Popular Culture Review Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter 2016 | Page 71

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