Still Fab - The Beatles and their timeless influence

Reason, June, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

The pop music of the '50s that was overwhelmed by rock was the last stage of big-band music; band singers like Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney displaced the bands as headline attractions after World War II, though they continued to perform in the old-fashioned idiom of the band era. While rock swept many of these singers offstage, the younger vocalists who replaced them quickly took up the same traditional pop narrative that has been going on since the 1890s, when the first commercial hit song ("After the Ball") established it. That narrative addresses a limited number of themes involving social identity, pleasure, personal fulfillment, and, above all, issues of courtship. These themes continued to dominate the new rock charts as they had the earlier songs, even though they were sung, played, and received in new ways. The musical break in the 1950s was not one of emotional substance, as the rock establishment likes to suggest; it was one of emotional style.

The separation between these two emotional styles is not nearly so distinct as rock would like to think. While rock is never threatened by its other influences--it is never about to become the blues, much less jump or country music--it has repeatedly been threatened by pop.

In fact, one of the original merits of the Beatles is, supposedly, that they arrived to rescue American rock at just such a point of decay. According to this take, Elvis had been reduced to a bel-canto fraud, singing such horrors as a rewrite of "O Sole Mio" ("It's Now or Never"); acts such as Ben E. King were doing over-lush numbers like "Spanish Harlem" and "Amor"; pop figures such as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme had been sneaking back into the Top 10; the Beach Boys were doing barbershop harmonies; the model of teen excitement was Rick Nelson, a sitcom spinoff. Rock was forgetting itself amid symphonic arrangements and a crooner revival, when suddenly the Beatles exploded on the scene with three guitars, a set of drums, a bluesy harmonica, and a "Whoa, yeah!" whoop.

This is a tendentious picture of the time; it ignores, among other matters, James Brown, early Motown, Phil Spector, and the Atlantic Records groups (such as the Drifters), and it downplays the merits of Brill Building music. But it's not an entirely false picture, either. The Beatles, along with the torrent of British Invasion groups that followed them into the American market, trimmed the Top 40's excrescences, invigorated its sound, and addressed its audience with new subjects.

This story is often interpreted in terms of rock's Romantic myth. According to this narrative, British musicians had been closer students of America's own musical heritage than Americans had been, especially regarding the lost heritage of the blues. British groups listened eagerly to recordings that most Americans didn't know existed, incorporated the rhythms and instrumentation into their own styles, and returned the vigorous result to surprised and delighted American audiences. This story is demonstrably true for many of the British (and Irish) groups that enjoyed American success; one can clearly hear the influence in the early hits of such groups as the Animals, the Yardbirds, Them, the Spencer Davis Group, and, obviously, the Rolling Stones.