Their songs showed that girls and women could have the upper hand in a relationship.
Their songs showed that girls and women could have the upper hand in a relationship.
A t the beginning of this week, we find ourselves in the eye of the hurricane as far as the Democratic and Republican conventions are concerned. The Democrats have just finished, the Republicans are about to begin, and the rest of us will soon be plunged back into the whirlpool of vacuous platitudes, self-serving propaganda, and partisan grievance from which we just emerged.
In the meantime, however, we should talk about the Beatles, simply because there’s never a bad time to talk about the Beatles. The endlessly generative music of the Fab Four has been playing on a loop as the soundtrack to our civilization ever since the sexual revolution of the ’60s. But there have been precious few attempts to reckon with Beatlemania as a lasting sociological phenomenon — as something as integral to the sexual revolution as the automobile or the birth-control pill. This is strange, and vaguely Marxist to boot. Undoubtedly, material factors are hugely important when it comes to explaining historical developments and trends, but conservatives and old-fashioned liberals have always rejected the idea that this approach to history is an exhaustive one. This rejection was articulated with eloquence by Churchill during one of his wartime broadcasts:
The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
No analysis of history is ever complete that does not seek to understand the state of the human soul in the time and at the place of the events in question. The interiority of history, the way it is driven by human beliefs, hopes, affections, and hatreds, has often been obscured in English-language historiography because our great thinkers, left and right, have mostly been materialists. The luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, along with their English counterparts, such as John Locke, posited a theory of the mind as a blank slate onto which the material of the world is projected and consciousness thus formed and developed. In other words, our minds are just receptacles for pure sense-data. The result is a philosophy that places far too much emphasis on physical or sensory experience. In both John Locke and Karl Marx, human identity is constituted in relation to property — i.e. stuff. John Locke cannot even bring himself to speak of the Christian God except as a kind of divine proprietor of human persons. In spite of all their differences, Locke (who is venerated on the American right) and Marx (who is venerated on the American left) agree that material conditions are the driving force and central concern of politics. Locke wants to protect property and Marx wants to abolish it, but they both share a commitment to its supremacy in human affairs.
A different way of approaching politics is offered up by Alexis de Tocqueville and the liberals of the French Restoration. Led by a philosopher of genius, Maine de Biran, these thinkers argued that our experience of ourselves shapes the world as much as the world shapes our experience of ourselves. Why does this matter? Because it means that you can’t understand history without understanding the thoughts, feelings, and convictions of human beings on their own terms. This is why Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is so different from Marx’s Capital or Locke’s Second Treatise on Government — when people profess that their beliefs do not emanate from their relationship with their property, Tocqueville believes them. His account of American exceptionalism has so much to do with Puritan Protestantism because he believes that man’s interior life, manifested in this case by religious faith, can affect the social structure as much as material factors.
So, why the Philosophy 101 primer? Simply because Tocqueville had the right approach, and if he had lived during our lifetime, he would certainly have written at least one book about the Beatles — maybe more. If the state of the soul has any real weight and worth when it comes to historical analysis, then any credible history of the sexual revolution must reckon with the souls of the screaming fangirls at Shea Stadium in ’66, quite literally wetting themselves at the sight of Paul McCartney. The Beatles were the soul of the ’60s, and their records were nothing less than vinyl liturgies, inducting the young into the patterns of worship that would shape the age of sexual autonomy in which we all now live.
To understand the ‘60s, you have to understand that the Beatles really, really wanted to be an African-American girl group. As Rob Sheffield writes in his book Dreaming the Beatles:
The Beatles loved girl groups with a passion — John Lennon famously spent his first night in New York City in his hotel room, calling up radio stations and asking them to play the Ronettes. They craved the extravagant girliness of the Shirelles (mentioned as the band’s biggest influence on the back cover of their first album) and the Shangri-Las and the Crystals — the way these girl singers combined deep fervor and silliness at top volume, acting out the run-mascara-run melodramas. . . . They loved turning themselves into those frenzied girls. Every time the Shirelles dropped a new 45, the Beatles scrambled to cover it — John sang “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” while Paul took “Mama Said.”
McCartney himself has spoken about the band’s early girl-group obsession:
We did the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy,” which is a girl’s song. It never occurred to us. No wonder all the gays liked John. And Ringo used to sing “Boys.” Another Shirelles number. It was so innocent. We never even thought, Why is he singing about boys? We loved the song. We loved the records so much that what it said was irrelevant, it was just the spirit, the sound, the feeling.
The Rolling Stones wanted to be Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, the Beatles wanted to be the Shirelles or the Ronettes. As a result of this, Lennon and McCartney began to write girl-group lyrics for their songs. In girl-group love songs of the ‘60s, there is a traditional division of masculine and feminine gender roles in matters of courtship. The singer (a woman) is an adoring onlooker, devoid of sexual agency but hoping against hope that the object of the song (a man) will choose her and treat her well. She is the supplicant, the subordinate party in the relationship. The man to whom she is singing is the one with all the choices, all the power, all the prerogatives, as society in the ’50s and early ’60s basically dictated. The Beatles completely reverse this dynamic. They put themselves in the place of the helpless, passive supplicant and bestow all of the sexual agency in the relationship on the girl. This dynamic is at work most explicitly in their recorded covers of girl-group songs, such as the Marvelettes’ “Please, Mister Postman.” Lennon changes the noun from “boyfriend” to “girlfriend,” and, in doing so, upends centuries of traditional gender dynamics:
There must be some word today
From my girlfriend so far away
Please, Mister Postman, look and see
If there’s a letter, a letter for meI been standing here waiting, Mister Postman
So patiently
For just a card or just a letter
Saying she’s returning home to me.
One begins to understand why the Beatles were such a cultural flashpoint in the United States during the middle of the last century. They were teaching boys and girls how to relate to one another in a completely different way than they had before. The controversially long hair was only a symbol, representing the fact that these songs were deconstructing the crew-cut, buttoned-down, Eisenhower-era models of masculinity and femininity. The Beatles told girls that it was okay to be the one making decisions and taking action when it comes to sex and relationships. They also gave boys permission to be more vulnerable and to ask for love and affection from the opposite sex. As a result of Lennon and McCartney’s role-reversal with the Shirelles and the Ronettes, they wrote songs in which men are more feminine and women are more masculine, in terms of how the two genders relate to one another, than had been the case in pop music before.
There are too many examples of this dynamic in Beatles songs to list all of them here, but a few are worth mentioning. The title of “Please Please Me” immediately puts the girl in the position of sexual agency, but even more than that, there’s one line of the song sums up everything the Beatles wanted to say to the girls of the ‘60s: “You don’t need me to show the way, love.” The Beatles are supplicants again on “Love Me Do,” and on their cover of their Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” but perhaps the most striking example of this attitude is on the barnstorming opener to the band’s second album, “It Won’t Be Long.” Lennon puts himself in a position of abject and obedient helplessness (“Every night when everybody has fun / Here am I sitting all on my own,” “I’ll be good like I know I should / You’re coming home, you’re coming home.”). The coup de grace, however, comes during the chorus. Any other rock-and-roll singer of the day would have sung the lyric “It won’t be long ’till you belong to me.” A line like that would convey the swaggering self-confidence of an Elvis Presley or a Mick Jagger. But it’s not the line Lennon wrote. Instead he sings, “It won’t be long ‘til I belong to you.” Ownership is imputed to the girl, and Lennon presents himself as her possession.
The constant ceding of agency to the girl in Beatles songs is relentless. “Tell me that you love me, baby / Let me understand / Tell me that you love me, baby / I wanna be your man,” “The girl that’s driving me mad / Is going away,” “She’s a big teaser / She took me half the way there,” “Will you still need me, will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four?” John Lennon can’t even tell the listener that he once “had” a girl without correcting himself: “I once had a girl, or, should I say, she once had me?”
Through these songs, the Beatles revived the courtly-love tradition of the Middle Ages and repackaged it for the purposes of sexual revolution. In medieval courtly-love poetry, such as Dante’s Vita Nuova, the poet is in the place of the supplicant and his “lady” in the place of the exulted love-object. Courtly love was always, however, unconsummated, sexually speaking. The poet did not want to marry his “lady,” because the monotonous warp and woof of child-rearing and domestic life isn’t fit for transcendent obsession and worship. Dante had a wife, but his wife was not Beatrice.
The sexual revolution changed all this. The advent of birth control meant that men and women could have breathless, transcendent sexual encounters without incurring any risk of parenthood or of the long-term domestic commitment that would take the edge off romantic ecstasy. The music of the Beatles divorces sex from any necessary connection with child-rearing and monogamy and pairs it with the exhilarating romantic ethic of the courtly-love tradition. They took the material conditions of the sexual revolution (the invention of effective birth control) and used it as a jumping-off point for renovating the relationship between the sexes. Not that any of this was deliberate, of course; no one, least of all the Beatles themselves, could have imagined that their music would have any kind of broad social influence, let alone that it would become the world’s favorite thing. But it is, nevertheless, what happened. There isn’t a single corner or facet of pop culture that hasn’t been affected by the way that John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang about girls.
Undoubtedly the social revolution that the Beatles took part in has had seismic effects, positive as well as negative. But the merits of the ’60s, what they gave us and what they took away, don’t really concern us for present purposes. I happen to think that the decoupling of sex and marriage is a catastrophe of civilization-threatening proportions, but I also think that gender relations in the ’50s were far from healthy. The point I’ve been trying to illustrate in this piece is that political discourse often gets so caught up in concern with material factors that it misses the irreducibly spiritual nature of political concerns. Material factors are merely the conditions of soulcraft. They force us to relate to ourselves in different and new ways, but it is still fundamentally that human relationship of the self to itself and to other selves that propels history forward (or backward). The Beatles may not have invented birth control, for instance, but they did invent the self-image of the young people of the ’60s who used it. They provided these young people with music and lyrics that acclimatized them to the new sexual technology and taught them how to use it to relate to each other in a new and exciting way. That’s why the girls in Shea Stadium lost their minds, their dignity, and any sense of self-restraint at the sight of Paul McCartney but probably hadn’t a clue as to who invented the Pill.