THE BEATLES
Why do we (still) want to hold their hands?

by John Platoff
professor of music

In the Christmas season of 2000, the hottest-selling CD in America consisted entirely of music by a rock band that stopped recording more than 30 years ago. The Beatles’ “1,” a compilation of 27 hit songs from the band’s seven-year run atop the charts in the 1960s, sold over five million copies in the last few weeks of the year. It sat at number one in the “Billboard 200” for eight weeks, and as of this writing has spent six months on the charts, reaching more than seven million units sold. (Worldwide sales are said to have topped 20 million.) While this success is unique--every other CD with comparable commercial success in recent years has been by a currently active group or performer--it is not surprising. The Beatles’ three double-CD “Anthology” releases in 1995-96, which offered a variety of out-takes and alternate versions of their songs, were all on the Billboard charts for months. And their long-awaited book, The Beatles Anthology, was among the best-selling books of 2000, selling over a million copies. In short, the unequalled popularity and success that the Beatles enjoyed nearly four decades ago show no real signs of abating.

            Many explanations have been offered for the unprecedented explosion of fan madness in the 1960s that was called Beatlemania. Some writers argue that the Beatles benefited from lucky timing: they unwittingly capitalized on the existence of an unusually large and increasingly affluent cohort of teenagers, the marketing potential of which was just beginning to be understood. (Even the widespread use of the term “teenager” dates back only to the 1940s, when advertisers first began to target adolescents as a distinct market in their own right.) Another point of view is that the Beatles were valued primarily for their charisma and visual image: their daringly long hair (a potent symbol of rebellion in the staid world of 1963) combined with suits and ties made them threatening but not too threatening, and their offbeat, witty replies to questions from the press won over even the most cynical reporters. Still other voices argue that fans loved the Beatles because their music, while not perhaps all that great, was still vastly better than what else was playing on Top-40 radio at the time. (Anyone who can bring to mind the Singing Nun’s rendition of “Dominique,” which was a number-one hit for weeks in 1963, will scarcely dispute this proposition.)

          But none of these explanations can account for the great success of the Beatles in 2001. Nor is it merely the group’s aging fans from the 1960s who continue to buy their music. For one thing, the new “No. 1” CD is merely a repackaging of favorite songs from CDs that most older fans have owned since the late 1980s, when they first became available in that format. And the constant presence of the Beatles on the playlists of a wide variety of radio stations, not just those that play classic rock of the 1960s, makes clear that young listeners in the new century are still responding to--and buying--the Beatles’ music, along with their books and calendars.

            We need to consider what may be breathtakingly obvious: that the Beatles survive today because of the music itself. The group’s music continues to be heard, and continues to delight listeners, because it is some of the best music of the last century. Just as it stood out from most of the popular music being made around it in the 1960s, it continues to be more rewarding and sometimes more challenging than most of the popular music being created in 2001, or in the 40 years in between. The word “challenging” is crucial, because our culture values most highly those works of art that offer a degree of challenging complexity. We tire quickly of pieces of music that reveal themselves fully on first hearing and cherish those (whether popular or classical) that seem to offer new details as we listen to them over and over.

            In their seven years of recording, the Beatles exhibited an astonishing degree of stylistic development--a comparison to other great artists of the last century, like Picasso or Stravinsky, is not far-fetched. Their early music was straightforward but electrifying, a fiercely energetic presentation of American blues styles (think of “I Saw Her Standing There”). It was a revelation to white audiences, here and in Britain (as Elvis Presley’s take on the same elements of African American music had been nearly a decade before).

            But this early Beatles music is for the most part not what continues to be heard and admired today. Listeners are attracted to the greater richness of their later music: songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” which treated subjects largely foreign to rock and roll (death, social alienation) and which employed classical string instruments rather than the guitars and drums of the rock band. Then came the songs, psychedelic both in inspiration and in effect, that explored unfamiliar states of consciousness with cryptic words and innovative new sounds and textures: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” say, or “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The most memorable song on their most memorable album (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”) is “A Day in the Life.” With its juxtaposition of instrumental combinations (the acoustic guitar, the full rock band, the symphony orchestra) and its unprecedented form, the song painted a disturbing picture of modern life in the world of mass culture, culminating in the nightmarish explosion of its final chord--a brilliant, wordless comment about our fearful lives in the age of the Bomb.

            By the end of their careers, the Beatles had utterly demolished any limits on what rock music could be. They created children’s songs (“Yellow Submarine”), tunes inspired by 1920s vaudeville (“When I’m Sixty-Four”), screaming hard rock (“Helter Skelter”), acoustic ballads (“Blackbird”), sophisticated multi-song medleys (on the B side of Abbey Road) and avant-garde sound collages (“Revolution 9”). But what has not been remarked on enough are the more subtle complexities of their music--for example the way that successive choruses of a song are enriched with additional musical elements, so that each return of the “same” music offers more to the ear.

            In Lennon’s famous and controversial “Revolution 1,” from the White Album, the group makes subtle changes in texture both between verses and within each verse, nearly always by adding new elements. As the song progresses, the ironic “shoo-be-doo-wah” back-up vocal appears more and more frequently, along with harmonized singing of what was at first a solo melody. An added brass section, initially quite discreet, takes an increasingly active role; by the third verse it is playing jaunty syncopated chords that decisively undercut the serious message of the words. The effect is that the song’s meaning actually appears to change, from a preaching sincerity to a kind of light-hearted rejection of the political world. Another sort of hidden complexity is illustrated by the back-up vocals of “Paperback Writer.” At first, we notice only that they are sung high, in the falsetto range. But after a few more listenings, we hear that the back-up voices are actually singing the children’s song “Frere Jacques”--perhaps an ironic commentary on the adult ambitions of the song’s protagonist.

            Finally, these two examples illustrate an attribute of the Beatles’ music that should not be undervalued: its humor. A great deal of music created for or by adolescents is earnest, sometimes appallingly so. But the Beatles knew how to be serious without being earnest (for instance, in Lennon’s moving “In My Life”), and a great many of the Beatles’ great songs have a kind of unspoken wink to them--they remind us that life and music are supposed to be fun, “nothing to get hung up about.” In their extraordinary range of styles, the combination of sophistication and accessibility in their music, and their light-hearted spirit, the Beatles created a body of work that survives on its merits. Like the music of other great artists of the past (be it Duke Ellington or Ludwig van Beethoven), it will continue to be heard and appreciated for many generations to come.