The Beatles invented rock music as we know it, and as pretty much everyone has known it since the mid-1960s. But because their success was so revolutionary, it's hard to remember where the music seemed to be headed before they arrived in the United States 50 years ago -- or to imagine what might have happened if they had not.
There are some familiar
myths: One is that by 1964 rock 'n' roll had become insipid music
dominated by teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and the other is
that the Beatles introduced white American teenagers to the power of
black music. In fact, the rock 'n' roll scene had become increasingly
integrated through the early 1960s, to the point that in late 1963
Billboard magazine stopped publishing separate pop and R&B charts
because so many of the same records were on both.
The big new sound in rock
'n' roll was Motown, and James Brown was coming up strong, having
broken onto the pop charts with his "Live at the Apollo" album.
Back then, pop prophets
were divided into roughly two camps: Some predicted that
African-American artists would increasingly dominate the rock 'n' roll
scene, providing a joyously danceable soundtrack to the broader story of
a triumphant civil rights movement. Others continued to optimistically
predict the demise of rock 'n' roll, pointing to all the young people
who were abandoning teen dance music for more mature and intelligent
styles like folk and jazz. All agreed that the teens buying rock 'n'
roll singles and dancing up a storm to the Supremes were the opposite of
the serious folk and jazz fans buying LPs and discussing them endlessly
in college dorms.
That divide seemed
unbridgeable: People who loved rock 'n' roll thought of it as thrilling,
fun, youth music, and expected adults to hate it, while people who
appreciated adult styles considered them an antidote to the stupid noise
on the radio. The few who imagined rock 'n' roll growing up thought it
would take the path of jazz, getting hipper, blacker, and more
melodically and harmonically complex. But most people assumed it would
remain kid's music and even its most passionate acolytes would grow up
to prefer other styles.
No one could have dreamed
that rock 'n' roll would be reshaped as a sophisticated British import,
or that anyone would want to mingle the already old-fashioned sound of
Chuck Berry with baroque string quartets, Indian sitars and avant-garde
poetry.
The Beatles were not only unimagined, but unimaginable.
50th Anniversary of Beatlemania
Ringo Starr's shout-out to Wolf Blitzer
Revoluntionary impact of The Beatles
Working for the Beatles
It took the Beatles a
couple of years to evolve from peppy rockers to psychedelic
culture-trippers, but they transformed Americans' image of rock 'n' roll
within hours of stepping off the plane at Kennedy Airport. Previous
rockers had been famously inarticulate -- in the movie "Jailhouse Rock,"
when a group of college professors asked Elvis what he thought of Dave
Brubeck, his response was to sullenly slam out of the room, sure that
they were laughing at him.
The Beatles, by contrast,
were witty and urbane. When reporters asked them silly questions about
their long hair and screaming female fans, they responded with elegant
mockery. Their Liverpool accents may have struck Britons as provincial
and working class, but to Americans they sounded dazzlingly
sophisticated.
The Beatles backed up
their exotic charm with brilliant music, but at least for the first
couple of years that was somewhat secondary -- witness the success of
fellow invaders like Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clarke Five. They had
lovely harmonies and interesting melodies, but in retrospect those
early records sound no more advanced or earthshaking than what was
coming out of Motown, and "Yesterday" sounds positively archaic next to "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag."
The change that
redirected the course of American pop was this: By 1965, the year those
two records appeared, the British Invasion had resegregated the charts
and no one was comparing the Beatles to James Brown. They are remembered
as rock 'n' rollers, he is remembered as playing soul and funk. The
Brits didn't do that on purpose -- they loved contemporary
African-American styles (the Beatles told 16 Magazine that Brown was
their favorite singer) -- but they couldn't manage the tricky new
rhythms, so they fell back on older varieties of blues and rock 'n'
roll.
For dancers, that made
their music relatively boring, and after the first wave of Beatlemania
the twisting, frugging girls abandoned them for Motown, then moved on to
funk and disco.
But their blues-based,
guitar-driven sound and increasingly adventurous lyrics created an
unexpected bridge to the folk crowd -- they inspired Dylan to go
electric, he inspired them to write obscure poetry instead of poppy love
lyrics, and rock became music that boys discussed seriously in dorm
rooms.
Every revolution has
winners and losers. A generation of black musicians remembers the
Beatles' arrival as an apocalypse, the moment when rock 'n' roll became
white and they were banished to a lower-status ghetto labeled R&B or
soul. On the other hand, millions and millions of listeners all around
the world remember the Beatles as leveling the divide between high art
and street pop, paving the way for 50 years of rock innovation, and
making some of the most spectacular music of the 20th century.
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