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The Beatles The Beatles' influence on rock music and world culture was – and remains – immense. Their huge commercial success started an almost immediate wave of changes including: a move from US global dominance of rock and roll to UK acts; from soloists to groups; from professional songwriters to self-penned songs, and changes in fashion. They also provided the template for the self-contained four-piece guitar group.
Before their emergence, it was common for singers to rely on professional songwriters for their material (such as the Brill Building in New York City, which was a source of many hit singles in the early 1960s) as well as relying heavily on studio musicians for their recordings.
In October 2005, the US Variety magazine named The Beatles the #1 icons of the 20th Century, beating Louis Armstrong and Lucille Ball.
Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were recently (2006) named by more than a third (34 per cent) of those surveyed as the "Best of British" - with The Queen (18%), Harry Potter (14%) and the BBC (14%) behind them.*. In second place - after The Beatles - came the local English public house - 32% - which was followed by the British countryside - 27%. Shakespeare was named as the "Best of British" by only 13 per cent. "Posh and Becks" (David Beckham and Victoria Beckham) were chosen as the "Worst of British"; even less popular than "a rainy day" - in second place.
TV & Film
Although Elvis Presley used the medium of television in the 1950s in America to attract a wider audience (rather than just performing live or being heard on the radio) The Beatles had the advantage of being seen in the USA as well as on British TV in the early sixties, just as the sale of television sets increased dramatically (although only in black & white). Their influence on the medium of TV - and its rising importance - paved the way for presenters of programmes to utilise their fame, and performers/actors to include references to The Beatles in their own writing.
They also used film to present themselves to the public, as had Presley with his string of Hollywood muscials. The Beatles would - later in their career - move away from main-stream films to make more experimental movies - such as the Magical Mystery Tour - which influenced directors, such as the young Steven Spielberg, when he was in directing school (Anthology) and Tom Hanks (That Thing You Do!).
The music
Composition and recording
Whilst by no means the first to do so (Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry composed their own hits, for example), the Beatles' example made self-composition the standard for rock bands then and since. Although they did not necessarily invent all the new ideas they incorporated in their music, they often competed with and played off the developing ideas of other prominent acts of the period (such as Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and the Beach Boys). As such, they spurred rock music, which hitherto had been largely looked down upon by older music fans, towards becoming an accepted art form. When the Sgt. Pepper album was released, it was hailed by music critics of the time as a major work, and was even compared favorably to classical musicians such as Schubert and Schumann. Within days of its release, the album's title song was being covered by artists like Jimi Hendrix.The Beatles were known for utilizing extensive multitrack recording to layer their arrangements, much like how Brian Wilson recorded Pet Sounds. The Sgt. Pepper album was clearly influenced much by the production of Pet Sounds, but a significant difference is the Beatles' use of Stereo panning (Pet Sounds was mixed in mono). The stereo panning was very important to the sound of their records, as it featured rather unconventional placements of sounds in the stereo field (such as placing the bass all the way to the left, when it had been considered a "rule" to keep the bass centered).
The Beatles' use of various instruments is regarded as highly innovative. With the help of George Martin, they made wide use of string and brass overdubs for a variety of different musical effects and experimented with some more unconventional instruments. An early example is the string arrangement on "Yesterday"; other notable examples include the use of the sitar on "Norwegian Wood", the exclusive accompaniment of a string octet on "Eleanor Rigby", and the amusing orchestral arrangement (with an initial reference to "La Marseillaise") of "All You Need Is Love".
Instrumentation
The popularity of the individual Beatles combined with their considerable instrumental skills led to a better knowledge in the general public of the musical contributions made by lead guitar, rhythm guitar, drums, and particularly bass guitar.George Harrison was also the first musician of a pop group in the sixties to make use of the sitar. Because of its psychedelic sound, the instrument would soon be used by many other bands, such as The Rolling Stones, Love and Donovan. Ravi Shankar, who taught the sitar to George Harrison, would even be part of the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Length of Songs
The Beatles, along with several other artists such as The Doors and Iron Butterfly, pushed the boundary for just how long a standard single could be, recording songs of up to 4 or 5 minutes, which for the time, was almost twice the length of the average single, and seemed gargantuan by most people's standards. The Doors released a standard 3-4 minute version of "Light My Fire but the album version ran to seven minutes eight seconds. By the end of the decade 3-4 minute singles became quite common. This is generally accepted as being due to the influence of the Fab Four as evidenced by the nearly-eight minute number one hit, Hey Jude, which stayed on the charts at number one for nine weeks.The album format
Prior to The Beatles, record albums were of secondary consideration to 45s in mass marketing. Albums largely contained filler material along with one or two worthwhile singles. The Beatles, with the ability to produce albums with consistently well-regarded material and the desire to rarely use singles as part of full albums, helped to define the album as the preferred mechanism for releasing popular music, which in turn resulted in the development of new FM radio formats such as Album-oriented rock (AOR) in the 1970s. The Beatles' song "Hey Jude" was memorable in its time for helping to break down the barriers around pop music.
To conform with the preferences of commercial radio, most (though not all) songs released as singles up to that time were about three minutes in length; "Hey Jude" clocked in at over seven minutes and helped make it acceptable for a single to be longer than standard length. Even album covers changed during this period, becoming increasingly artistic -- works of art in their own right. (The Beatles seemed to rebel against this in 1968 when they released their plain white album The Beatles, known as the White Album.) While they were not alone in promoting these developments, they were clearly at the forefront of them.
The Beatles' album covers themselves were well-thought-out designs that have been copied and imitated hundreds of times by everyone from The Simpsons and The Muppets to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This has especially been the case with the covers of With the Beatles, which featured the four band members' faces half-darkened with shadows; The White Album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. Abbey Road in London has become a popular tourist attraction with countless numbers of tourists taking their photo walking along the crosswalk in front of Abbey Road studios.
One of their most experimental and personal cover designs was released and then recalled shortly thereafter. This was the 'Butcher Sleeve', photographed by Robert Whitaker. Originally intended by Whitaker to be one of a triptych of allegorical studies of the group, the photo was selected for the cover of the US version of the album Yesterday & Today; thousands of covers were printed, but the "Butcher Sleeve" version of the album was famously withdrawn from sale before release because of complaints from retailers. It has since become one of the rarest and most valuable of all Beatles collectibles.
Photos and music videos
Their rapid ascent to vast international fame quickly made the four Beatles among the most photographed people in history. As part of the assiduous image management of the band overseen by manager, Brian Epstein, the group was assigned a succession of leading photographers -- most notably Dezo Hoffmann and Robert Whitaker -- who helped Epstein to carefully sculpt the group's visual image. Whitaker took many of the best known photographs of the band during their heyday as a touring act between 1964 and 1966, including the famous photographs of their legendary Shea Stadium concert.
One other notable photographer who worked with the band was Richard Avedon, who photographed them for a famous and much reproduced series of psychedelic portraits in 1967, as well as the four portrait shots included as inserts with their 1968 album The Beatles ('The White Album').
The Beatles began filming promotional music videos for their songs in the middle of the 1960s, mainly because they wanted to send them to television programs so they wouldn't have to appear in person. This began the now common practice of releasing a video clip to go along with singles.
Perhaps the single most influential of all the visual representations of The Beatles was their first film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. It pioneered many now-standard techniques including the cutting of images to the beat of the music, and it is arguable that this film became the basic template from which the music video as a genre emerged. Especially notable is the "Can't Buy Me Love" segment, which features creative camera work, and the band running and jumping around in a field -- a device which almost immediately has become de rigeur for virtually every pop band since. (George Harrison of The Beatles and Michael Nesmith of The Monkees went on to become pioneering music video directors). Beatles promo videos include "Day Tripper," "Help!," "We Can Work It Out," "Ticket To Ride," "Paperback Writer," "Rain," "I Feel Fine," "Hello Goodbye," "Penny Lane," "A Day in the Life", "Revolution," "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," "The Ballad of John and Yoko," and "Something."
Their most innovative film-clip, which remains one of the landmarks of the genre, was that made in 1967 for the single "Strawberry Fields Forever". Shot in the late winter, in the afternoon and early evening, on Salisbury Plain, it depicted the group at the peak of their psychedelic phase, with long hair, colourful clothes, moustaches and what was soon to become Lennon's trademark, his 'granny glasses'. It used many techniques previously only seen in experimental film, including intricate jump-cuts that rapidly alternated between night and day, reversed film and other avant-garde devices.
Legacy
The Beatles' influence on rock music and world culture was – and remains – profound. The Beatles' legacy is of course tremendous, and they are popularly conceived to be one of the most influential artists of the last century.
Their clothes, hairstyles and choice of musical instruments made them trendsetters throughout the decade; their growing social awareness, reflected in the development of their music, saw their influence extended far beyond the music scene into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s; and their enduring popularity with successive generations of both fans and musicians has cemented their reputation for being one of the most influential music artists of all time.
Even decades after the band broke up, The Beatles have become a yardstick to which nearly all new rock and roll bands are compared. It is extremely common for new bands to be promoted as being "the next Beatles" or "the new fab four". It is also quite common for record reviewers and members of the media to refer to musical acts as being "Beatlesque" given The Beatles impact on Baby-Boomer culture. To this day, no new artist or band has quite lived up to the hype of being compared to The Beatles. Inspiring the same degree of popularity as The Beatles may be unattainable now due to the splintering of popular tastes in music.
The influence of The Beatles even extended beyond their music. Perhaps the most notable was their influence on male fashion. Their relatively long hair, when they burst onto the scene in 1964, was a shocking fashion statement, one that was quickly adopted by other rock bands of the time, and by the 1970s, long hair became standard fashion for men. The hair styles even led toy manufactures to begin producing plastic "Beatle Wigs". In the early Beatle-mania years, the Beatles would occasionally wear grey, collarless suits. These unusual suits eventually became extremely common for new bands after 1964. In fact, it was not unusual for bands to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show or another similar program wearing the suits made popular by the band.
See also
External links
"The Beatles' influence on popular culture"