renewed importance in our musical landscape are due to a very specific artistic and
cultural context which created a privileged connection between sender and receiver, the
evolution of which over the past three decades tends to indicate that the Fab Four will
remain forever the number one rock band – the only one which was ever allowed to
express true art in popular music, free from the constraints of a brave new music
industry that ironically was born out of and consolidated through Beatlemania.
The Art in Pop
After a long up-hill canonical battle in the music academic circles, and as the
distinction between culture and popular culture becomes a little hazier everyday, The
Beatles have indisputably achieved the status of true artists, for their work possesses
the two characteristics we all instinctively admit as sure signs of worthwhile artistic
endeavors: originality and endurance. Both notions are naturally related to each other,
and one could argue that it is precisely their originality which allowed the Beatles to offer
a polysemic enough message to resist the passing of time and effortlessly connect with
new generations. However, beyond Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s undeniable
talent as song writers and musicians, which for a Beatles expert such as Kim Monday
bears more weight upon the Beatles’ trajectory than the generally accepted notion of
being the first modern rock band31, this originality is also the result of the utter freedom
the Beatles enjoyed and which allowed them to established a connection with their
public which was not yet filtered and administered by pre-existing structures of
commercialization and distribution.
Such a status, that of the first pop musical act to be considered artistically
significant enough to be eligible for canonization, has naturally spawned a great deal of
bibliography ranging from fan literature to more academically oriented inquiries, the
sheer amount of which is enough to discourage any well-intentioned cultural scholar.
However, when considered along the lines of the three main paradigms that compose
the universal axis of communication, i.e., sender/message/receiver, we observe that the
vast majority of the textual production devoted to The Beatles usually revolves around
only one of the three aforementioned paradigms, and in particular around that of the
sender, which seems to have inspired most critics at all levels, as the story of the Fab
Four’s lightning rise to fame is told over and over again, from Nicholas Shaffner’s now
classic Beatles Forever to the recent issue of People that celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of Beatlemania (People Special, 4/2/14). It is indeed not a coincidence if
Mark Lewisohn, author of The Complete Beatles Chronicles, and considered by many
as the foremost authority on the subject, is precisely a cultural historian, hard at work
retracing the most minute details of the band’s career from the very begi