The Beatles
An article in The Guardian got me going. It doesn’t take a lot. A Cambridge University historian has published a study (what does that mean?) called Youth Culture In Modern Britain, claiming that the Beatles were not heroes of the counter-culture but capitalists who cynically exploited youth culture for commercial gain. This bloke David Fowler claims: “They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s.”Fowler claims that many commentators during the 1960s saw youth culture as being all about the Beatles. But he says that just because they were fantastically popular - maybe bigger than Jesus, as John Lennon said in 1966 - it did not make them leaders of their generation.
Instead Fowler identifies a dreamy, folk-dancing rural revivalist Rolf Gardiner, the father of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, as a true youth culture pioneer of 20th century Britain.
“They were young capitalists who, far from developing a youth culture, were exploiting youth culture by promoting fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer.”
Now I know The Beatles are big enough to take care of their own playground squabbles, but this sort of stuff is like a red rag to a bull with me. Not just because I’m a fan of the band, but because youth culture and pop and the state of the world it exists within are so vitally important to everything I’ve done with my life up to this point. I’ve lived through an age of cultural change, where racism, homophobia and sexism are gradually being challenged and altered largely through shifts in culture – an age where pop music, art, literature and film have repeatedly refused to accept the status quo and indicated and forced real political and social change.
The Beatles were an important part of that change; reducing their impact to “mindless screaming” ignores the impact of a band who reflected the evolution of pop culture from screaming fans to effective counter-cultural movement; from teen hysteria to anti-Vietnam protest; from mop-tops to student power; from Fab Four to Civil Rights Campaigns.
The Beatles reflected that change, echoing the feel of a decade when young people were learning to organise rebellion. They neither developed nor led ‘a youth culture,’ as Fowler rightly states, nor did they try to. But they served as an oppositional rallying-cry, they were the anti-Nixon in a way that Elvis could never be. They stood for the new cultural phenomena of change, in the way their music constantly reinvented itself, in the way they looked, and in their attitude to the pivotal issues of drugs and war.
Of course they were young capitalists pandering to ‘passive teenagers’. For a while. But they clearly got bored of that and threw themselves into a wholesale re-working of what a pop group can be. What were the ‘passive teenagers’, rioting on the streets in Paris, London and Chicago in 1968, listening to? Let me guess…
Certainly they weren’t listening to Rolf Gardiner, pre-war fascist sympathizer and all-round sandal-wearing nutjob who thought he might create popular cultural revolution by encouraging skinny-dipping and herb-growing with Nazi academics.
Basically an upper-class twit who swanned off to Germany to instigate a ‘masculine brotherhood’ and who wrote articles for The Times serenading the German Youth Movement and bemoaning “the impoverishment of the stock” in his racial theories, Gardiner seems to be exactly what The Beatles stood against – popular culture’s greatest achievements are its ability to break with the past and to deny conservatism, both politically and socially.
There, I got it out of my system. Now onto more important matters…
Boff
09 Oct, 2008 | chumba
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