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Beatlemania: Technology, Business, and Teen Culture in Cold War America. AndréMillard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 223 pp. $50.00 cloth.

2013; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.12034_11

1540-5931

Mindy Clegg,

Music History and Culture

Why Beatlemania? What made this one band from Liverpool, England so very special in the Anglo-American cultural landscape? These are the questions that André Millard wrestles with in his book, Beatlemania: Technology, Business, and Teen Culture in Cold War America. As one might suspect, the answer proves to be both complex and contradictory. The Beatles burst onto the transatlantic music scene at a fortuitous moment in what he dubs “Empires of Sound” (p. 54)—an evocative phrase describing the international music industry that emerged in the 20th century. Technology was opening up new directions within that industry. The shift in the music industry that happened in the late 1970s and 1980s Millard argues began with the Beatle's rise to superstardom. The Fab Four are not really at the center of this story, but rather provide important signposts. The real star of the show is the music industry, new recording technologies, and the rise of teen culture. With a few caveats, Millard convincingly argues that these three things intersected in interesting and novel ways at this time, creating new parameters in the music industry and how it operated. Millard argues that Beatlemania represented a near-universal social phenomenon in the 1960s. He peppers the book with stories of fans whose lives were changed by their encounter with the Beatles. Many American and British baby boomers embraced them as a universal expression of their youth. This seems especially so with the benefit of hindsight. Many of the interviews he quotes were conducted in the 1980s or 1990s. The subjects over and over again place their early encounters with the Beatles as key to identity formation in their early youth. Such ideas about making children into young adults have become almost cliché, but if being a teenager is meant to be a period when we sort ourselves into certain sexual, political, and economic boxes, Millard illustrates how teenagers became linked to the culture industry in the Cold War era. This hinges on the idea of authenticity in music and how the young connect with that music. We often position the Beatles in a category of cultural authenticity, while supposedly inauthentic industry created artists (think of the recent singers Britney Spears or Demi Lovato, both of who started out their careers within the Disney culture machine) are corporate drones, simply parroting a contrived corporate cultural patois. Millard shows this distinction is not so simple. He uses the phrase “boy band” to describe the Beatles often throughout the book, a phrase that brings to mind a very tightly controlled industrialized process of making teenage culture. The fact that Beatlemania was something of a media-created phenomenon underscores this point. He shows how the Beatles were very “media friendly,” quoting John Lennon as saying “We learned the whole game.” It was a very controlled media representation that emerged in the early 1960s, and Millard said “the press had an investment in the band that they were loath to damage” (112). The power of that representation rested in the fact that the Beatles “played themselves” in the various representations of their band in the media (113). Millard argues that the modern formula of youth culture stems from this Beatles/media interaction. The role of authenticity in rock music during the post-war period comes into question when we begin to question how “real” the Beatles were during this time. Millard provides the reader a useful means for beginning to understand the ideological role of the idea of authenticity in music—as something that needs to be analyzed. In addition to questioning the authenticity of youth culture, Millard reveals an important point about the spread of rock music—it was film that did much of the legwork early on. The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, and Blackboard Jungle all helped introduce young people the world over to rock music (63). Uta Poiger made a similar argument with regard to jazz and rock in a divided Germany. (For example, Poiger examines the way the West and East German governments dealt with rock films, such as The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle, in Chapter 2 of her book, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.) These were not hermetically sealed industries, but a more loosely connected set of corporate interests. It was not just music and film, either; radio and television had a stake in the rise of rock music. Millard argues that the rise of the “Top 40” format was in part a major preoccupation of radio and television. The Beatles appearing on TV was a major means of their conquering their home island, before turning to the former British colonies (116). There are many strengths in this book, but there are moments of weakness as well. Many of the sources are secondary. Many of the primary sources are made up of oral histories about the Beatles. More problematically, Millard universalizes the middle-class white youth experience, ignoring other ways of viewing the band or other artists of the era. He also points out the often intertwined relationship between the media and the Beatles’ marketing, but often takes the newspaper accounts at face value. Last, Millard also calls this book a “Cold War” history. Anything that takes place within that time frame can be called “Cold War,” but the Cold War is more than just a time period. Millard unreflectively cites rock as a major contributor to the fall the Soviet empire. Other than a documentary on the Beatles’ reception in the Soviet Union, he cites no evidence that engagement with western culture is equal to an embrace of US-led capitalism (192). If a love of rock and American films means one loves capitalism then how do we explain the existence of Slavoj Žižek? In Millard's narrative, Beatlemania proves to be a complex phenomenon situated between several interconnected social and economic realities. This is a history of technology, of the music industry, of youth culture, and of the Cold War. Anyone interested in any of these phenomena, no matter their discipline, would find Millard's work valuable. Millard, with some reservations, has created a convincing and meaningful narrative of Beatlemania that connects the technological with the social and economic.