Cultural impact of the Beatles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles hold a record that no other act in history has matched: between February 1964 and July 1970, they had the top-selling single in the United States one out of every six weeks. On the 9th of February 1964, roughly 73 million viewers across more than 23 million American households tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show to watch four young men from Liverpool perform live for the first time on US television. The Nielsen rating service reported it was the largest audience ever recorded for an American television program. What followed was not simply a music career. It was a cultural realignment that touched the shape of British society, the global ambitions of rock music, the habits of young people on every inhabited continent, and the course of the Cold War. How did four musicians from a port city in northern England come to be described as the only pop group whose removal from history would have made things significantly different? The answer runs through Merseybeat and moptops, the civil rights movement and communist Eastern Europe, fashion trends and contested chord progressions, and a single animated television series that ran on ABC for four years. This documentary follows those threads.

• 2. The Mersey Sound

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  Liverpool had a structural advantage that most British cities lacked. As the UK's main transatlantic port, it gave local musicians access to American records through the Cunard Yanks, the sailors who worked the shipping routes and brought back rhythm and blues, girl group recordings, and other sounds that had not yet reached the rest of Britain. The Beatles formed in that city in 1960, absorbing American influences alongside skiffle and honing their live act through long seasons performing in the Hamburg red-light district. When their popularity grew in 1963, the terms "Mersey sound" and "Merseybeat" entered the British press, marking the first time in the country's pop history that a sound and a geographic location had been linked together. Before them, the UK music industry was centred on London, with domestic acts generally seen as pale imitations of American originals. Their debut single as EMI recording artists, "Love Me Do", released in October 1962, stood apart from the polished style of contemporary British hits. Author Peter Doggett describes the January 1963 follow-up, "Please Please Me", as "the real birth of the new", saying it was "more driven than any previous British pop record". As musicians who were also their own songwriters, the Beatles established working-class authenticity as a hallmark of British rock. Their first two albums, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, each topped the Record Retailer LP chart for a combined run of 51 consecutive weeks.

• 3. The British Invasion

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  Most Americans first encountered the Beatles through "I Want to Hold Your Hand", which rose to the top of US charts on the 1st of February 1964. Ian MacDonald wrote that every American artist asked about the song said the same thing: "it altered everything, ushering in a new era and changing their lives." Eleven weeks before the Beatles arrived, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. American commentators at the time linked young people's embrace of the band to that national mourning; author Nicholas Schaffner later wrote that the Beatles "more than filled the energy gap" left by Kennedy's death and by the decline of 1950s rock. In early 1964, Life magazine declared: "In 1776 England lost her American colonies. Last week the Beatles took them back." By mid-1964, several more UK acts had arrived in the US, among them the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Billy J. Kramer, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. One-third of all top ten US hits that year were performed by British acts. The depth of the Beatles' impact was also felt in classical and easy listening circles, with the Boston Pops Orchestra recording "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and the Hollyridge Strings releasing the 1964 album The Beatles Song Book. Social historian Arthur Marwick identifies the Beatles' American breakthrough as the "single critical event" that established what he calls "the hegemony of youth-inspired British popular culture", a shift that extended to exports revenue, film, and the recognition of London as the leading city of international culture.

• 4. Beatlemania

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  The word "Beatlemania" was coined by the British press in late 1963, first coming into wide use after the band's appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the 13th of October, when reports of wild crowd scenes outside the venue spread while 15 million viewers watched the broadcast. The Royal Variety Performance on the 4th of November that year was watched by 26 million people, roughly half the population of the UK. Lennon had told manager Brian Epstein he planned to sabotage the occasion; instead, he charmed the audience by asking those in the cheaper seats to clap and the rest to "rattle your jewellery". When the group toured Australia in June 1964, a crowd of 300,000 greeted them in Adelaide, the largest recorded gathering of Australians in one place. Around 4,000 fans gathered outside Buckingham Palace on the 26th of October 1965 when the Beatles received their MBEs, chanting "God save the Beatles" and scaling the palace gates. Journalist Robert Sandall later wrote that never had a ruling monarch been so thoroughly upstaged by a group of her own subjects. The intensity of fan devotion was such that people with physical impairments were sometimes brought to the group in the belief that they had healing powers. Authors David Luhrssen and Michael Larson write that while subsequent boy bands have drawn screaming audiences, no act has "moved pop culture forward or achieved the breadth and depth of the Beatles' fandom".

• 5. Fashion, Image, and Merchandise

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  The Beatles' moptop haircut, a mid-length style that was widely mocked by adults, became an emblem of rebellion for the youth culture that was beginning to coalesce around them. Authors Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs argued in their 1986 book Re-making Love that the haircuts signalled androgyny and thus presented a less threatening version of male sexuality to teenage girls, while the band's presentable suits made them seem less "sleazy" than Elvis Presley to middle-class white Americans. Russian historian Mikhail Safonov wrote in 2003 that in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, mimicking the Beatles' hairstyle was itself an act of defiance; young people were called "hairies" by their elders and forced to have their hair cut in police stations. The Chinese name for the Beatles in Modern Standard Mandarin was chosen to reflect the musicians' hairdos, with the first two characters referring to unruly hair. Clothing influence ran from their Pierre Cardin suits and Cuban-heeled Beatle boots to the Carnaby Street mod fashions they adopted later, and eventually to Nehru jackets and other Indian-style clothing in the late 1960s. The merchandise operation was correspondingly vast. In the US, products authorised through Seltaeb ran to what author Nicholas Schaffner estimated as "several hundred" items, including toys, clothing, alarm clocks, pillowcases and lunchboxes. Beatles wigs became, in Schaffner's words, "the best-selling novelty since yo-yo's". Beatles-brand chewing gum alone generated millions of dollars in the US. King Features' animated television series The Beatles, which broadcast on ABC from September 1965 to April 1969, was the first animated series to depict living people and extended the merchandise operation into cartoon-style products marketed by companies including Nestlé.

• 6. Music as Serious Art

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  Pop music received its first serious coverage in the arts section of a major British broadsheet in December 1963, when William Mann, The Times's classical music critic, wrote an appreciation of the Beatles. In July 1964, A Hard Day's Night made the Beatles the first pop act since Buddy Holly to release an album consisting entirely of original compositions. John Lennon's book of prose In His Own Write and its 1965 sequel, A Spaniard in the Works, furthered his individual artistic reputation. With their August 1965 album Help!, the Beatles became the first rock group to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The November 1965 album Rubber Soul is described by author David Simonelli as "the first serious effort by a rock and roll act to produce an LP as an artistic statement", while author Christopher Bray calls it "the first long-playing pop record to really merit the term 'album'". In May 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band achieved what author Peter Doggett calls "the biggest pop happening" between the band's debut on American television and Lennon's murder in December 1980. Its win in the Album of the Year category at the 1968 Grammy Awards was the first time a rock LP had received that distinction. Critic Tim Riley identifies the Beatles as pop music's "first recording artists", whose work represents "very intricate art". Their music publishing company Northern Songs was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1965, defying analysts' predictions by becoming a major financial success. Harrison's song "Something" earned rare praise from Frank Sinatra, who called it "the greatest love song of the past fifty years".

• 7. Civil Rights and Political Impact

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  In August 1964, the Beatles were informed that the venue for their the 11th of September concert, the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, was racially segregated. They said they would refuse to perform unless the audience was integrated. City officials relented. The band also cancelled their reservations at the whites-only Hotel George Washington in Jacksonville. American singer Brian Hyland recalled of the episode: "They were really the first group to have the power to do that. They used that platform really well." On the same tour, the Beatles repeatedly voiced their admiration of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and soul artists including the Miracles, Marvin Gaye and Chuck Jackson. Miracles leader Smokey Robinson said he was grateful for their championing of Motown music, adding that they "were the first white artists to ever admit that they grew up and honed themselves on black music". The band subsequently invited Mary Wells to be their support act on a UK tour and arranged for Esther Phillips to give her first performances outside the US in 1965. Documents revealed by Mark Lewisohn show that for their 1965 and 1966 tours, the Beatles included clauses in contracts requiring integrated shows. Back in Britain, their political significance was palpable by 1964. In the run-up to that year's general election, the New Statesman reported that Conservative candidates were told to "mention the Beatles whenever possible". Harold Wilson engineered a photograph with the group in March 1964 and was seen as having secured the youth vote as a result, contributing to his election victory. When the band received MBEs from Queen Elizabeth II in October 1965, Tony Benn, a minister in Wilson's Cabinet, thought the award also reflected the royal family's desire to appeal to the masses in what he saw as a new era of egalitarianism.

• 8. Beyond the Decade

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  The reach of the Beatles' influence extended well past the decade in which it was forged. Cover versions of "Yesterday" had reached 1,600 by 1986, making it among the most recorded songs in history. "She Loves You" was the best-selling single in UK chart history from its release until 1978. As of 2019, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band held the position of the all-time third best-selling album in the UK and the best-selling studio album there, with certified sales of 5.1 million copies. The band's six consecutive number-ones on the Billboard Hot 100 from January 1965 to January 1966 remained unbeaten until Whitney Houston achieved a seventh in 1988. Documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead, a former Cold War intelligence operative, reported in the 1990s that Russian rock musicians told him the Beatles had "played a really significant part in helping to wash away totalitarianism", with many young Russians having learnt to speak English through the band's lyrics. Russian musician Sasha Lipnitsky put it plainly: "The Beatles brought us the idea of democracy... For many of us, it was the first hole in the Iron Curtain." Tom Petty, who joined his first band in Gainesville, Florida, after seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, recalled that within weeks, he could drive through literally any neighbourhood in Gainesville and hear garage bands playing, and that within a year, the city probably had fifty bands. Time magazine included the Beatles in its list of the twentieth century's 100 most important people, and The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, writing in 2001, defined their influence as encompassing "all of Western culture".