Whither a New Beatles?

It was fifty years ago today that Meet The Beatles!, the first U.S. Beatles album on Capitol Records, EMI's North American subsidiary, was released.  It was a groundbreaking hit album that helped spark a musical revolution in America, and it wasn't even the real thing - it was a reworked version of the Beatles' second U.K. album, With the Beatles (which I reviewed here in June 2013), with a different track listing and all but one of the six cover versions from the U.K. album omitted for fear that covers of Chuck Berry and Smokey Robinson tunes would sound like old hat to American ears.  Which is ironic, since it was the Beatles' love for American music that contributed to their sound.  (Those covers would form the nucleus of the group's second U.S. Capitol LP, another big hit.)

But I'm not here to review an American edition of a record I've already talked about.  I'm here to point out how this album revived rock and roll in the land of its birth . . . at a time when rock is in trouble again.  Popular music in America in late 1963 was typified by the likes of Bobby Vinton, and the rock and roll pioneers of the fifties had either died, been banished, or gone mainstream.  As rock critic Greil Marcus noted, radio in late 1963 felt "dull and stupid" and like "a dead end."  Popular music today feels just as dull and stupid, with mean, arrogant bad-ass rappers, salacious dance-pop divas, and a lot of other electro-pop nonsense on the radio.  So you're probably wondering . . . when are the next Beatles going to bring rock and roll back, and how long will it take to happen?

The respective answers to those questions are, 1) probably never, and 2) it likely won't.  First of all, pop radio in America in 1964 was much different than today.  It was primarily comprised of Top 40 AM stations.  FM radio hadn't become mainstream yet, and the pop audience wasn't fragmented along generic lines. That has all changed.  Thanks to the Beatles themselves, the album replaced the single as rock's main medium of expression, and FM rock radio was born out of that reality; Top 40 became a denizen for light, mainstream pop, as well as "soft rock," which rendered it uncool in the seventies (this was before Top 40 migrated to FM, where it is today).  Second, rock radio was one of many FM formats that grew out of a desire by broadcasters in the early seventies to go after different demographics, a trend that continues with satellite and Internet  radio; no one is listening to the same thing anymore.  Third, TV in America was also different in 1964, what with only three broadcast networks, a couple of local stations, and no cable. The Beatles performed on Ed Sullivan's show at a time when Sullivan was as dominant in presenting TV entertainment as Walter Cronkite was in presenting TV news; thanks to the fragmentation of television - cable television these days is more fragmented itself since the early days of MTV - and the death of the variety show, rock acts can't reach everyone through the tube anymore.  Fourth, the trend away from guitar-based rock started as far back as the early eighties, something I've already pointed out repeatedly, and big record companies and hip-hop entrepreneurs have only been too happy to keep the electro-pop/rap/dance-pop trend going as long as it proves to be very lucrative.  Fifth - I've already pointed this out as well - rock got too white at a time when the country started becoming less so, and several departed rock radio stations later, many rock fans still haven't gotten the message.  Even if they get it tomorrow, it may already be too late.   

Note that I have said a new Beatles "probably" or "likely" won't materialize, and it "may be" too late for rock to come back.  A rock comeback may not be likely, but it's possible.  There are still a lot of teenagers who listen to the Beatles and other classic rock acts these days, as I noted before.  In fact, kids have been listening to the Fab Four long since their 1970 breakup.  There's clearly a teen audience out there who are tired of Britney and Bruno and fed up with all that hippin' and hoppin' and who, if they had a current band of Beatlesque quality to rally around, would do just that. So far, they haven't proven to be a lucrative demographic.  Rock bands that thrive today don't sell enough records to cause Kanye West to lose any sleep.  After rock's long dominance from the mid-sixties to the end of the twentieth century, we seem to have entered a post-rock era - I think it was the debacle of Woodstock '99 that started it - and so it's hard to imagine a twenty-first century Beatles materializing when neither the Hanson brothers nor the Jonas brothers could even cut it as a twenty-first century Bee Gees.

If - and that 's a big if - we do get a new Beatles,  expect such a band to perform songs in English; despite the growing Hispanic population in the U.S., English is expected to remain the dominant language in America and the lingua franca globally.  Such a band will likely come from a foreign English-speaking country; as in 1963, there's too little interest in rock and roll in America to allow a home-grown band to bring it back in the land of its birth.  But most importantly, it will have to be an integrated band.

America is simply too multicultural for rock and roll to be revived here by a bunch of white guys.