Can’t Buy Me Love
I started reading a book about The Beatles this week called “Can’t Buy Me Love” by Jonathan Gould. The book aims to define why the postwar social and industrial fabric of the world was the perfect environment for a cultural revolution unlike any artist had achieved before or has achieved sense.
The figures are mind-boggling, especially as a member of the last generation of consumers that will ever remember what it was like to have to go to record stores to buy albums before technological advances and aging business models began to shake the record industry into crisis mode. At the height of their pop-stardom in the first quarter of 1964, The Beatles constituted 60% of all music sales in the country. Meet The Beatles sold 2 million copies in it’s first three weeks alone. Their debut performance on American television (2/9/74 on the Ed Sullivan Show) was watched by 74 million Americans, or roughly 34 percent of the entire domestic population at the time. According to Gould, Capitol Records would go on to collect roughly 13,900 newspaper articles published about The Beatles around the country throughout their two week stay.
It’s incredible to read accounts of Beatlemania because I wasn’t around to witness it. I was born in 1983, thirteen years after The Beatles disbanded in 1970, and as an independent artist clawing at the achievement of something considered even marginally successful within the collapsing constructs of today’s industry, it’s dizzying to imagine what it might have been like to be a part of the hysteria that used to surround the rock and roll explosion at its peak.
Reading this book makes me realize that what I do used to have cultural significance. It used to be a unifying force among a rebellious youth, a voice that challenged the existence, politics, religion, and pop-culture. I read about how Bob Dylan was the voice of a generation and wonder:
Who among us is going to grow some guts and be the voice of ours?
