Cultura Americana

Prof. Stephen Wilson

Second semester – A.Y. 2018/2019

Giulia-Nemeye Giubertoni
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April 5, 2019

Hard Days’ Night (1956), documentary about The Beatles

GROUPIES And Their Mind (If They –Still- Have One)

It comes without saying, everyone has some kind of

musical taste and loves certain musical artists among all the
possible genres and bands existing in the world. Nevertheless, for
someone like the so-called “groupies” music taste turns into
something decisively deeper and that verges on an irrational and
absurd kind of zealous enthusiasm.

It may be interesting to start from the very definition of the very

noun ‘groupie’. As it sounds at first, this is clearly a slang word
(ending in “–ie”) and refers to some fan, very often but not
necessarily of female sex, of a particular celebrity.
Not any fan can be defined a ‘groupie’, though. The groupie
would attend as many public appearances of the beloved
celebrity’s as possible, commonly in naïve hopes of getting to know them more, considering a start of some
kind of (either physical or emotional) intimacy with them. A ‘groupie’ is very often obsessed with the VIPs
they are into.

For a ‘musical groupie’, musical taste would turn into a true literal sensation of love towards a specific
group: Hopefully it is the band’s music, in other cases it is their members’ faces: in any scenarios, the
groupie is a hopelessly, head-over-heels screaming girl in love.

As it was being questioned du ring our last American culture class, what can possibly be happening
in the heads of the so-called “groupies”, that is to say in the mind of those young women the documentary
Hard Days’ Night (1956) often showed us? How was society seeing them? What are the causes and
consequences of such a new and eccentric social phenomenon? To answer such question, it may be
necessary to first look on the phenomenon of The Beatles’ and their success.

The Beatles: An Influence In The 60s

On the internet and among the shelves of any library there is an amazing amount of information to be
found regarding The Beatles and the period of success of this English band (1957-1970). After all, as it had
been comically imagined by an Italian journalist (Repubblica.it, article by Ballanti, 2012), if one used the
technique of the so-called time lapse, it would almost certainly contain one (or some) photo(s) of The
Beatles’, conveniently separated by a few others: “for example, a snapshot by Dylan, Kennedy and Luther
King, passing through Monterey and Woodstock and ending with Che Guevara and Charlie Manson” and
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“snapshots from Vietnam, from the Moon, from Prague and from China, from American and European
universities”1.

The Beatles: From Liverpool …Across The Universe

The Fab Four who were… Quarrymen

It was in Liverpool in 1957 that, during a performance

of John Lennon’s group Quarrymen, John Lennon met for the
first time Paul McCartney, and start considering starting a
new band. The other two members George Harrison and
Ringo Starr would later join the two (the former some months
later in the same year, and the latter in 1962).
The name of the band would change few times, and after
passing through Johnny and The Moondogs, Beatals, Silver
Beetles and Silver Beatles, it eventually was fixed as The
Beatles, to refer to the English word “beat” (Bell, 2016).

The 60s: A Special Decade

It was therefore back in the 1957 years ago when the Beatles started their career: one year more, one
year less: in three years the 60s would have started and this decade could easily be enclosed between the
birth and the end of the Beatles (approximately 1970).

However, it is a an unquestionable fact that the task of summarizing a decade like the one of the sixties is
absolutely not a simple one: Over 10 years, different political and world dynamics took place and definitely
changed an entire generation’s values and behaviors: just to mention few the Vietnam War, the
assassinations of US President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

This made it possible for The Beatles’ music not to stand out just thanks to its
innovative incorporation of classical elements with older pop forms and
alternative recording techniques, but also through the topics they intended to
discuss and refer to. The result was an overall continuous experiment of
pioneering musical styles triggering a real (unrepeatable?) process of
collective self-awareness. In short, it is common to hear people claim that The
Beatles as a band who made a change in music and in young people’s
behavior: A generation suddenly started to discover itself as planetary and
powerful.

Beatleprovocation
Very often wearing matching suits, humble-bowl hair cut (at least during the first years), shoes, a
turtleneck under a blazer composed the style of the band that was a mix of sophisticated and refined even if
they would always joke about it with the press :
Q: Do you select your own clothes, or does somebody guide you...?
BEATLES: No.
JOHN: (giggling) No. Look at him. You're joking.

1
Ballanti’s original text in Italian: “Per esempio, una istantanea di Dylan, di Kennedy e di Luther King, passando per Monterey e Woodstock e
terminando con Che Guevara e Charlie Manson. Ed instantanee dal Vietnam, dalla Luna, da Praga e dalla Cina, dalle università americane ed
europee.” Direct link to the full article in Italian to be found at the end of the document.
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Had The Beatles begun a provocation, showing that “all you need” was super-straight and thin hair, a bowl
and pair of scissors? Not at all: on the contrary what they were offering to the masses was a “different” way
of facing life, experiencing sexuality, fighting for political rights, freedom of action and thought. The songs
of the British group, apparently light-hearted but in fact rich in cultural and political references, have
overcome censorships and denials in a profoundly innovative way.
Famous songs involving criticism to war policies US and asking for peace among nations are:
 Back In U.S.S.R.: song written from a different and not common point of view. What is being sung is
the reflections of a Russian spy’s who is going back home, namely to the U.S.S.R. after a mission in
the States. Of course, these lyrics appeared to be celebrating the Western world’s enemy and
bothered many conservative American political personalities.

I'm back in the USSR

You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the USSR, yeah

 All You Need Is Love: in a time when the bands were writing against the war in Vietnam (such as the
Rolling Stones were playing Street Fighting Man and Paint it Black) merely stating the problem, The
Beatles wrote about the solution: all you need is love, nothing else. What is more, the song opens
with a governmental tune: a clear way to mock government and how it politics devalues ‘love’.
 Happiness Is A Warm Gun: unquestionably an insane thing to say: “a warm gun” is a clear reference
to the pleasure some people take in violence (as a gun is warm when it has just shot). The denounce
here may be about how disturbing human nature sometimes embraces violence rather than peace.
 Revolution (1968) is a beautiful song, one of Lennon’s best creations. It is the year of US campus
riots, Vietnam war among others. Lennon displaces everyone, though. Even if he and the Beatles are
non-conformist revolutionary, instead of supporting, here decides to criticize who is protester “by
profession”:
You say you want a revolution / Well, you know / We all want to change the world /
You tell me that it's evolution / Well, you know / We all want to change the world /
But when you talk about destruction / Don't you know that you can count me out /
Don't you know it’s gonna be alright / Alright, alright

THE BEATLEMANIACS – As Known As Beatles’ Groupies

During the documentary there are several scenes in

which we see the members of the British group dealing with
the “Beatlemania” they had “caused”. They are shown while
escaping hordes of fans, feeling trapped from a train to their
hotel’s room, or flying away via helicopter fearing for
their safety.
In addition to this, they are sometimes shown busy trying to
answer fans’ mail… Nevertheless, they would soon decide to A huge crowd of fans waiting outside the Town Hall in Melbourne to
greet the Beatles in 1964. Ap / AP/REX/Shutterstock.
flee to head to a party.

In my opinion, what might therefore have served as one of the triggering factors and justification to such an
obsession and absurd adoration of these four musicians lies in their normality. The Beatles are normal
young men, not very preoccupied with their look (see paragraph above), energetic impatient musicians either
rehearsing their songs before the show or goofing around in the backstage.
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Moreover, The Beatles came to propose an image of escape, but not too radical, either. They consisted in a
model which was sufficiently compatible both with the desire to break and change young people and at the
same time with an ideal of self-realization for those who were still largely within the “precincts” of the strict
and bourgeois family.

Secondly, and probably this is the most determining win-factor: the cultural industry behind them. Just
like a “factory of dreams” which produced itself its consumers for its products, through The Beatles the
cultural industry managed to influence huge masses of young people, intercepting their needs: lightness and
change. The Beatles are unintentionally the perfect shot. The music industry would soon multiply their
turnovers and throught some good old power of persuasion, it would make portable machines (walkmans)
necessary to stay in touch with the “essential and necessary sound of the soul”: music. Young people from
all over the world would have discovered music as a destiny.

In conclusion, such an unprecedented social phenomenon of hysterical screams, crying, fainting and
mindless consumption had a deeper meaning. It dealt with fans who no matter what their social
extraction, culture, sex and age, wanted to consume in the sense of making make decisions autonomously
on their choices, on their tastes. The new opulence of the post-war society let in fact people to reflect and
pursue their a social identity and, consequently, to request recognition of their rights. Above all, what they
sought was strong emotions: something that could make them get out of that limbo of boredom and
predictability that post-war society seemed to being offering them, despite the very high socio-political
tensions, instability and enormous concerns of those years’.
The Beatles (and singers such as Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan) definitely emerged at the right time to collect
the requests of a society who wanted to live happily, love and stand out from the adults.

Sources
Treccani. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/beatles_%28Enciclopedia-dei-ragazzi%29/ - last accessed on April 13, 2019.

Daily motion.com. Documentary – direct link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xabpg1?playlist=x1v29k - last accessed on April 10, 2019.

Assante, E.; Castaldo, G. (2018). Beatles. Collana Economica Laterza. Available in GoogleBooks – direct link:
https://books.google.pt/books?id=a4OODAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-
BR&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false - last accessed on April 10, 2019.

Bell, R. (2016). The History of British Rock and Roll: The Beat Boom 1963 – 1966. Lulu Press. Available in GoogleBooks – direct link:
https://books.google.pt/books?id=trymCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT20&lpg=PT20&dq=when+did+the+silver+beetles+change+their+name&source=
bl&ots=CtOVZ5urrU&sig=ACfU3U3h4X0eNhwW-CfyjYB5bR-k5U3ROQ&hl=pt-
BR&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKwOfwjtfhAhXJ4IUKHc6UBCUQ6AEwCXoECAkQAQ#v=twopage&q&f=false - last accessed on April 10,
2019.

Ballanti, F. (2012, September 16). La rivoluzione culturale: I Beatles hanno svegliato il mondo. Article on Repubblica.it – direct link:
http://www.repubblica.it/persone/2012/09/26/news/una_rivoluzione_culturale_come_i_beatles_hanno_svegliato_il_mondo-43325590/ - last
accessed on April 10, 2019.

Gammond, Peter. The Oxford Companion to Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, page 46.

Quora.com. In What Ways Were The Beatles Innovative? Discussion of Quora.com - direct link: https://www.quora.com/In-what-ways-were-The-
Beatles-innovative – last accessed on April 12, 2019.

Sanchez, G. H. (2017, September 21). 23 Photos That Prove Beatles Fans Were Doing The Absolute Most In The '60s. Buzzfeednews.com. – direct link:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gabrielsanchez/pictures-from-the-sheer-insanity-that-was-beatlemania – last accessed on April 16,
2019.