Yeah yeah yeah: The sixties screamscape of Beatlemania

Abstract

The screams of Beatlemania are well known and, when listening to or watching the Beatles live, impossible to ignore. Still, screams are too often dismissed as pure noise. In this article, I explore the “screamscape” of Beatlemania in context and consider the importance of the behaviors, attachments, and meanings associated with Beatle fandom among women in the 1960s. The screaming of fandom was a site of release, joy, and rebellion, especially when individual fandom was enacted in public—at concerts, on street corners, outside hotel rooms, and waiting at airports—and Beatlemania became a broad cultural current. Individually and collectively, these screams made up an important part of the soundscape of the 1960s, giving voice to young people, music fans, and women, and representing an early iteration of cultural rebellion and challenges to the confines of gender in a decade that would come to be defined by both. In listening to these screams and voices, I seek to locate the importance of popular music in young women's lives during Beatlemania and the significance of their fandom in American culture more broadly, placing both as integral to the history of the 1960s.