The Beatles: Modern or Postmodern - Essay Example

The Beatles - modern or postmodern The Beatles remain a remarkable commodity nearly forty years after the band split up. Perhaps the most famous and influential pop group in history, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr were responsible for massive cultural changes during the 1960's. They represented the move from 1950's conventionality to 1960's rebellion and yet, after the band split up in the late 1960's their influence only seemed to grow. In 2006 two new "Beatles" products appeared with a Las Vegas show dedicated to their music and the release of "Love", an album of remixed recordings by their long-time producer George Martin which is used in the Las Vegas show. Two of the Beatles are now dead, but the icon of "Beatles" remains, having moved from a Modernist, central position within world culture to a postmodernist, ironic placement as a mixture of nostalgia and commercialism. When The Beatles first appeared on music scene in 1963, the idea of a musical band being anything more than simply a group of young men (and sometimes women) who played live and who would, if successful, release records, had yet to be invented. Pop groups, even those that became phenomenally successful in a manner never seen before, were clearly definable, and limited Modernist figures. A clear delineation could be made between the pop group and the musical culture/general world in which they performed and lived. In a modernist and semiotic sense, the relationship between signifier ("The Beatles") and signified (the live performances and records) was fairly clear (Barthes, 1978). But as early as the late stages of Beatlemania in 1964, a postmodern uncertainty was coming into the sign "Beatles" as a slippery commutability between signifier and signified started to occur. Essentially "The Beatles" became a signifier for much more than the signified of their music. The hysterical "love" that surrounded the four young from Liverpool reached such extreme and massive proportions that some seriously suggested that the fans were suffering from some kind of mass hysteria. "The Beatles", to put them in a Freudian context, were bringing out an id within their fans that dominated their ego and superego. While the raw sexuality of Beatles music was making the previous icon of rebellion, Elvis Presley, seem relatively tame by comparison, their success within Britain caused them to become icons of the mainstream establishment as well. In 1965 Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the MBE, a civil honor, on the band. Their dominance of the music industry - on April 4th 1964 they had all top five records on the Billboard Top 100 (Spitz, 2006) - had apparently led them to become icons of that most traditional of British institutions, the monarchy. When John Lennon told the Royal Command Audience that they should applaud, only the rich should jangle their jewelry the "servants" of the Queen who had been commanded to perform for her (and who bowed so low) were now ironically commenting upon the British class system. The move to postmodern irony had already started before the famous mop-tops were grown long, the Beatles stopped performing live, and the concept studio album took over. The role of the Beatles as something more than merely a pop group began to take on far greater proportions as the Sixties rolled on. Thus they were seen as having snubbed the President of the Philippines' wife and barely escaped the country with their lives, and John Lennon caused a huge uproar by his less-than-diplomatic, but probably correct assertion that the Beatles were at the time more popular than Jesus (Spitz, 2006). Much of 1970's fashion can be traced to a single Beatles album cover: that of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thus the sheer range of culture and society that the Beatles influenced eventually drowned out the importance of their music. An ideal symbol of this tendency was the perhaps apocryphal moment when the band stopped playing at a gig only for the audience not to notice because of the noise they were making. In true postmodern fashion, the background noise of the Beatles became louder than the actual music, both literally and metaphorically. Turning to the period after the Beatles split up, which is in fact more now nearly forty years in length, a clear pattern can be identified. The further away from the 1960's time passed, and thus the more remote from the time that the actual Beatles were playing together, the further the sign of "Beatles" became dispersed through society. Here what Baudrillard (1993) termed "the endless commutability of the sign" comes into play. Thus one signifier leads to another signifier which in turn leads to another, all without perhaps gaining any solid signified at the end of the chain. For example, in one episode of The Simpsons (Martin, 1993) Homer wins a Grammy with a Barbershop quartet and meets George Harrison at a party afterwards. From this point on in the episode various Beatles allusions occur, including Barnie (the most talented of the quartet) meeting a corpse-like Japanese woman who decides to sit in on their sessions in order to bring some "real talent" to the proceedings. Eventually they go their separate ways, but only after playing one last performance on top of a building, and then Homer says, "I hope we passed the audition". Thus a series of Beatles allusions occurs within the episode, but they are designed to comment upon the supposedly mediocre music of the Eighties as compared to the "real thing" of the Sixties. The Beatles have thus become the ultimate self-referential sign within the postmodern world. At times this self-reference becomes very complicated: in the episode of The Simpsons just discussed George Harrison actually guest stars as himself using his voice. Thus a cartoon characterization of a real person using the actual person's voice is contained within a satirical take upon the band the person belonged to together with a wry comment upon the 1980's . . . the endless commutability is clear to see here. As the time since the Beatles were actually together has passed so their influence has expanded. John Lennon was murdered in New York, thus joining a pantheon of other 1960's stars who are "forever young" because of their untimely death (Goldman, 1988). In the early 1990's the surviving actually added backing to a solo tape of Lennon singing a song, thus in a sense creating a posthumous album with their dead band-member. Beatles paraphernalia now far outsells actual CDs (or downloads) of their music (Kane, 2005). Much of this merchandise is actually bought by people who were born after The Beatles split up. It is the iconography and association of the Beatles that attracts these people, and yet these are both now so diffuse that they may bare little relation to the actual band of the 1960's. Some Beatles songs have become such a part of the fabric of Western culture and society that they are essentially wheeled out at times of crisis to reassure people. For example, Paul McCartney sang "Let It Be" at the concert for the families and colleagues of 9/11/2001 victims. What precise relevance this song might have to what had just occurred in New York is rather hard to see, and yet thousands were reduced to tears within the auditorium only at this point in the evening. McCartney, who can essentially no longer sing, produced an embarrassing performance of one of his greatest compositions, but the quality of the music was irrelevant. It was the huge familiarity of the song that enabled McCartney to touch and essentially provide comfort to an audience in the extraordinary manner that he did. From being new and innovative, developing pop music to a complexity that had been scarcely imagined before, the Beatles have slowly become one of the most conventional and unthreatening cultural icons. When the Beatles received their MBEs in 1965 several people returned their own honors saying the Queen was debasing them through giving them to mere pop stars. But by the 1990's when Paul McCartney was Knighted, there was scarcely any surprise at all. If there could be a Sir Paul McCartney then why not a Sir Elton John (a few years later there was) or even a Sir Tom Jones (which occurred in 2006) As some of the most powerful symbols of postmodern culture the Beatles moved from being apparently shocking and dangerous to being conventional and even hackneyed. Within the endless commutability of the sign that occurs within the postmodern world there is no threat to be seen within artists such as the Beatles because they have rendered values meaningless. The idea of merchandising individual artistic products within other fields was first introduced by the Beatles, and then perfected by the merchandising deal that George Lucas signed with Star Wars. Since that time all the arts have become melded into a huge merchandising system in which commercialization is king. Thus every film seems to have tie in with a fast-food chain (if aimed at children), a video game (if aimed at teenagers and young adults) and numerous other kinds of paraphernalia. If a film is to be really successful it will try to have as many different offshoots as possible: indeed, the actual film often disappears beneath them. It is thus partially the responsibility of the Beatles that a Da Vinci Code video game is now available. . . . To conclude, the Beatles started as a modernist type of cultural artifact: they challenged preconceived notions as to what a pop group could and could not be. People worshipped and reviled them. Fans stalked them, critics burned their records, psychopaths murdered them. But over time the Beatles became a postmodern sign, endlessly repeating itself as a signifier without ever reaching a signified. At the present time there are over 29,000 books dealing with "The Beatles" being listed on Amazon.com; the Beatles have become an industry unto themselves, even though two of them are dead and the other two have not produced any new worthwhile material in decades. _________________________________ _____________________________________ Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Hill and Wang, New York: 1978. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. Verso, New York: 2993. Goldman, Albert. The Lives of John Lennon. William Morrow, New York: 1988. Kane, Larry. Lennon Revealed. Running Press, New York: 1005. Martin, George (prod.), The Beatles: Love. Apple Records, London: 2006. Martin, Jeff. "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" The Simpsons, September 30th, 1993. Spitz, Bob. The Beatles: The Biography. Back Bay Books, New York: 2006. Read More