# A Jazz Critic Looks at the Beatles

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2017/08/28/jazz-critic-looks-beatles/
- Published: 2017-08-28T18:17:01+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**A few weeks ago an unfounded rumor scurried through New York’s music circle: DownBeat’s
coverage was to go 60 percent pop music and 40 percent jazz. Not a chance, the editor
assures us. Where did such nonsense get started?**

While it was still being rumored, I overheard a fellow saying that he wouldn’t mind
so much reading about Tony Bennett or Andy Williams—but he certainly did not want
to know about the Beatles.

Personally, I think I’d rather read about the Beatles, for the Beatles seem to me
one of the most remarkable phenomena in popular music in the last 40 years—and among
phenomena, popular music has had some doozies in the last 40 years. (Ah, there, 
Helen Kane and Bonnie Baker.)

For one thing, is it not curious that four young men from Liverpool, England, should
be offering what is essentially a strident imitation of American Negro blues singing?
Specifically, as Jim Delephant pointed out in Rhythm & Blues, isn’t it curious that
they modeled themselves largely on the style of Chuck Berry with perhaps touches
of Jimmy Reed? Not that there is anything wrong with Chuck Berry as far as I’m concerned,
but what is it that makes four English boys want to sing that way? What hold does
such a style have on them, and why?

And what is it that makes their audiences of primarily young girls scream in a kind
of sustained frenzy, or sometimes go into a catatonic trance, when these four young
Englishman perform? What are they responding to, and why?

And why is it that the same gossip columnists and Broadway types who found Elvis
Presley contemptible or alarming seem to find the Beatles and their fans charmingly
amusing.

In an article in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago, novelist David Dempsey
suggested that the girls were responding to a kind of collective archetype—that 
the Beatles are a modern manifestation of Orpheus, and the girls were experiencing
a kind of hypnotic bacchanal.

I have no doubt that they are responding to an archetype, and perhaps Dempsey has
put his finger on the right one. But saying so seems to avoid as many questions 
as it answers. After all, today’s dowagers who panted over Bing Crosby in 1932 were
experiencing in their way the same sort of collective archetypal response. And so
were the girls who swooned for Frank Sinatra in the ’40s or those who shrieked for
Presley in the ’50s.

What seems much more significant would be to find out more specifically what is 
going on in the soul of a generation that must scream constantly throughout a performance,
blocking out any possibility of even hearing what they are presumably there to hear.
Or to discover the reason there young men carry these somewhat effeminate hairdos.(
One group of Beatles imitators now sports hair that is easily longer than Doris 
Day’s).

I’m sure that one can’t ask any of these questions without also asking why is it
that a kind of enfrenzied version rhythm and blues has become _the_ popular music
for, by now, two generations of young people in many parts of the world, Occidental,
Oriental and elsewhere—wherever American music is heard.

Make no mistake about it, the popularity of rock and roll is no product of the promotions
of U.S. disc jockeys nor of the payola doled to them by the record distributors 
over here. The Top 40 in Sweden or Japan or South Africa (!) or Australia or France
is likely to be just about the same as the Top 40 here.

And there are performers of “le rock” in France who costume and deport themselves
in a manner bizarre enough to make Elvis Presley look a like a 1910 British public-
school boy. A couple of years ago, there was Danny Boy, “the gentleman of rock,”
who wore a gold-on-black shirt and trousers, had the required flat electric guitar
around his neck, reared back with his knees bent and with his curly hair falling
over his forehead and ears. He was surrounded by three accompanists who wore black
peaked hoods, with eye slits that looked for all the world like medieval executioners’
clothing or dyed Ku Klux Klan customes. Gentleman indeed!

I have no idea what these things really mean. I asked a Jungian psychologist, who
is well versed in the ways of the collective psyche; he confessed he had no idea
either. But I think the question is a fundamental one that if fully answered might
reveal more about the state of man for the second half of the 20th century than 
the answer one would get to any other question.

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