Patty has been listening to a long video exposing some kind of cult called “Inner Fire.” They teach radical breath-holding while immersed in ice-water, or something like that. Sometimes people die, doing this stuff. It has an Exalted And Enlightened Leader.
Up until this morning, I’d never heard of it. Not a word.
I’ve begun to notice a rather strange phenomenon in popular culture. Once upon a time, there were huge fads that swept the country (think Davy Crockett, hula hoops, Cabbage Patch dolls, etc.) You couldn’t not know about them. Where would you have had to be in 1965, not to have heard of the Beatles?
To me it looks like fads that would have once been virtually universal now get swallowed whole by the Internet. It all winds up online. No more hula hoops or coonskin hats everywhere you look. Everybody’s head is stuck in the computer.
If you’re just 10-year-old Joe Blow in 1959, you’re going to be subjected to the fads. All of them–there was no escape. Life Magazine. TV specials. You couldn’t avoid this stuff, even if you wanted to.
But today–! Today is different. Today we can pick and choose online: we can specialize. We don’t all participate in the same cultural hiccups at the same time anymore.
That’s a big change! The common culture seems to be falling into fragments. One can only wonder what that will lead to.
Look around you. Am I right?
The Beatles were one of the biggest fads in history. It was unavoidable for anyone living at the time to avoid some effect of this phenomenon. I have worn a mustache, most of my adult life, and mustaches came back into vogue when the colorfully dressed Beatles appeared wearing mustaches, on the cover of their Sargent Pepper’s album, in ‘67.
But the mechanism of their fad is what I find the most interesting. Think about the Beatles, from the perspective of an American youngster. No one had heard of the Beatles, but then the phenomenon of Beatlemania was reported on, in the national news. Not much later, they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to a huge waiting audience. The Beatles phenomenon, at least in the US, owed much of its existence to the power of television. Back then, there were three sources of national news, NBC, CBS and ABC. That was it. There were three national TV networks, so Ed Sullivan had a huge audience on any Sunday night, and with the hype about the Beatles, the audience was even more massive, because a large proportion of American youth were watching on Feb, 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on American television.
But that was just the start. In 1964, most cities had one, or possibly two youth market AM stations, which may have served a 100 mile radius, so every two-door ‘57 Chevy in town probably had its old tube radio tuned to the same station. When the Beatles held several top chart positions in April of ‘64, it was all but impossible not to hear them. This was the era of mass produced music and mass distribution via a handful of record companies. The Beach Boys were on the same US label as the Beatles, and they actually suffered, because they were no longer the crown Jewel of Capitol’s stable of artists.
There will never be another Beatles, because the music business has changed. A brilliant new act can create good quality recordings with equipment that is relatively inexpensive. Big record labels no longer control what is released and distributed, but there’s also far less money to be made from owning the rights to a hit song, because Spotify doesn’t pay nearly as much to artists as the royalties which could be had in the halcyon days of radio. If you want to make money in music these days, you build publicity by releasing recordings and then make money from concerts, including the profits from overpriced T shirts and other memorabilia sold at concerts.
So now, with the Internet, there are micro fads, which can grow rapidly, but which also compete with numerous other micro fads. So they can stay below the radar of the broadest segment of society, yet grow in their own corner of the cyber world.
Speaking only for myself; I’ve never been a huge fan of fads. I watched the Beatles on Sullivan, as a child, and even then knew that these were excellent musicians and had it together. In a strictly technical sense, they were an influence for good, making Rock n’ Roll more than three or four chord songs. But within a few years after their Sullivan appearance, their music changed and began the slide into drug influenced songs, which were creatively unique, but not really suited to the wider tastes of Top 40. As one goes into their later years, there were still hits, but the cuts that didn’t get airplay started to sound like self indulgent recordings of half formed ideas, at least to my ear.
To this day, I don’t own copies of their later albums. By then, I was listening to the Classics IV, Chicago, James Taylor, and the beginnings of the singer/songwriter movement which became prominent in the ‘70s.
When Paul McCartney came out with Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, I thought it was brilliant. Paul returned to radio friendly songs when he started Wings, and had more years of success than the Beatles.
But even that is gone, now. Modern artists perform songs written by professional songwriters who assemble their songs from ideas submitted by underlings. Everything is the product of market research, and the analysis of elements common to hit songs. The result is overproduced, canned, music performed in elaborate stage shows with complex choreography. To me, this is unappealing, but the strategy is to market aggressively and make hay while the sun shines.
How do we explain the popularity of “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”?
I loved the early Beatles. I went to see them at their concert at Dodger Stadium in 1965 or 1966 – I say see them because I sure couldn’t hear them with all the girls screaming that they loved Paul, John, George or Ringo.
I remember “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.” I think that was banned on the airways for a while. I liked many of the novelty songs.
As a family, we used to watch the Ed Sullivan show. I had heard the news, beetles were going to be on his show. My friend and I thought they were talking about bugs.