Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 10
Popular Culture Review
Gillett; Hirsch; Palmer; and Peterson and Berger). Explanation, however, can be
as theoretically worthy as prediction. But to date neither popular culture nor mass
communication nor popular music research has explained the appeal of Beatles
music for audiences today. To be sure communication researchers as diverse in
orientation as Marxist-postmodernist Lawrence Grossberg (“Politics,” “Another,”
“If Rock,” “Is There,” “Reply”) and content analysts Christenson; Cooper;
Chesebro, Fougler, Nachman, and Yannelli; and Fedler, Hall, and Tanzi have
attempted to account for the popularity of popular music. But neither they nor the
popular music scholars cited above have asked, let alone answered, “What precisely
accounts for the lasting appeal of an enduringly popular musical text?”
It is the cardinal contention of this study that SFF has remained popular for
more than 30 years due to what I shall identify as one authorial and three “inventive”
elements. By “authorial” I mean SFF’s authorship; the song-recording was written
by John Lennon when he was an active Beatle and recorded by the Beatles
(Dowlding). Perhaps a respondent in another study of the longevity of another,
contemporaneous, Beatle song-recording best expressed the effect of that text’s
authorial element: “The Beatles were such popular figures, they almost
overshadowed their music” (qtd. in Wolfe, “Song” 83) or any particular song they
released. The term “inventive” aims to descriptively summarize three features of
the song-recording itself: (1) the relative novelty of theme expressed in its lyrics,
(2) their “interaction,” and (3) innovations in song-recording production most
frequently evinced in the recording’s nonverbal audio. The phrases “novelty of
theme” or “thematic novelty” refer to how SFF’s lyrics have been read as a break
from the romantic adolescent love song mold of the Beatles’ earlier songs such as
“She Loves You” (1964) and “(I Wanna) Hold Your Hand” (1964). Lennon
biographer Ray Coleman explains:
While [fellow Beatle songsmith] Paul McCartney’s gift lay in
composing love songs, John [Lennon] was incapable of
songwriting [solely] as a craftsman, “for other people.”
Conversely, the extrovert McCartney found it hard to write about
himself. In that, John Lennon excelled...From “Strawberry
Fields Forever” through to “Imagine,” John Lennon’s work, in
and out of the Beatles, was distinct [from songs such as “She
Loves You”] and highly personalized...For although he loved
the speed of rock ‘n’ roll, his own writing would have to act as
a mirror of his personality as he grew older and more observant
and wanted more from life than teenagers screaming his name.
At twenty-six, John wanted his music to express the important
things in his life; his childhood memories; his assiduous reading