Winner of the 2022 Open Publication Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-ANZ) A Women's History of the Beatles is the first book to offer a detailed presentation of the band's social and cultural impact as understood through the experiences and lives of women. Drawing on a mix of interviews, archival research, textual analysis, and autoethnography, this scholarly work depicts how the Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, while also reexamining key, influential female figures within the group's history. Organized topically based on key themes important to the Beatles story, each chapter uncovers the varied and multifaceted relationships women have had with the band, whether face-to-face and intimately or parasocially through mediated, popular culture. Set within a socio-historical context that charts changing gender norms since the early 1960s, these narratives consider how the Beatles have affected women's lives across three generations. Providing a fresh perspective of a well-known tale, this is a cultural history that moves far beyond the screams of Beatlemania to offer a more comprehensive understanding of what the now iconic band has meant to women over the course of six decades.

Since the magazine’s first issue in 1964, TeenSet’s role in popular music journalism has been overlooked and underappreciated. Teen fan magazines, often written by women and assumed to be read only by young girls, have been misconstrued by scholars and journalists to lack “seriousness” in their coverage of popular music. TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don’t Let the Name Fool You disputes the prevailing conception that teen fan magazines are insignificant and elevates the publications to their proper place in popular music history. Analyzing TeenSet across its five-year publication span, Allison Bumsted shows that the magazine is an important artifact of 1960s American popular culture. Through its critical commentary and iconic rock photography, TeenSet engaged not only with musical genres and scenes, but also broader social issues such as politics, race, and gender. These countercultural discourses have been widely overlooked due to a generalization of teen fan magazines, which have wrongly presumed the magazine to be antithetical to rock music and as unimportant to broader American culture at the time. Bumsted also examines the leadership of editor Judith Sims and female TeenSet staff writers such as Carol Gold. By offering a counternarrative to leading male-oriented narratives in music journalism, she challenges current discourses that have marginalized women in popular music history. Ultimately, the book illustrates that TeenSet and teen fan magazines were meaningful not only to readers, but also to the broader development of the popular music press and 1960s cultural commentary.

The Beatles are known for cheeky punchlines, but understanding their humor goes beyond laughing at John Lennon's memorable “rattle your jewelry” dig at the Royal Variety Performance in 1963. From the beginning, the Beatles' music was full of wordplay and winks, guided by comedic influences ranging from rhythm and blues, British radio, and the Liverpool pub scene. Gifted with timing and deadpan wit, the band habitually relied on irony, sarcasm, and nonsense. Early jokes revealed an aptitude for improvisation and self-awareness, techniques honed throughout the 1960s and into solo careers. Experts in the art of play, including musical experimentation, the Beatles' shared sense of humor is a key ingredient to their appeal during the 1960s-and to their endurance. The Beatles and Humour offers innovative takes on the serious art of Beatle fun, an instrument of social, political, and economic critique. Chapters also situate the band alongside British and non-British predecessors and collaborators, such as Billy Preston and Yoko Ono, uncovering diverse components and unexpected effects of the Beatles' output.

The Beatles and Vocal Expression examines popular song through the topic of paralanguage – a sub-category of nonverbal communication that addresses characteristics of speech that modify meaning and convey emotion. It responds to the general consensus regarding the limitations of Western art music notation to analyse popular song, assesses paralinguistic voice qualities giving rise to expressive tropes within and across songs, and lastly addresses gaps in existing Beatles scholarship. Taking The Beatles’ UK studio albums (1963–1970), paralinguistic voice qualities are examined in relation to concepts, characteristics, metaphors, and functions of paralanguage in vocal performance. Tropes, such as rising and falling intonation on words of woe, have historical connections to performative and conversational techniques. This interdisciplinary analysis is achieved through musicology, sound studies, applied linguistics, and cultural history. The new methodology locates paralinguistic voice qualities in recordings, identifies features, shows functions, and draws aural threads within and across popular songs.

When The Beatles arrived in postwar America, Beatlemania swept the nation as hysterical girls flocked to the band and young men grew out their hair. In this book Andrew Hunt explores this wildly enthusiastic fandom from the bottom-up. Showcasing oral histories, fan magazines, club newsletters, newspapers and personal memoirs, he uncovers The Beatles' fan culture from the perspective of Beatlemaniacs, Beatlephobes and ordinary Americans to understand the impact it had on society at large. Offering a cultural history from below, Beatlemania in America highlights previously neglected voices of fans, critics, parents, teachers and politicians. It contextualises the Beatles fandom against a wider, global perspective of changing cultures and shows how this band was part of a wider shift of social change. It delves into who Beatles fans were and shows how their collective voice gave them power. Exploring themes of gender and race in this turbulent and tumultuous era of American history, it highlights the social issues and debates provoked by this subculture which foreshadowed the arrival of an increasingly polarized society.

Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

Paul McCartney has lived an extraordinary life in popular music and popular culture. His careers as a Beatle, as a solo musician and band leader in Wings, and in areas outside music have varied tremendously and are well-documented. That Was Me explores the impact of Paul McCartney as a musician outside the Beatles, identifying the continued excitement in generations of fans and listeners, and his perennial efforts to perform and record music. Richard Driver argues that his solo career is multi-faceted and extremely diverse, ranging from breaking sharply with the style and output of the Beatles to experimenting in orchestral and operatic music and returning to music designed to emulate and reproduce the style, success, and popularity of the Beatles. Through McCartney we can literally and symbolically view and revisit the popular music phenomenon that was the Beatles, and popular music from the 1950s to today.

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.

The Beatles are probably the most photographed band in history and are the subject of numerous biographical studies, but a surprising dearth of academic scholarship addresses the Fab Four. New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles offers a collection of original, previously unpublished essays that explore 'new' aspects of the Beatles. The interdisciplinary collection situates the band in its historical moment of the 1960s, but argues for artistic innovation and cultural ingenuity that account for the Beatles' lasting popularity today. Along with theoretical approaches that bridge the study of music with perspectives from non-music disciplines, the texts under investigation make this collection 'new' in terms of Beatles' scholarship. Contributors frequently address under-examined Beatles texts or present critical perspectives on familiar works to produce new insight about the Beatles and their multi-generational audiences.

More than 50 years after their breakup, the Beatles are still attracting fans from various generations, all while retaining their original fan base from the 1960s. Why have those first-generation fans continued following the Beatles and are now introducing their grandchildren to the group? Why are current teens affected by the band's music? And perhaps most importantly, how and why do the Beatles continue to resonate with successive generations? Unlike other bands of their era, the Beatles seem permanently frozen in time, having never descended into "nostalgia act" territory. Instead, even after the announcement of the band's breakup in 1970, the group has maintained its cultural and musical relevance. Their timeless quality appeals to younger generations while maintaining the loyalty of older fans. While the Beatles indeed represent a specific time period, their music and words address issues as meaningful today as they were during the Summer of Love: politics, war, sex, drugs, art, and creative liberation. As the first anthology to assess the nature of fan response and the band's enduring appeal, Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years defines and explores these unique qualities and the key ways in which this particular pop fusion has inspired such loyalty and multigenerational popularity.