Abstract
AbstractThe debate over the cultural value of the Beatles was as vehement as it was significant in 1960s and early 1970s Britain. Lennon and McCartney's early compositions received some early critical plaudits,Sgt. Peppersought to blur distinctions between high and low culture and the band members’ side projects forged links with the avant garde. To accept the Beatles as artists, however, required critics to rethink how art was created, disseminated and evaluated and how it interacted with contemporary social, economic and technological change. This article makes extensive use of contemporary journalism, scholarship and fan literature, much of it unstudied, to demonstrate that the rethinking process was contested and protracted. No consensus emerged. Claims made for their artistry, which contributed to a wider discourse elevating ‘rock’ over ‘pop’, were countered by cultural conservatives who defended their own status as artists and intellectuals by exposing the Beatles as kitsch.
Highlights
From this one question regarding the artistry of the Beatles flowed scores more concerning the medium, genre, performance, composition, creation, reception, dissemination, evaluation and social context of popular music
Pepper and the critical reception accorded to Lennon and Ono
The early acceptance narrative appears in some of the first rock criticism (Cohn 1969, p. 128) and in an early rendering of Arthur Marwick’s ‘cultural revolution’ thesis (Marwick 1971, p. 175), which cited Mann’s and Buckle’s articles as evidence that the Beatles had conquered ‘all sections of British society’ by 1963. It has latterly been given a pejorative slant by Oded Heilbronner who, following in the tradition of New Left cultural criticism, argues that English popular musicians including the Beatles achieved acceptance by ‘modell[ling] themselves on the cultural codes of the English middle class’ (Heilbronner 2008, p. 110)
Summary
Three existing explanations make the case for early acceptance, accreditation and rejection They broadly correspond to the three events mentioned above: Mann’s 1963 article, the impact of Sgt. Pepper and the critical reception accorded to Lennon and Ono. Mann’s accolades seemed part of a trend when ballet critic Richard Buckle If the early acceptance narrative does not account for the hostility initially facing the Beatles, nor does it explain the equivocation of their first supporters Mann qualified his praise for the Beatles’ music with patronising comments about their fans and pop music as a whole, while Buckle’s comparison to Beethoven was facetious in intent. Gendron’s American model maps poorly onto Britain, where the Beatles lived and worked He suggests that there was ‘greater toleration of British high culture toward mass culture’ than was the case in the United States The purpose of incorporating material up to 1975, five years after their public break-up, is not to consider the Beatles’ solo careers, but to consider the first retrospectives of the Beatles’ career before punk and how the murder of Lennon transformed debates about the band (see Collins 2014, p. 82)
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