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Rock music--England--History and criticism and Music--Social aspects

Addresses the band's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music.Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles'artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.At the Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, Kenneth Womack is Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Todd F. Davis is Associate Professor of English. Together they authored The Critical Response to John Irving and Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory, and edited Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Davis is also the author of Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism, also published by SUNY Press.

Popular music--Instruction and study

Teaching the Beatles is designed to provide ideas for instructors who teach the music of the Beatles. Experienced contributors describe varied approaches to effectively convey the group's characteristics and lasting importance. Some of these include: treating the Beatles'lyrics as poetry; their influence on the world of art, film, fashion and spirituality; the group's impact on post-war Britain; political aspects of the Fab Four; Lennon and McCartney's songwriting and musical innovations; the band's use of recording technology; business aspects of the Beatles'career; and insights into teaching the Beatles in an online format.

The first concept album in the history of popular music, the soundtrack of the Summer of Love or'Hippy Symphony No. 1': Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is first and foremost the album that gave rise to'hopes of progress in pop music'(The Times, 29 May 1967). Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles commemorates the fortieth anniversary of this masterpiece of British psychedelia by addressing issues that will help put the record in perspective. These issues include: reception by rock critics and musicians, the cover, lyrics, songwriting, formal unity, the influence of non-European music and art music, connections with psychedelia and, more generally, the sociocultural context of the 1960s, production, sound engineering and musicological significance. The contributors are world renowned for their work on the Beatles: they examine Sgt. Pepper from the angle of disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, literature, social psychology and cultural theory.

The Beatles, the 1968 double LP more commonly known as the White Album, has always been viewed as an oddity in the group's oeuvre. Many have found it to be inconsistent, sprawling, and self-indulgent. The Beatles through a Glass Onion is the first-ever scholarly volume to explore this seminal recording at length, bringing together contributions by some of the most eminent scholars of rock music writing today. It marks a reconsideration of this iconic but under-appreciated recording and reaffirms the White Album's significance in the Beatles'career and in rock history. This volume treats the White Album as a whole, with essays scrutinizing it from a wide range of perspectives. These essays place the album within the social and political context of a turbulent historical moment; locate it within the Beatles'lives and careers, taking into consideration the complex personal forces at play during the recording sessions; investigate the musical as well as pharmaceutical influences on the record; reveal how it reflects new developments in the Beatles'songwriting and arranging; revisit the question of its alleged disunity; and finally, track its legacy and the breadth of its influence on later rock, pop, and hip-hop artists. The Beatles through a Glass Onion features the scholarship of Adam Bradley, Vincent Benitez, Lori Burns, John Covach, Walter Everett, Michael Frontani, Steve Hamelman, Ian Inglis, John Kimsey, Mark Osteen, Russell Reising, Stephen Valdez, Anthony D. Villa, Kenneth Womack, and Alyssa Woods. John Covach's Afterword summarizes the White Album's lasting impact and value. The Beatles through a Glass Onion represents a landmark work of rock music scholarship. It will prove to be an essential and enduring contribution to the field.

Rock musicians--Great Britain--Biography--Comic books, strips, etc and Rock musicians--Great Britain--Biography

This volume explores the complete illustrated story of the Beatles from their formation, through the Beatlemania phenomenon, all the way through their breakup. Readers see how the band evolved and amplifed the uproar of the sixties, became politically and socially active, and achieved a lasting impact unparalleled in pop music. Chapters combine text and comics for complete information presented in a fun way.

Hundreds of books have been written about The Beatles. Over the last half century, their story has been mythologized and de-mythologized and presented by biographers and journalists as history. Yet many of these works do not strictly qualify as history and the story of how the Beatles'mythology continues to be told has been largely ignored. This book examines the band's historiography, exploring the four major narratives that have developed over time: The semi-whitewashed'Fab Four'account, the acrimonious breakup-era Lennon Remembers version, the biased'Shout!'narrative in the wake of John Lennon's murder, and the current Mark Lewisohn orthodoxy. Drawing on the most influential primary and secondary sources, Beatles history is analyzed using historical methods.