![]() This was partly a function of the times, but what’s interesting is the way they employed similar strategies in the service of divergent ends. In the five years from 1963 to 1968, the band went from infectious to insurrectionary, from singing about love to singing about social change. ![]() Their emergence not only helped usher in the era of pop culture, it changed society at the broadest level by redefining celebrity as a potent social force. ![]() That’s a great description, and it establishes the key conundrum of the Beatles - the tension between public image and private life. It was the new definition of ‘pop group’ they had created, something closer to the Marx Brothers than any forerunners like the Blue Caps or Shadows - a gang laughingly on the run from overblown adulation and desire, a brotherhood that in the brightest glare of publicity still kept its own intriguing secrets, the ultimate impenetrable clique.” “What captivated and fascinated Britain in late 1963,” Norman writes about the early bloom of Beatlemania, “was not just a pop group more extraordinarily and unstoppably successful than any before. In this, as in so much else, the Beatles created the template from which an industry would spring. Who was Lennon really, after all? Yes, he was a rock star, but that’s too simple, for rock stars as we currently conceive of them didn’t exist when he came along. ![]()
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