Beatles won a new audience for mass music and left the hit parade with a musical example that will be hard to forget.
“The Beatles have done it again” rings the cry after each new hit. What the Beatles do agin and again is show that pop music can be alive, inventive and unrepetitious, even beautiful.
Teen-agers pass out squealing at the Beatles to be sure but these impish lads from Liverpool are laughing. Not only at the screaming girls but at themselves. Their undying sense of humor is the first clue that they are not ordinary matinee idols.
The Beatles keep making faces at you, almost sticking out their tongues and saying. “Neh,neh neh I fooled you!” Their album covers of funny faces suggest that “If you buy this record, you have to take our funny faces with it” or “I wonder if the fans would love us in crewcuts?” This all-pervading sense of humor comes through in every record-even when they are yelling “Help!” or “Yeah, Yeah Yeah”
A Beatles’ fan at the University of Chicago explains it this way “The Beatles maintain double image, one of the pop hero and the other four sensitive human beings. One appeals to me and the other appeals to me”
There is a genuine and healthy need among modern youth for proof that you can make it in the mass media world and still, like John Lennon, write two books of poetry, “In His Own Write” and “A Spaniard in the Works”
