Chapter 18: The Beatles
From 1964 until their breakup in 1970, the Beatles were the most popular and influential musical act in the world. Their impact extended far beyond record sales and fan adoration; they helped redefine the possibilities of pop music as a serious artistic medium. The Beatles shaped everything from songwriting and studio production to fashion, youth culture, and the global entertainment industry. Their legacy remains foundational to how we understand not only the 1960s but also the continuing evolution of popular music.
While many studies break up the Beatles’ story into separate chapters this book presents an overview of their entire career at once. This approach offers a cohesive view of how the band’s music evolved in tandem with the dramatic cultural shifts of the 1960s. Their early recordings, marked by upbeat rock and roll and love songs, captured the optimism of the postwar period. As youth countercultures emerged and political awareness deepened, the Beatles responded with more introspective, folk-inspired material on Rubber Soul (1965). Their psychedelic period, most fully realized on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band(1967), paralleled the era’s fascination with experimentation, communal ideals, and altered states of consciousness. By the end of the decade, the fractured textures of The White Album (1968) and the stripped-down finality of Let It Be (1970) echoed a broader cultural mood of disillusionment and fragmentation. Presenting their career in a single arc allows us to trace the band’s artistic development as a reflection of, and response to, the broader social and musical transformations of the 1960s. Seeing this progression in one arc sets the stage for deeper exploration of each topic in later chapters. In this way, the Beatles’ changing sound and public persona can be read as a barometer of the decade’s shifting social moods and cultural ideals.
Some may ask why a British band holds such a central place in a book about American popular music. The answer lies in the profound, reciprocal transatlantic dialogue that shaped pop in the postwar era. American rock and roll and rhythm and blues inspired the Beatles’ early sound, but their global success redefined American pop music itself. Their innovations challenged American artists to expand their creative ambitions, and their influence permeated everything from and their influence permeated everything from mainstream pop, Motown, folk-rock, to psychedelia. To understand the Beatles is to understand a key part of American musical and cultural history, refracted through the lens of four young musicians from Liverpool.
Understanding the Beatles as musicians remains a challenge in musicology, in part because their emergence represented a seismic shift in popular music with few precedents. They were white British artists who not only played rock and roll but wrote their own songs, developed distinct personal styles, and treated pop as a serious artistic medium. Their fame was unprecedented, and unlike most performers of their era, they eventually stopped touring to focus entirely on studio work—a move that helped redefine the boundaries of popular music.
One of the difficulties in analyzing the Beatles’ music is that musicologists often lack a full grasp of the commercial and stylistic context in which the group operated. Some early academic analyses sought to legitimize their work by drawing comparisons to canonical Western art music, noting, for example, the use of Aeolian cadences or modal harmonies and aligning them with composers like Schubert or Mahler. However, these elements were not consciously inserted by Lennon, McCartney, or Harrison; rather, they reflect the group’s intuitive ear for harmony and their absorption of folk and popular idioms. Their modal tendencies, for instance, are less the result of deliberate emulation of classical music than an unconscious inheritance from Anglo-Celtic folk music, The Beatles’ music drew from a broad vernacular palette: British music hall, American rock and roll, Motown, doo-wop, gospel, rhythm and blues, skiffle, folk, soul, and even Indian classical music and avant-garde styles like musique concrète.
This eclecticism marked them as “folk musicians” of the media age—artists shaped not by formal training but by what they heard. Influences like Motown shaped their sense of arrangement, rhythm, harmony, and melody. Instrumentally, the Beatles’ approach to composition was grounded in tactile experimentation. They often discovered new sounds by moving their hands around the fretboards of guitars or pianos, trying alternate tunings or exploiting the physical properties of their instruments. This hands-on method produced unusual chord voicings and progressions that defied classical norms but made intuitive sense within the grammar of pop. Their use of the studio as a compositional tool—particularly after 1965—was pioneering, as they embraced tape loops, backward recording, varispeed, and multitracking to construct soundscapes that could not be replicated in live performance.
Each member brought a distinct approach to songwriting. McCartney was a melodist whose tuneful optimism led to elegant, wide-ranging compositions. Lennon’s style was more speech-like, emotionally direct, and harmonically inventive. Harrison’s writing, originally more chordal and harmony-driven, expanded under the influence of Indian music and eventually adopted a more lyrical style. Collectively, their ability to combine unexpected harmonic choices, melodic invention, and studio experimentation created a body of work that defied easy classification and has yet to be equaled in the world of pop.
The Beatles’ impact on popular music and culture is difficult to fully capture. In terms of popular music alone, they reshaped the genre into what later generations would recognize as modern pop. They transformed songwriting practices, pioneered new approaches to studio production, helped establish music video as a promotional tool, and redefined the public image and performance style of rock musicians
Beyond their individual musicianship, the Beatles served as cultural touchstones throughout the 1960s. Their music and public image reflected many of the decade’s major cultural shifts—from youth rebellion and experimentation to introspection and spiritual searching—with a level of responsiveness so attuned that some observers credited them with initiating the very changes they seemed to mirror. While this perception overstates their role, it speaks to the depth of their influence as a popular music group that came to symbolize and shape the evolving cultural landscape of the late twentieth century.