesting for the public and created a wider public of interest beyond the West.

The discussed social, cultural, political and technological factors created ‘’global patterns’’ of cultural and social behaviour. In their own way, The Beatles contributed and made use of these factors, which made it possible for them to contribute to changes in youth cultures around the world in the 1960’s.

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Research Article

Who remembers the Beatles? The collective memory for popular music

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America, Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America

Roles Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – review & editing

Roles Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

• Stephen Spivack, 
• Sara Jordan Philibotte, 
• Nathaniel Hugo Spilka, 
• Ian Joseph Passman, 
• Pascal Wallisch

• Published: February 6, 2019
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066
• Reader Comments

How well do we remember popular music? To investigate how hit songs are recognized over time, we randomly selected number-one Billboard singles from the last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each song, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized it. Plotting the recognition proportion for each song as a function of the year during which it reached peak popularity resulted in three distinct phases in collective memory. The first phase is characterized by a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium; the second phase consists of a stable plateau during the 1960s to the 1990s; and the third phase, a further but more gradual drop-off during the 1940s and 1950s. More than half of recognition variability can be accounted for by self-selected exposure to each song as measured by its play count on Spotify. We conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena.

Citation: Spivack S, Philibotte SJ, Spilka NH, Passman IJ, Wallisch P (2019) Who remembers the Beatles? The collective memory for popular music. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0210066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066

Editor: Antonella Gasbarri, University of L'Aquila, ITALY

Received: March 2, 2018; Accepted: November 28, 2018; Published: February 6, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Spivack et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Data will be publicly available, but the details of this (URL, etc.) will only be clear upon acceptance.

Funding: This study was funded by the Deans Undergraduate Research Fund (DURF) at New York University. This funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study

Competing interests: No competing interests.

Introduction

Since the pioneering work of Ebbinghaus in 1885 [ 1 ], the study of individual memory has been a mainstay of cognitive psychology [ 2 , 3 ]—even during the darkest days of behaviorism [ 4 ]. In contrast, collective memory—what groups of people or entire cultures know—has received comparatively little scientific attention [ 5 , 6 ]. Yet, as exemplified by speculations about archetypes [ 7 ] and the collective consciousness [ 8 ], this question is of longstanding popular interest. An understanding of how cultures remember their past is of critical importance if we are to learn from history [ 9 ]. However, it is largely unknown how much history people remember.

Cognitive psychologists have begun to investigate this question in studies that probe collective memory for political leaders both in the United States [ 10 ] and in China [ 11 ]. Using a free recall paradigm, the results of these studies suggest the existence of a serial position effect [ 12 ] in collective memory, in which the recency portion shows a linear decline. We are not aware of existing literature that has investigated collective memory for other kinds of historical phenomena, such as popular music. Importantly, exposure to music is typically driven by personal interest; in other words, it is self-selective. Conversely, exposure to historical leaders is usually involuntary and often within academic settings, which could affect remembering over time [ 13 , 14 ]. Another key distinction is that of set size, or how many items participants are expected to remember. For historical leaders, this number is finite and relatively small; in the United States there have only been 45 presidents to date. In contrast, for popular music this space is vast and essentially infinite; even the number of top singles on the Billboard popular music charts alone is well in excess of one-thousand since 1940 [ 15 ], which we think could rule out the possibility of a primacy effect in collective memory.

Given these considerations, we hypothesized that there might be a “cultural horizon” beyond which once popular music is effectively forgotten. Should this horizon exist, we aimed to characterize the drop-off as either linear [ 16 ] or exponential [ 1 ]. Finally, we were curious to know whether there are certain “evergreen” songs that are remembered regardless of how long ago they were first popular, akin to flashbulb memories [ 17 ]. In this paper, we aimed to empirically address each of these questions.

We operationalized “popular music” as that which reached the number-one spot on the Billboard Top 100 between the years 1940 and 1957 and on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1958 to 2015 (we refer to both together as the Billboard henceforth). The Billboard is a record chart for the top singles in the United States and is the industry standard by which the popularity of contemporary music is measured. Rankings are published each week and are currently based on three components: record sales, radio airtime and online streaming [ 18 ]. We randomly selected two of the top songs from each year—for a total of 152 songs (see S1 Appendix for a list of the songs we used)—and presented them to participants via Audio-Technica ATH-M20x Professional Monitor Headphones using custom-built MATLAB (2016b) software (Mathworks, Natick, MA). Note that this sampling method is not weighed by time on chart and could be considered biased if this mattered, that is, if the time on chart was non-stationary over time. For instance, songs from the 1960s through 1980s stayed in the top spot, on average, for a much shorter time than in the 2000s. However, there is no empirical correlation between recognition proportion and length of time at the top of the charts in our sample, r (138) = -0.01, p = 0.94, so this is a fair sampling method. As a proxy for self-selected exposure to music, we recorded the play count for each song as it appeared on Spotify—a streaming service with the world’s largest collection of digital music, with over 140 million users [ 19 ]—as of October 8 th , 2017. We also recorded the number of covers and samples for each song as they appeared on whosampled.com—a comprehensive and publicly accessible database—as of June 18 th , 2018.

Participants and task

To satisfy statistical power needs in both psychology and neuroscience [ 20 ], we used a sufficiently large sample to address our research questions. Each participant ( n = 643) was presented with a random selection of seven out of the 152 songs and asked to listen to the selection and report whether they recognized it. Participants were also presented with 5-, 10- and 15-second excerpts deemed to be representative by a consensus panel of seven practicing musicians and professors of music theory and composition and often containing a highly recognizable “lick”—a unique and often repeated pattern of notes played by a single instrument—of each song. To control for the possibility of exposure effects on recognition, all songs and clips were presented in random order. Participants were recruited from the New York University student population for course credit as well as the greater New York metropolitan area, who were compensated for their time at $10 an hour. There were no meaningful differences in any of the measures reported in this manuscript between these two populations. Our sample consisted mostly of young participants, with a mean age of 21.3 years, a median age of 20 years and a standard deviation of 5.09 years. The majority (88%) of this sample was between the ages of 18 and 25, which we considered to be “millennials”. All experimental procedures were approved by the New York University Institutional Review Board, the University Committee on Activities Involving Human Subjects (UCAIHS). All participants provided their written informed consent prior to participating in the study.

Data analysis

630 participants (98% of the total sample) completed the entire study and were used in this analysis. As much of our data is nonlinear, we used Spearman’s rho [ 21 ] to quantify the strength of the relationship between any two variables, such as song recognition and play count. To confirm the validity of our song recognition assay, we used a pairwise t-test to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between recognition for songs compared to clips of 5-, 10- and 15-second durations. In some cases, a pairwise t-test was not appropriate. When comparing phases, the unit of analysis is a song. However, the samples are not independent and the n is not matched between phases, as they contain an unequal number of songs. Instead, to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between the parameters—such as recognition proportion—for each phase, we remained conservative and used a Mann-Whitney U test [ 22 ]. Finally, we performed a normalized multiple linear regression to account for recognition as a function of Spotify play counts, number of covers and number of samples per song. To guard against false positives and to compensate for multiple comparisons, we adopt a significance level of 0.01. This is adequate, as our study is sufficiently powered. We would like to emphasize that we used participants of all ages in the analysis that is presented here. When restricting the same analysis to millennials (aged 18–25, n = 564), we found that there is no meaningful difference in our results when compared to our entire participant pool—only minor numerical differences. This is probably due to the fact that our full sample overwhelmingly consisted of participants in that age range. Spotify’s application programming interface did not contain play count data for two of the 152 songs, so we did not include them in the analysis of Spotify playcounts. Similarly, whosampled.com did not contain data for 14 of these songs, so we did not include those in the analysis of covers and samples.

The main question of this paper is whether there is a cultural horizon for the collective memory for popular music. If such a horizon were to exist, we also wanted to know at what point in time it occurs and whether it is approached linearly or exponentially. To answer these questions, we calculated the proportion of participants who reported to recognize each song and plotted this proportion as a function of the year it reached the number-one spot on the Billboard ( Fig 1 ).

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• TIFF original image

Dots represent the proportion of participants who reported to recognize a given song from a given year. The red curve represents the convolved average proportion for a given year, integrating over 5 years. Magenta dots represent songs from Phase 1 (2001 to 2015), blue dots represent songs from Phase 2 (1960 to 2000) and black dots represent songs from Phase 3 (1940 to 1959). Dashed vertical lines are decade markers.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.g001

As assessed by Spearman’s rho, the proportion of participants who reported to recognize a given song increases with how recently that song occupied the number-one spot on the Billboard popular music charts, r s (150) = 0.62, p = 1.70e-17. This is not surprising and could be considered a manipulation check. As can be seen in Fig 1 , this trend is far from linear. Whereas the average recognition proportion across all songs and all years is 0.39, we observed three distinct phases in collective memory. Phase 1: recognition was high but decreased steeply and linearly from 2015 until the turn of the millennium. Phase 2: there was a stable plateau at an average recognition proportion of 0.37 from the late 1990s to the early 1960s. Phase 3: starting in the late 1950s, recognition was quite low and slowly decreased toward oblivion.

As we asked our participants to indicate whether they recognized each song in response to hearing it, we probed the feeling of recognition at the time they heard it—not whether they could accurately select the title from a list of related titles. This raises the question of whether our assay is a valid means of capturing recognition memory. To confirm the validity of this method, we replicated the above finding using short excerpts (5-, 10- or 15-second clips) that we deemed to be representative of each song ( Fig 2 ).

Orange curve: 5 second clips, purple curve: 10 second clips, green curve: 15 second clips. All three curves represent the convolved average proportion for a given year, integrating over 5 years. Dashed vertical lines are decade markers.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.g002

As assessed by Spearman’s rho, recognition for clips is remarkably similar to that of songs, regardless of clip duration, r s (150) = 0.97, p = 1.12e-89. Indeed, when we used a pairwise t-test we found that none of the clip durations yielded recognition rates that are statistically distinguishable from that of the songs, t (151) = 1.29, p = 0.20, d = 0.05; t (151) = 1.49, p = 0.14, d = 0.05; and t (151) = 2.36, p = 0.02, d = 0.10, for 5-, 10- and 15-seconds, respectively. In absolute terms, the mean recognition for 5-second clips is 0.38, for 10-second clips is 0.40 and for 15-second clips is 0.42. Using a pairwise t-test to compare different clip durations against one another we found that the difference between the recognition proportions for 5-second clips and 10-second clips is statistically significant, t (151) = 3.18, p = 0.0018, d = 0.14; the difference between 5-second and 15-second clips is also statistically significant, t (151) = 4.42, p = 1.88e-05, d = 0.10; but the difference between 10-second and 15-second clips is not, t (151) = 1.26, p = 0.21, d = 0.04. This is visually evident in Fig 2 , as the orange trace tends to be below the purple trace, which in turn tends to be below the green trace—but the effect sizes are small. Therefore, it seems that five seconds is enough time for participants to accurately report whether they recognized a given song from a clip. This is consistent with the finding that, in response to hearing 400-millisecond “thin slices” of music, people are able to identify both the song title and artist [ 23 ]. Moreover, it has also been shown that people are able to reliably categorize music genres in as little as 250 milliseconds of hearing a song [ 24 ]. Thus, as there is no difference in recognition between clips and songs, we conclude that we used a valid metric of recognition memory—participants responded far from randomly.

For the next part of our analysis ( Fig 3 ), we quantified the mean song recognition proportion and mean variability—defined here as the average residual from the convolved mean—for each of the three phases we previously identified in Fig 1 .

Left panel: Black dots represent the mean recognition rate for a given phase. Red bars represent the standard error of the mean. Right panel: Black dots represent the average residual—the distance between individual songs to the corresponding point on the convolved average (red curve) from Fig 1 , for a given phase. Red bars represent the standard error of the mean.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.g003

The mean recognition proportions for each of the three phases are 0.72, 0.37 and 0.19, respectively. To confirm that the difference between each phase is statistically significant, we performed a Mann-Whitney U test to compare Phases 1 and 2, U = 2140, p = 2.28e-09; Phases 2 and 3, U = 14.5, p = 3.83e-12; and phases 1 and 3, U = 840.5, p = 1.31e-05. Indeed, the proportions for each of these three phases have a statistically significant difference from one another, with a general downward trend in recognition across time.

For the mean residual of each phase, we observed a different pattern: during Phase 1—and to a lesser extent Phase 3—the recognition proportion of individual songs closely follows the mean for a given year. In contrast, inter-song variability is high during Phase 2, where the mean does not closely represent recognition rates of individual songs. Some songs in this phase are recognized extremely well, such as “When A Man Loves A Woman” by Percy Sledge (1966) whereas others like “Knock Three Times” by Dawn (1971) are all but forgotten. The mean residual for each phase is 0.08, 0.18 and 0.11, respectively. When we performed a Mann-Whitney U test to determine whether this observation is supported by the data, we found that Phases 1 and 2 have a statistically significant difference, U = 696, p = 0.008; that Phases 2 and 3 have a statistically significant difference, U = 707, p = 1.49e-05; but that Phrases 1 and 3 do not, U = 527, p = 0.30. Thus, recognition variability is highest during Phase 2. This raises the question of what drives the variability in recognition, both between phases and between songs within a given phase. One possible explanation for the former is simply exposure: people are more likely to recognize songs to which they have been exposed more often [ 25 ].

To address the question of whether exposure can account for a sufficiently large proportion of recognition variability, we used play counts on a digital streaming service—in this case, Spotify—as a proxy for self-selected exposure to music and plotted them against recognition proportion ( Fig 4 ).

Magenta dots represent songs from Phase 1 (2001 to 2015), blue dots represent songs from Phase 2 (1960 to 2000) and black dots represent songs from Phase 3 (1940 to 1959).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.g004

As assessed by Spearman’s rho, there is a considerable correlation between the likelihood of recognizing a given song and its corresponding play count on Spotify, r s (148) = 0.73, p = 6.09e-27. Thus, a substantial amount of the variability in recognition proportion can be accounted for by this metric of self-selected exposure to each song. This is remarkable given that Spotify was launched in 2008, well after the majority (89%) of this music was released, suggesting that the relatively young cohort of participants in our study consumes music primarily through digital streaming. Of course, Spotify is only one proxy of exposure; there are others, such as the number of covers or samples, which presumably are also considerable sources of exposure to the original song. When assessing this possibility with a regression model we note that most of the variability in recognition proportion in our sample is captured by Spotify play counts, but the number of samples and number of covers also explains smaller but significant proportions of variance in recognition, R 2 = 0.41, F(2,134) = 30.93, p <0.01. The respective normalized beta-coefficients are 0.48, 0.24 and 0.14, for Spotify play counts, number of samples and numbers of covers. However, note that one ought to be cautious when interpreting these numbers at face value, as it presumes that songs were covered and sampled at random, which is presumably not the case. There is a high likelihood why some songs are covered more often than others, including the sheer possibility that they are covered more in the future because they have been covered more in the past. In other words, being covered is highly self-selective and until further research uncovers the reasons for why some songs are covered and others are not, it is hard to interpret what this means.

Given the results of research on collective memory for other historical phenomena, we would not have expected the stable plateau—characterized by high within-phase recognition variability—that we found. One possibility is that this phase results from our participants listening to the music of their parents, when growing up in their household, as suggested by studies on the autobiographical memory of music [ 26 – 28 ]. Another possibility is that the music from the 1960s onwards truly was different from earlier music, with music from the 1960s to the 1990s representing a particularly special time in music. We know from the history of music that it did change dramatically from the 1960s onward—the common practice period transitioned into rock music and then electronically-generated music (Ted Coons, personal communication, 01/23/2018). Moreover, the lyrics of popular music also changed. Starting in the 1960s, we saw political music, whereas prior to that time, love songs dominated, as shown by a content analysis [ 29 ]. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but we were curious to know if we could find further support for the notion that the 1960s to 1990s were a unique time in terms of popular music.

To address this issue, we looked at the diversity of song titles over time. To quantify this trend, we plotted the number of unique titles that occupied the number-one spot as a function of the year during which they were most popular. In years during which this number was low, few titles managed to hog the top spot; in years during which there was fierce competition between equally popular but different songs, this number was high, as it was more difficult for any given song to stay on top for long ( Fig 5 ).

Note that the data was smoothed by a 3-year moving average. A value of just above 10 in the early 1940s means that an average song was at the top of the charts for over 4 weeks in a row. The peak levels in the mid-1970s mean that the average song was only on top of the charts for little more than a week during that period.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.g005

We observed three distinct phases similar to those seen in Fig 1 . Phase 1: low diversity from 2015 to the 1990s. Phase 2: high diversity from the 1960s to the 1990s. Phase 3: low diversity—again—from the 1940s to the end of the 1950s. Diversity here means the number of unique singles that occupied the number-one spot during a given year. To quantify the diversity in titles over time, we first binned the data according to the phases we identified in Fig 1 and then computed the mean and standard error of the mean for each. The mean for each of the three phases is 6.73, 11.32 and 6.14, respectively. Next, we performed a Mann-Whitney U test to confirm that there is, once again, a statistically significant difference between Phases 1 and 2, U = 83, p = 3.32e-05; and Phases 2 and 3, U = 71, p = 1.88e-07; but not Phases 1 and 3, U = 192, p = 0.16. This pattern is undeniable, but we cannot speculate the underlying reasons. Anything we could propose, such as changes in listening habits and technology or the rise of DJ culture and dance music, would be purely speculative. However, there seem to be distinct diversity peaks in almost every decade, which could lead to the suggestion of “boom and bust” cycles in music, giving each decade a unique sound when the old sound has “played out”.

We identified three distinct phases in the collective memory for popular music. The first phase is characterized by generally high recognition with a steep linear drop-off and low inter-song variability. For the second phase, we observed moderately high recognition with high inter-song variability—some songs are well-remembered whereas others are not. In the third and final phase, recognition drops again to rather low levels as time passes, and inter-song variability is relatively low again. We also found that a sizeable proportion—more than half—of this recognition variability can be accounted for by self-selected exposure to each song as measured by its overall play count on Spotify.

We interpret these findings to mean that collective memory for popular music—and perhaps for cultural artifacts in general—is different than that for political leaders, be they in the United States [ 10 ] or China [ 11 ]. There are two important differences. First, the drop-off we observed is only linear for a short period, until it hits the recognition plateau from the 1960s to the 1990s. Second, there seems to be no primacy effect for popular music. There are several possible explanations for this. For instance, the primacy effect for political leaders presumably stems from the fact that the founders of a political dynasty are frequently repeated in public discourse. Conversely, people demonstrably do not choose to listen to songs from the early years of the Billboard , if Spotify play counts are a valid metric of exposure. In fact, play counts for this period are remarkably low (see Fig 4 ). The issue of play counts highlights another difference between existing work on collective memory for political leaders and our work here. Presumably, people are exposed to political leaders in history classes and coursework, much of which is part of mandatory schooling. In contrast, much—if not most—of music listening is both voluntary and self-selective. There are other differences as well. The number of historical leaders is countably finite—in terms of United States presidents, there have been only 45 to date. However, the universe of existing music is vast and—from the perspective of an individual—basically boundless. Given this consideration, it is surprising that our recognition rates are as high as they are. As there are strong recency effects for both Chinese and American leaders—but not for popular music—the actionable advice would be that if one wants to remain famous in politics, they must found a political movement. Conversely, if one wants to remain famous for their art, they have to keep producing new releases, or release them during a special period that increases the chances of being remembered. Few things will stand the test of time, in particular if they are not repeated. Finally, our work involved reports of recognition in response to a specific stimulus whereas most existing work on collective memory used free recall. One paper that did use recognition methods—again on United States political leaders—suggests a proneness to false-positives due to contextual familiarity [ 30 ], as has been shown previously for other material [ 31 ].

In addition, these results put the notion of a hard cultural horizon in question. We do not find a period during which recognition drops to zero. Even our millennial participants—which formed the bulk of our participant pool—were not completely unaware of the music that was popular in the 1940s. We posit several plausible explanations for this. For instance, it is possible that not enough time has passed since the first titles of our stimuli set. Perhaps a future study might be able to identify when recognition hits zero (the cultural horizon), if there is a long enough history of Billboard music. However, it is also possible that involuntary exposure through film, television and radio or accidental exposure through music discovery services such as Pandora allows people to discover music that might be very old indeed. Finally, people might also intentionally seek out the music of previous generations. In principle—as much, if not all music is recorded and digitally available forever—this could prevent a cultural horizon indefinitely. We are unable to distinguish these possibilities in the present study.

This study has other limitations as well. For instance, we used Spotify play counts, numbers of covers and numbers of samples as a proxy for total music exposure. We do not have data on how often individuals listen to music in analog format, on other web-based platforms, on the radio, or are exposed to music in everyday life in other forms such as movie and television soundtracks, or simply as background music. Put differently, all of the observed recognition effects might be entirely driven by exposure, but our measure of exposure is noisy if not biased, lowering the proportion of variance in recognition rates for which we cannot account. In addition, it is possible that newer music has greater play counts on Spotify for several reasons, none of which are mutually exclusive, and none of which we can distinguish. For instance, older music might be more readily available in analog formats such as cassette tapes or vinyl records, which could lower the digital play count of such music. Conversely, it is also possible that the average Spotify user—who is between the age of 13 and 29 [ 18 ]—preferentially listens to the music of their generation. In this cohort, that corresponds to music from the 2000s and 2010s. However, this line of reasoning is not central to our argument that distinct phases exist. That we can account for as much of the variance in recognition as we do, simply with Spotify play counts, does suggest that this is a reasonable proxy for exposure in general, and that voluntary exposure through digital streaming is a main driver of recognition. This does not preclude that there are other factors that influence recognition as well. Music is a complex phenomenon and songs are not unaffected by the socio-cultural context in which they are released, and this might in turn impact how they are remembered. A related limitation is that most of our participants were young adults. Presumably, if we had multiple age cohorts, the linear recency peaks would average out, perhaps yielding an overall flat recognition curve. In that sense, it was good that our sample overrepresented a single generation. We predict that future studies with multiple age cohorts will exemplify distinct and shifted recency peaks that are unique to a given age cohort. A final limitation worth noting is that we did not test recognition strictly speaking—but rather the feeling of recognition—as we asked participants whether they recognized what they heard, not whether they could select the title of the song from a list of related titles. Whether this report is actually accurate remains unknown. However, we would like to emphasize that our findings have face validity. It would be surprising if our cohort of millennials reported higher recognition rates for music before their time. Yet, consistent with previous research on memory for popular music [ 32 ] and historical events [ 33 ] that date prior to one’s lifetime, we did not observe such recognition reports. Moreover, the strong correlation with exposure and the concordance between clip and song recognition patterns would be very surprising if participants responded randomly. Thus, we conclude that this measure of recognition is reasonably valid. To get an estimate of the false recognition rate, it would be advisable to include a piece of unpublished music in the stimulus set as a lure. Finally, note that we use the term “collective memory” sensu Roediger, i.e. in terms of what large groups of people remember and forget. In other words, what a group remembers is conceptually the average recall of the individuals that make up the group and in terms of music can be largely explained in terms of the exposure of individuals (as exemplified by Spotify playcounts). There is an important other way in which the term is used. For some social scientists, collective memories transcend individuals, whereas others recognize that even in that case, individuals are the carriers of these shared memories [ 34 ]

Taken together, the most compelling interpretation supported by our data is the notion that the period from the 1960s to the 1990s was a special time in popular music history. During this period, we observe an extended plateau characterized by relatively high recognition that is surprising given prior research on collective memory. However, to determine whether the music of the 1960s to 1990s was truly special will require a follow-up study in another 30 years or so. Our prediction is that in another generation, people will still preferentially listen to current music, but the linear drop off phase will be extended as the 1960s to 1990s plateau shifts back in time. The recognition curve might even have multiple peaks by then, as the plateau we identified in the current study will look much like a primacy effect, if the music of the 1960s to the 1990s appeals to the children of millennials. Conversely, if the autobiographical memory explanation is true [ 28 , 35 , 36 ], the general pattern should look much like it does now, only with an extended Phase 3, that perhaps could even reach close to zero recognition.

In this paper, we investigated the collective memory for popular music. Studies on collective memory for other historical phenomena suggest the existence of a serial position curve, in which the recency portion shows a linear decline. However, due to the inherent self-selective nature of music listening behavior, we reasoned that memory for popular music might be different. Specifically, we hypothesized the existence of a cultural horizon beyond which memory for once popular music is effectively forgotten. Although our data support the existence of the recency portion of the serial position curve, we see neither a primacy effect nor a cultural horizon for the earliest music. Instead, our large sample of mostly millennial participants seemed to remember at least some of the hit songs from the 1940s and 1950s. Thus, we conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. list of billboard songs..

For each song we used in our study, we included the year, song title, artist, mean recognition proportion and play count on Spotify (in millions).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210066.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lucy Cranmer, Warren Ersly, Caroline Myers, Mir Hwang and Ted Coons for helpful comments on a prior version of this manuscript.

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The Impact of the Beatles on Teen Culture in the 1960s

This essay about The Beatles’ early years explores the foundational period of the iconic band, highlighting their evolution from a local group in Liverpool to global superstardom. It traces their origins to the Quarrymen, detailing the lineup changes that led to the formation of The Beatles with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. The essay discusses their initial musical style influenced by American rock and roll, their transformative performance experiences in Hamburg, and their residency at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, which solidified their sound and performance skills. It also examines the impact of their partnership with manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, who were pivotal in transitioning the band from popular live performers to groundbreaking studio artists. By the mid-1960s, The Beatles had expanded their musical repertoire and were exploring more complex themes in albums like “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver,” reflecting both personal growth and the dynamic changes of the 1960s. The essay underscores how The Beatles’ early experiences shaped their later music and cultural impact.

How it works

The Beatles, a band destined to etch themselves into the annals of cultural history, commenced their journey from humble origins that would profoundly influence their early musical endeavors and leave an enduring imprint on their trajectories. This discourse delves into the nascent years of The Beatles, from their embryonic stages in Liverpool to their metamorphosis into the globe’s preeminent musical ensemble.

The genesis of The Beatles can be traced back to Liverpool, England, during the twilight of the 1950s. The founding triumvirate comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison coalesced around a shared ardor for music, steeped in the traditions of rock and roll and the resonances of skiffle, a genre characterized by improvised instruments.

Lennon’s inaugural foray into the musical realm with the Quarrymen, initiated in 1956, laid the groundwork for the eventual emergence of The Beatles. McCartney’s integration into the fold in 1957 was succeeded by Harrison’s enlistment in 1958. The crowning addition to the quartet, Ringo Starr, assumed his position in 1962, supplanting Pete Best on percussion duties.

The embryonic compositions of The Beatles were distinguished by their simplicity, espousing plaintive love ballads and infectious melodies that mirrored the ebullient vitality and sanguinity of their adolescence. Tracks like “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” epitomize this nascent aesthetic, profoundly influenced by luminaries of American rock and roll such as Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. The band’s burgeoning popularity was propelled by their magnetic stage presence and lyrics that struck a chord with youthful audiences across the British Isles.

During these formative epochs, The Beatles honed their musical acumen within the crucible of Hamburg, Germany, and Liverpool’s iconic Cavern Club. The sojourns in Hamburg assumed particular significance; performing marathon sets amidst arduous circumstances, they honed their proficiency as musicians and showmen. This epoch of relentless live performances engendered a symbiotic relationship with their audience and facilitated experimentation with diverse musical idioms. The sojourn in Hamburg not only honed their sonic identity but also cemented their camaraderie, laying the groundwork for their collective synergy and collaborative ethos.

The seminal breakthrough for the ensemble materialized upon their return to England and the fortuitous alliance with manager Brian Epstein in 1962. Epstein instilled professionalism within the ensemble, orchestrating record contracts and refining their public image. This epochal juncture was swiftly succeeded by the collaborative partnership with producer George Martin, whose ingenuity in the studio was pivotal in sculpting their sonic palette and steering them toward pioneering recording techniques. This amalgam of astute management and innovative production facilitated The Beatles’ transition from a ubiquitous live act to a studio-bound ensemble that charted new vistas of sonic exploration.

By the mid-1960s, The Beatles had transcended the confines of their rudimentary pop-rock origins to embrace a panoply of musical genres, from folk and blues to the frontiers of psychedelic rock. Albums like “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” heralded a seismic departure from their earlier oeuvre, evincing more intricate lyrical motifs and sophisticated musical arrangements that mirrored their evolution as artisans and individuals. Their evolving sonic tapestry not only mirrored personal growth but also served as a reflection of the shifting sociocultural milieu of the 1960s.

In summation, the embryonic epoch of The Beatles was characterized by a fecund period of evolution and experimentation. Emerging from the crucible of Liverpool, they ascended meteorically to unparalleled pinnacles of renown and ingenuity. Their trajectory from the environs of Hamburg to the zenith of global acclaim is not merely a narrative of musical triumph but also a testament to their cultural resonance, bequeathing a legacy that reverberates through the annals of music and popular culture. Their nascent exploits and youthful exuberance laid the groundwork for subsequent innovations, epitomizing the embryonic phase of their illustrious odyssey.

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The Beatles reshaped American culture, explaining their enduring appeal

The group ignited a culture war, changing music and fashion and challenging gender norms

Peter Jackson’s new, nearly eight-hour edit of the 1969 film “The Beatles: Get Back” is getting plenty of attention, along with its fair share of rave reviews and withering criticism . The documentary, cleaned up with the latest technology, counters the usual story of the Beatles’s acrimonious breakup by showing them doing more than squabbling. They collaborate, joke around and wax nostalgic in studios and in their legendary rooftop concert. The film reminds us that at the end of the 1960s, they were still writing innovative music that resonates today.

Just five short years before, in 1964, the group was the subject of another powerful film, which tracked a pop revolution in the making. Albert and David Maysles’s “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.” showed the band not only making music but reshaping the culture. Both documentaries reveal how the Beatles reoriented American music, helped the country shake off the drab conformity of mid-century consensus and, in the process, even provoked one of the first major battles of the modern culture wars.

The Beatles first landed in the United States in February 1964, a little over two months after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That year, the exuberant Fab Four did their part to draw America out of a dark, national depression by creating a new kind of cultural communion. The devotion of their acolytes bordered on the religious. Fans wanted relics and totems: a piece of a bedsheet, a guitar string, a lock of hair. Some concertgoers in the front rows, delirious with excitement, occasionally wet their seats or fainted. This was Beatlemania.

The screams of teenage girls — captured in tour footage in the Maysles film — were, as feminist scholars Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs would later observe, the shouts of a gender revolution in the making. “To abandon control — to scream, faint, dash about in mobs,” they wrote of these American girls, “was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture.”

The Beatles also revolutionized what it meant to be a young man. Their public image, thanks to manager Brian Epstein, lacked the feral machismo and snarl of earlier rock-and-rollers like Gene Vincent or Jerry Lee Lewis. The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, said the group “sound like a male Shirelles.” Indeed, they covered songs by other “African American girl groups” like the Marvelettes, the Cookies and the Donays.

Their relative androgyny charted a new way of being. Feminist writer Betty Friedan even thought that young men with their long Beatles hair were “saying ‘no’ to the masculine mystique.” To Friedan, they seemed to be rejecting “that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew-cut, Prussian, big-muscle, Ernest Hemingway” manliness that was all too prevalent in postwar American society.

In their style and with their irreverence, the group helped alter American views of the British as stuffy and wedded to outdated, rigid institutions and ideas. The Beatles certainly did not fit that stereotype. They were fun and with-it, and their surprising, ebullient compositions sounded fresh and invigorating to young American ears.

Music critic Ian MacDonald once described the Beatles’ American fans as “a generation raised on crew-cuts, teeth-braces, hot rods and Coca-Cola” who “knew nothing of blues or R&B and had forgotten the rock-n-roll which had excited their elder brothers and sisters only five years earlier.” Of course, there were plenty of extraordinary rock, pop and soul acts in the pre-Beatles period. But immediately before the Fab Four arrived in the States, the U.S. Top 40 charts were dominated by fresh-faced, bland teen crooners and one-hit wonders such as Bobby Vinton, the Kingsmen, the Murmaids and Bobby Rydell. One of the top-selling albums of 1963 was “Soeur Sourire,” the Singing Nun’s self-titled release, a parent-friendly record that a youth pastor might recommend. Even Elvis Presley had lost some of his luster, becoming a kind of self-caricature, making one forgettable movie after another.

But the Beatles upended these popular trends. The Beach Boys, who had four hit albums and launched the surf music craze in 1962 and 1963, began to worry that they, too, were becoming outmoded. Brian Wilson was one of the 74 million Americans who tuned in to watch the Beatles’s first performance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” in 1964. He noticed how catchy their music was and said that “they looked sharp.” That seemed especially the case, he admitted, “compared to the silly, juvenile striped shirts and white pants the Beach Boys wore onstage. I suddenly felt unhip, as if we looked more like golf caddies than rock-and-roll stars.”

By the summer of 1964, the Beach Boys had a host of other sharply dressed British bands to compete with. The British invasion was well underway, making room for the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five and a raft of other with-it rockers.

Not everyone in the United States was impressed. William F. Buckley, the father of modern conservatism, wrote that the Beatles “are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as the crown heads of anti-music.” In Buckley’s estimation, the Beatles were uncouth and artless.

Conservative Christians sensed something far more sinister. Evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists across the country targeted the Beatles with fury. Believers worried that their sons and daughters knew more about John, Paul, George and Ringo than they did about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In deeply racist language, ministers proclaimed from their pulpits that the Beatles’ loud, rowdy music came straight out of the darkest jungles of Africa. Pastors and youth leaders decried the group’s tight suits, long hair and effeminate look. One Pentecostal author declared in 1966, “No matter how popular the Beatles become, American girls still like boys to look like boys!” America’s foremost evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, wondered whether long hair on men signaled the end of civilization.

When John Lennon told a journalist in 1966 that the group was “more popular than Jesus,” America’s conservative Christians launched an anti-Beatles crusade. Religious conservatives climbed aboard what was being called the Beatles “ban wagon.” Responding to such pressures, at least 35 radio stations refused to play their records. Churches across the country sponsored Beatles record and paraphernalia burnings. David Noebel, a popular traveling minister, gave lectures and wrote books about how the Beatles were agents of communism, hypnotizing American youths in advance of a “red invasion.” Meanwhile, California’s conservative Republican governor Ronald Reagan won national fame by targeting disrespectful youths, rock music and the counterculture that the Beatles represented.

Yet the Beatles’ wild look, raw talent and disregard for tradition appealed to millions, despite all the apocalyptic warnings and denunciations. By the time the Beatles were filming their studio sessions in 1969, they had helped change American taste in music and fashion. At the beginning of the decade, when the band was developing its musical chops in Hamburg, the four resembled arty German existentialists, decked out in full black leather suits. By the decade’s end, they looked like desert monks or hobo mystics. They led the way in production and album-oriented rock. They pioneered music videos. They also transformed attitudes about mind-altering drugs and ushered in a new interest in non-Western religions. Albert Maysles sensed that he was filming a historic moment when the band first arrived in 1964. He summed up the experience decades later: “These guys, the Beatles, they were almost, like, from another planet.”

Today we live in an era of an entirely different media and entertainment landscape. Long gone are the days of highly influential radio stations and three-network television that helped the Beatles reach, entertain and unite American devotees. But even today, in the era of new media and streaming music, the Beatles — in contrast with their counterculture contemporaries like the Who and the Yardbirds — continue to attract new generations of fans. In 2019, Paul and Ringo reissued “Abbey Road,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. Meanwhile, Forbes recently reported that 18-to-29-year-olds represent 47 percent of the listeners of the Beatles’s billions of streamed songs. That staying power is why today, more than half a century after the Beatles stopped making music as a band, young and old across the United States are setting aside 468 minutes for Jackson’s film.

Research Developments in Arts and Social Studies Vol. 4

An Interpretation of The Beatles’ Music

• József Pál Vas

Research Developments in Arts and Social Studies Vol. 4 , 26 May 2022 , Page 105-112 https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/rdass/v4/16261D Published: 2022-05-26

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The purpose of this paper is to define the components of the Beatles' impact on popular culture during the 1960s. Their new musical style has such characteristics that it can appeal to individuals all around the world. While listening to their music, these characteristics will be examined. The first inquiry is about their song's origins. They clearly have roots in both Western and Eastern folk music, not just rhythm and blues.

The second topic concerns whether or not standard tone functions alter the emotional impression. The answer is that the Minor tonality has got such function as the Major does: joy, brightness, and happiness. The third feature is their striving after synthesis between classical and pop music. The fourth feature can be seen as a synthesis between eras and cultures, i.e. modern and Baroque. Finally, I mention to hold such music groups for psychiatric patients when listened to music of The Beatles.

• Effects of Hindu folkmusic
• consonance of text and music
• synthesis between eras and cultures

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Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice

The Beatles and Beyond

• © 2021
• Phillip McIntyre 0 ,
• Paul Thompson 1

School of Creative Industries, University of Newcastle Australia, Newcastle, Australia

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Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

• Examines the creative processes of one of the most successful musicians on the planet
• Employs a theoretical framework that combines Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity with the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu
• Brings the theoretical apparatus of creativity to bear on creative practice itself

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture (PASCC)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front matter, background to the study: the systems approach to creativity.

• Phillip McIntyre, Paul Thompson

Paul McCartney as a Performing Musician

Paul mccartney and the creation of ‘yesterday’, paul mccartney and the creation of ‘paperback writer’: examining the flow of ideas and knowledge between scalable creative systems, paul mccartney’s major creative collaborators: john lennon and the creative system, paul mccartney as record producer: complete immersion in the creative system, paul mccartney’s multiple creative and business ventures, back matter.

• popular music
• songwriting
• Paul McCartney
• music recording
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Pierre Bourdieu

About this book

“Paul McCartney and his Creative Practice is a valuable case study for any researcher (in any field), who is interested in the creative process. For students, it illustrates how theoretical frameworks help us to understand and explain real world phenomena. For musical practitioners and McCartney fans, it offers new perspective on the artistry and contributions of a creative giant.” (Nyssim Lefford, Music Producer, Cognitive Scientist and Lecturer in Audio Production at Luleå University of Technology)

Authors and Affiliations

Phillip McIntyre

Paul Thompson

About the authors

Phillip McIntyre is a Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Newcastle, Australia where he researches creativity and innovation. Phillip has published widely with a particular focus on the creative processes involved in various aspects of music including songwriting, sound engineering, and record production. He is the author of Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice (2012), co-editor of Creativity as a System in Action (2016), and co-author of Educating for Creativity within Higher Education (2018). Phillip also has extensive experience within the music industry. 

Paul Thompson is a professional recording engineer and producer who has worked in the music industry for over 15 years. He is currently a Reader in Popular Music at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds School of Arts, and his research is centered on record production, audio education, popular music heritage, creativity and cultural production in popular music. His book ‘Creativity in the Recording Studio: Alternative Takes’ was published in early 2019 by Palgrave MacMillan.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice

Book Subtitle : The Beatles and Beyond

Authors : Phillip McIntyre, Paul Thompson

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology , Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-79099-8 Published: 11 August 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-79102-5 Published: 12 August 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-79100-1 Published: 10 August 2021

Series ISSN : 2755-4503

Series E-ISSN : 2755-4511

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIV, 304

Number of Illustrations : 12 b/w illustrations

Topics : Personality and Social Psychology , Music , Sociology of Culture , Popular Culture , Audio-Visual Culture

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Articles on The Beatles

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Now and Then: How composition choices made John Lennon’s music memo into a Beatles song

Steven Baur , Dalhousie University

New Beatles and Rolling Stones music owes much of its success to the psychology of nostalgia

Glenn Fosbraey , University of Winchester

Now and Then: enabled by AI – created by profound connections between the four Beatles

Adam Behr , Newcastle University

Is Now and Then really a Beatles song? The fab four always used technology to create new music

Jadey O'Regan , University of Sydney and Paul (Mac) McDermott , University of Sydney

3 ways AI is transforming music

Jason Palamara , Indiana University

Tangy apricot Bavarian whip, fried rice medley and bombe Alaska: what Australia’s first food influencer had us cooking

Lauren Samuelsson , University of Wollongong

Beatles ‘Get Back’ documentary reveals how creativity doesn’t happen on its own

John M. Richardson , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

What is toe jam? From harmless gunk to a feast for bugs

Caroline Robinson , Charles Sturt University and Luke Donnan , Charles Sturt University

‘The Beatles: Get Back’ glosses over the band’s acrimonious end

Tim Riley , Emerson College

The Beatles: Get Back and the magic of seeing chords become anthems

Mark Goodall , University of Bradford

Friday essay: Yoko, Linda, Get Back and shifting perceptions of the women of the Beatles

Christine Feldman-Barrett , Griffith University

The Beatles: Get Back review – Peter Jackson’s TV series is a thrilling, funny (and long) treat for fans

David McCooey , Deakin University

Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics: an extraordinary life in song

What Paul McCartney’s ‘The Lyrics’ can teach us about harnessing our creativity

Edward Wasserman , University of Iowa

‘Imagine’ at 50: Why John Lennon’s ode to humanism still resonates

Phil Zuckerman , Pitzer College

Prince: Why, five years after his death, the Purple One still reigns

Related topics.

• George Harrison
• John Lennon
• Paul McCartney
• Popular music
• UK pop music

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56 The Beatles Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best the beatles topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting the beatles topics to write about, 📌 simple & easy the beatles essay titles.

• 4-Track Beatles vs. 8-Track Marvin Gaye One might argue that the 4-track recording is more simplistic and less fluent compared to the subtlety of sounds of the 8-track alternative.
• Beatles Contribution to Rock Music If we analyze the time when the Beatles performed it was a time of revolution, a time of youthful change and creativity and the Beatles were a major part of that revolution. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• The Beach Boys and The Beatles in the Psychedelic Movement The Beach Boys’ career during the psychedelic movement was distinguished by the creation of the song “Good Vibrations” and the work on the album SMiLE that was never released.
• Careers of The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones in the 1960s Rolling Stones were in the shadow of the Beatles from the very beginning, and this fact disturbed them a lot. On the other hand, most of the fame went to the Beatles, and the Rolling […]
• Five New Approaches the Beatles Brought to the Rock and Roll Scene Undoubtedly, The Beatles are considered to be one of the greatest, most popular and revolutionary bands in the history of music. To begin with, the effect of The Beatles’ music on rock and roll in […]
• Beatles vs. Marvin Gaye’s The mono mix is slightly distorted due to the bass line presented by McCartney, which is by the way considered to imitate the one of Motown.
• A World Without the Beatles The Beatles had a strong influence on the world of music – on artists’ inspiration, the development of musical directions, and other aspects, such as conducting concerts or studio recordings.
• The Beatles in “A Hard Day’s Night” The power of the music and the image has brought the British band the Beatles to the status of icons in the United Kingdom, in the United States of America and in a whole world.
• “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by Beatles Album’s Contribution to Music History The key production personnel include all the four members of the rock group The Beatles, but they are also were some additional musicians involved in the production of the album, because the album is a […]
• The Beatles Band’s Best Music Album The album recited the story as the songs went on and the album displayed the excellence of electronic music of the day.
• George Martin’s Contribution to The Beatles As a person of considerable musical capabilities and outstanding arranger’s talent, George Martin was the key asset in making The Beatles’ sound as compelling as the listeners have come to acknowledge it.
• “The Beatles: Yellow Submarine” Animated Movie According to the plot, the Beatles play the role of the heroes and want to help Captain Fred to get rid of Blue Meanies in the Pepperland.
• Conflict of The Beatles and the Religious Far Right Reverend David Noebel was one of the pioneers of the anti-rock and anti-Beatles crusades. Noebel himself was anti-communist, and he feared that the Beatles could spearhead a communist takeover in the United States.
• The Beatles – British Band Conquers America Understanding the popularity of the Beatles in the American pop market with an American genre of music requires an understanding of the history of rock music and other related genres.
• The Tribute: Beatles Concert 1964 The Tribute apparently has the blessing of the families of the Beatles for their loving interpretation of the Fab Four.
• The Beatles Album Revolver Most of the songs in the album were composed by Paul McCartney who is a famous composer in Britain and he was assisted by Lennon.
• Sources of American Styles in the Music of The Beatles
• Conjecture and Conviction in the Myth of Kennedy, America, and The Beatles
• The Peculiarities of The Beatles: A Cultural-Historical Interpretation
• From The Beatles to Twenty One Pilots: Economics in Music in the Pop Culture Era
• You Can’t Do That: The Beatles, Artistic Freedom, and Censorship
• Similarities Between The Beatles and Pink Floyd
• The Beatles As Musicians: The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul
• The Beatles and Their Influence on Culture
• The Origins, Rise, and Downfall of The Beatles, an English Rock Band
• The Beatles as Place Makers: Narrated Landscapes in Liverpool, England
• Things We Said Today: A Linguistic Analysis of The Beatles
• How John Lennon Made The Beatles More Popular Than Jesus?
• From me to you: Austerity to Profligacy in the Language of The Beatles
• Ideology, Trajectory & Stardom: Elvis Presley & The Beatles
• The Influence of The Beatles’ Music in Brazil
• Why the Notion That The Beatles Changed the World Is a Misconception?
• The Ballad Style in the Early Music of The Beatles
• Why Did The Beatles and The Rolling Stones Have Such a Great Impact During the 1960s?
• The Mysteries Surrounding The Beatles in the 1960s
• How Do The Beatles Compare and Contrast Politics and Religion?
• Why The Beatles Revolutionized Music and Pop Culture?
• Rhythm and Harmony in the Music of The Beatles
• The Trope of Expectancy/Infinity in the Music of The Beatles
• The Life and Music Career of the English Singer, Song Writer, and Co-Founder of The Beatles, John Lennon
• The Beatles’ Psycheclassical Synthesis: Psychedelic Classicism and Classical Psychedelia in Sgt. Pepper
• The Events That Led to The Beatles Coming to America
• More Than The Beatles: Popular Music, Tourism and Urban Regeneration
• The Lyrical Expression of Adolescent Conflict in The Beatles Songs
• Biomusic and Popular Culture: The Use of Animal Sounds in the Music of The Beatles
• Taking The Beatles Seriously: Problems of Text
• The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think That Can’t Be Thunk
• The Blues in the Music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin
• The Impact of The Beatles on Pop Music in Australia: 1963–66
• The Successful Musical Career of The Beatles and the Feud That Destroyed the Rock Icon
• The Beatles Lyrics: The Unseen Story Behind Their Music
• She Loves You: The Beatles and Female Fanaticism
• The Beatles: The Most Influential Rock Band in History
• The Music of The Beatles in Undergraduate Music Theory Instruction
• A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every The Beatles Song
• The Interesting Story Behind the Beginnings of The Beatles
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IvyPanda . 2023. "56 The Beatles Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/the-beatles-essay-topics/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "56 The Beatles Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/the-beatles-essay-topics/.

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