The Beatles Research Paper

The Beatles

How does one begin to even explain what The Beatles are about? Honestly, what can be said that would summarize the revolution of music and in the world in general? The Beatles music, fashion, and television and film appearances, advanced their popularity in the 1960’s and beyond. Their influences stretched from music and film, and even touched on politics and the art of friendship.The Beatles blew away the definition of what people thought music was “supposed” to be and replaced it with a whole new concept that was accepted by the generations that followed.

The Beatles started when John Lennon started his own group, called the Quarrymen, in 1956. Paul McCartney joined the group as a guitarist in 1957. Beatles went through several

In these months, fascination with The Beatles grew larger, transforming their recordings and live performances into the matter of the public opinion. “In the fall of that year, when they belatedly made a couple of appearances on British television, the evidence of popular frenzy prompted British newspapermen to coin a new word for the phenomenon: Beatlemania. In early 1964, after equally tumultuous appearances on American television, the same phenomenon erupted in the United States and provoked a so-called British Invasion of Beatles imitators from the United Kingdom.” (Encyclopedia 7) Beatlemania was something different and new. Musicians performing in the 19th century, certainly got people excited. By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day’s Night, a movie that dramatized the phenomenon of Beatlemania, the band’s effect was shown around the world as countless young people love the band members’ characteristic long hair and whimsical displays of humour. Indeed, their social and cultural influence was even recognized among the upper political power. In 1965 each of the four Beatles was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, having been recommended for the honour by British Prime

“Between 1965 and 1967 the music of the Beatles rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied.” Their difference in taste has changed over those years from the pop song “Yesterday” and the folk sounding “Norwegian Wood” (both in 1965) to the hard rock song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966). It also included the carnival sounding calls, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (1967), which had conscious lyrics by Lennon and an imaginative arrangement built around random snippets of recorded steam organs. In 1966 the Beatles announced their retirement from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full experience of the recording studio. “A year later, in June 1967, this period of widely watched creative renewal was climaxed by the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by young people around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band’s genius but also of the era’s utopian promise.” (Cogan 37) The Beatles had come to personify, in the minds of millions of young listeners, the joys of a new culture of hedonism and drug experimentation. In those years the Beatles reinvented the meaning of rock and roll as a cultural form. After