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The Beatles meet reporters at Kennedy Airport in New York City, Feb. 7, 1964.

The Nation‘s critic fails to catch Beatlemania.

Popular music in America is better than ever. For the first time in the history of the Top-Forty-Juke-Box-Best-Sellers there is some correspondence between the singer and the song. The best of today’s vocalists—Diane Warwick, Martha and the Vandellas, Dusty Springfield, Patty Labelle and the Blue Belles—are young people singing from their own experience in a song that is a part of their particular heritage. They learned this music at home, at church and in the neighborhood— and after the recording session is over, it’s only natural that they should keep on singing in the same way about the same things.

In this sense, they are the real folk singers of our time, far more “authentic” than the city-billy’s academically perfect imitation of a sound created from an experience different from his own. As much as he sounds like Leadbelly or Big Bill Broonzy, Johnny Hammond did not grow up a black man in the South; nor did the New Lost City Ramblers learn their old-timey mountain music as poor Kentucky farmers. Their musical tradition goes back no farther than some very careful listening to old Library of Congress tapes and Folkways recordings.



Musically, the Beatles are an anachronism. They come pure and unadulterated from the early 1950s, the simple, halcyon days of rock ‘n roll: Bill Haley and his Comets, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, the Eberle [sic] Brothers, the Ted Steele Bandstand. The Beatle sound is primitive rock ‘n roll—straight four-four rhythm, undistinguishable melody, basic three-chord guitar progressions electrically amplified to a plaster-crumbling, glass-shattering pitch. It’s loud, fast and furious, totally uninfluenced by some of the more sophisticated elements in American music that have brightened our pop scene in recent years. One can only assume that Ray Charles, gospel, rhythm and blues, country and western, and other purer folk sound has yet to cross the Atlantic. The English always have been a bit behind us—witness Oliver, a good old-fashioned American musical comedy, or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other realistic films in the 1930s’ style. Often they do improve upon our models; the Beatles, with their American accents, their savagely delivered musical cliches, their tight pants, hair cuts and wild gyrations, are more entertaining and intelligent than anything we produced ten years ago.


Most did what was expected of them and went home disappointed. Disappointed because nothing really passed from the stage to the audience that night, nor from one member of the audience to another. There was mayhem and clapping of hands, but no sense of a shared experience, none of the exultation felt at a spontaneous gathering of good folk musicians, or, more important, at a civil rights rally where freedom songs are sung. The spectacle of all those anguished young girls at Carnegie Hall, trying to follow “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” seems awfully vapid compared to the young men and women who sing “I Woke Up This Mornin’ With My Mind” (. . . Stayed on Freedom). The Beatles themselves are lively and not without charm. Perhaps their greatest virtue is their sense of humor and self-caricature. But Beatlemania as a phenomenon is manna for dull minds.