On 7 February 1964, three thousand screaming girls and a gaggle of curious reporters gathered at a blustery Kennedy Airport to welcome the arrival of John, Paul, George and Ringo. The four young Englishmen, beginning a whirlwind tour of the US, had an instant impact. Twenty-four hours later, seeking to grasp the whirl of media and fan frenzy that greeted the musicians, the venerable Christian Science Monitor declared “An Invasion Of British Beatles.”Footnote ¹ Over the coming weeks, the invasion hardly let up. By 4 April, the Beatles had an unprecedented twelve songs on the Billboard charts. Even more astonishingly, the top five songs on the chart all belonged to the band. Trade journal Variety soon dubbed the Beatles’ early success “the most concentrated sale of a half-dozen singles and three LPs ever known in the disk biz.”Footnote ² Tickets for Beatles’ concerts sold out in record time. Fifty million dollars’ worth of Beatles merchandise was sold to American fans – Beatles’ wigs, dolls, eggcups, photos, lunchboxes, soaps. One entrepreneurial huckster even sold two-inch squares of soiled Beatles toweling for a dollar apiece.Footnote ³ Impressed by the success of the band, American commentators kept returning to that invasion metaphor. Declaring that the “sun never sets on British rock,” a seemingly endless series of articles observed that these “rocking redcoats” were “establishing,” “consolidating,” “expanding” and “entrenching” a beachhead in America – one wit saw the Beatles as a form of British vengeance for the Battle of Lake Erie. “In ’76 England lost her American colonies,” said Life magazine, but “last week the Beatles took them back.”Footnote ⁴

But how should we understand a British Invasion smack in the middle of the “American century,” a period associated with Americanization and US cultural imperialism? John once said that Yoko was the most famous unknown artist in the world – everyone knew who she was, but no one knew what she did. In the postwar histories of both US and global pop culture, the Beatles invasion is in a rather similar position. Although it seems almost impossible to think about the history of pop culture in the 1960s without at least mentioning the iconic band, their significance in the history of cultural globalization remains obscure. In fact, the Beatles have been interpreted, plausibly, in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they can seem to disprove the power of American cultural imperialism by serving as evidence of the ability of foreign cultures to “neatly reverse” the Americanization of global culture. On the other hand, their Americanized stylings can be seen as proof of the total homogeny of global culture in an age of American hegemony.Footnote ⁵

This uncertainty in interpreting the American (re)importation of rock ‘n’ roll from Britain reveals some of the deeper problems in scholarly efforts to theorize the meaning of cultural globalization in the twentieth century. Part of the problem is a residual tendency to think about cultural globalization by naturalizing the category of the nation. In thinking about cultural imperialism we try to make sense of cultural globalization by tracing the imposition of one national culture onto another – one adjudicates the question of cultural imposition by seeing the Beatles as either British or Americanized. In fact, it makes the most sense to see the Beatles as simultaneously British and Americanized, but that just raises difficult questions about the impact of globalization on cultural diversity. Has global culture become more homogeneous or more heterogeneous? Is cultural globalization a process of cultural domination, or of creatively cosmopolitan creolization? Decades of empirical and theoretical interrogation have left a sense that neither position is sufficient – a focus on homogenization and domination ignores the creative ways in which new cultures are appropriated, internalized and resisted; a focus on creolization ignores the power differentials that underpin the international flows of culture. Lurking here are deeper dichotomies. The homogenization approach emphasizes structure, particularly the political economy of culture; the creolization approach privileges agency and the thick description of lived cultural meaning.Footnote ⁶

In their respective studies of the Chinese jazz age of the 1920s and the phenomenon of world music of the 1980s, Andrew Jones and Veit Erlmann have begun to sketch a theoretical approach to cultural globalization that transcends these dichotomies. Despite their many differences, both begin by seeing the spatial distribution of culture as a product of an increasingly interlinked global market of cultural commodities that create the possibility of an interchangeable, global music. But both are careful in moving from the level of political economy to the level of cultural meaning.Footnote ⁷ The unification of an international cultural market does not necessarily mean homogenization at the level of content or consciousness – culture is only becoming homogeneous insofar as it is commodified, not because it is commodified. (In other words, commodification is, in and of itself, a type of homogenization, but it does not cause some totalizing homogeny of cultural meaning).

This duality of homogeneity and heterogeneity cannot be resolved analytically. Rather, it needs to become the object of analysis. On a formal level, in fact, the duality flows from the dualities of the commodity form itself. A cultural commodity needs to be universally legible in order to be exchanged, but it must also remain usable as a bearer of cultural meaning in a variety of locations.Footnote ⁸ Commodification and interchangeability thus produce the possibilities for new cultural hybrids that represent a more universal culture – but those hybrids will always be interpreted according to local systems of meaning. Importantly, whereas the hybridization approach presumes that foreign cultural products are appropriated into local systems of meaning, focussing on the commodity form allows us to critically interrogate the ways that local meanings are projected onto transnational cultural products. Such an analysis provides a way to grasp the nature of modern global culture – ever changing, yet undergirded by an increasingly uniform economic structure; increasingly interlinked, yet marked by an accelerating proliferation of style and difference.

Such a framework therefore allows us to see how cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity are simultaneously reproduced. On one level, global culture becomes more similar and interconnected, but the diverse meanings attached to an objectively unified culture serve to reproduce meaningful differences at the level of lived subjectivity. Theorists of cultural globalization have long emphasized the importance of studying the spaces and geographies of cultural exchange, but it is also necessary to understand how those global geographies are interpreted through local categories that emerge from historical experience. It is the double burden of the historian to trace out the emergence of a global market of culture on the one hand, and to map the multiple meanings read onto the emerging global mélange on the other.Footnote ⁹ Studying cultural globalization historically means narrating the shifting contours of cultural meaning and accounting for the material and economic conditions that underpin the increasing plasticity of culture.

The Beatles provide a particularly rich site to attempt this sort of analysis. Focussing on the US as an importer rather than an exporter of pop culture automatically unsettles our sense that postwar cultural globalization is best understood as a straightforward process of Americanization.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the Beatles were an important agent of pop culture's increasing globality in the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹ As America's first experience of cultural importation after a period of sustained postwar export, the Beatles allow us to see how a global cultural market emerged from a mid-century trough marked by depression, war, and US cultural predominance.

Tracing the Beatles’ trajectory in the 1960s therefore reveals the broader dynamics of cultural globalization in the period. The first section of this article shows how the Beatles represent the emergence of an increasingly unified international culture. It begins by showing the Beatles’ origins in the Americanized youth culture of 1950s Britain and Europe, and then shows how the Beatles reversed the flow of youth culture in part because they were beneficiaries of the shifting economics of the international recording industry and the nationalist assumptions of American recording executives. Their global success allowed the Beatles to continue to act as cultural bricoleurs in the mid-1960s on an ever-expanding scale, which positioned the Beatles as representatives of a more global youth culture in the late 1960s. The second section of the article turns from the construction of an interconnected culture to the ongoing reproduction of differences in cultural meaning, by exploring the ways in which the Beatles’ internationalism was interpreted in nationalist terms. To pay attention to cultural specificity, the article zooms in on the American response to the Beatles. In 1964, the Beatles were embraced by American commentators, curiously, for their alleged British respectability – their fusion of American and foreign cultural forms was made acceptable by projected assumptions about the differences between British musicians and their more controversial American forebears. Over time, however, this changed and the Beatles became more controversial as both the religious right and the countercultural left projected their own hopes and fears onto the Beatles’ ubiquitous cultural products. In all, then, this article sheds new light on the history of cultural globalization both by revealing the Beatles’ unique role in that history and by showing how postwar global culture was simultaneously shaped by the homogenization and interconnection of cultural markets and by the reproduction of cultural differences.

The Beatles emerged as a direct result of the postwar hegemony of US pop culture. From their bedroom radio sets in Liverpool, they had thrilled to the sounds of American rock ‘n’ roll crossing the channel from Radio Luxembourg. “We started off,” McCartney recalled, “by imitating Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry.” In 1968, Lennon told an interviewer that “nothing really affected me until Elvis.” Lennon and McCartney had met in 1957 and bonded as fellow skiffle players – taking part in the broader British craze for playing American country, rock and blues on cheap and homemade instruments. Buddy Holly and his Crickets inspired John and Paul to write their own material, with a little help from the Beats, the final name of a band that had earlier been known as the Quarrymen, Johnny and the Moondogs, and the Silver Beetles. The Beatles’ early look – long, greased hair and black motorbike jackets – had its origins in the juvenile delinquent look popularized by Marlon Brando in the Wild One. In so many ways, the Beatles began as but a minor example of the many British rockers – Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and others – who modeled themselves on the American rebels of the 1950s, and who were, in the words of one contemporary, “all just imitating Elvis.”Footnote ¹²

But then the Beatles went to Europe. “I didn't grow up in Liverpool,” John once said, “I grew up in Hamburg.” And in Hamburg in 1960 the Beatles made a living as the house band for a converted strip joint in the heart of the Reeperbahn district of the St. Pauli Quarter – which is to say, in the heart of one of Europe's most famous red light districts. A relatively new, and rather improbable, cultural pipeline connected the port city of Hamburg with Liverpool, and the Beatles had jumped at the chance to make a living as musicians abroad. The conditions they found themselves in were far from ideal. They were lodged in the unheated and filthy storage rooms at the back of a B-movie cinema, and worked in bars whose owners had connections to the Hamburg underworld of drugs and prostitution, and whose waiters wore knuckle-dusters. But they were young men – George was only seventeen– and they were away from home and living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. They drank as much free booze as they could, picked up the clap, and discovered amphetamines to propel them through four- and eight-hour sets. Buzzing along onstage, they engaged in a number of stunts that were half-schoolboy prank, half proto-punk, and miles away from their synchronized head-wobbling “whoooos” of 1964. They swore, drank, brawled, mooned and flashed the crowd, destroyed the set and performed wearing bedsheets and toilet seats. In the process, the band accumulated the hours of performance time that honed their sound and developed the musical skill that would differentiate them from the rest of the Mersey beat scene when they returned home. To fill the sets, the group radically expanded their repertoire from the Elvis derivatives that had dominated 1950s UK rock and began to incorporate a wider range of American musics: from the rock of Little Richard and Chuck Berry to the rockabilly of Carl Perkins to the R & B of the Coasters, the Marvelletes and the Isley Brothers. And the fact that those performances were taking place abroad, in front of the international crowds of the port's seamier underbelly, seems to have been central to the band's increasingly universal appeal. As John put it, “It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.”Footnote ¹³

Furthermore, via Stuart Sutcliffe, their then bass player and John's mate from art school, the band began to tap into a broader cosmopolitan bohemianism. In particular, Stuart and the band had caught the eye of three young art students slumming it in the Reeperbahn. Self-declared “exis” – slang for existentialists – these students modeled themselves on French bohemians. They introduced the Beatles to a world of Cocteau, Camus and de Sade and encouraged Stuart to cut his hair from the Teddy boy style, and wear it over the forehead in a deliberate imitation of the exis’ “French cut” or “mushroom head” that was worn in German art schools and universities. George immediately copied Stuart and, despite some initial derision, John and Paul got the same cut in Paris in the fall of 1961. By the time Ringo joined the band, it was simply expected that, as a Beatle, he would get the same cut.Footnote ¹⁴

By the time the Beatles broke in England in 1962, then, they had absorbed elements of American, British and European culture. Their early Teddy boy leanings, which had fused British neo-Edwardianism with such American influences as the zoot suit and western and gangster films, had evolved toward Brando-inspired rocker rebellion and European existentialism. And on return to England, as their new manager Brian Epstein worked to clean them up according to the dictates of London's mod fashion, the black leather jackets were replaced by neat, collarless Italian suits and Cuban-heeled boots. Such hybridity, however, would have been impossible if it was not underpinned by an increasingly interconnected transnational youth culture in which rock ‘n’ roll served as something of a lingua franca – Brando and Presley serving as role models for the Halberstaken in Germany, the Teddy boys and rockers in England, and the exis and mods alike. And that transnational youth culture, in which the Beatles could absorb US culture, hone it in Germany, and then remake it in England, was a product of the postwar hegemony of American popular culture.Footnote ¹⁵

In a more material sense, too, the Beatles marked both the apogee and the eclipse of American cultural dominance. The Beatles represented the moment when a global recording industry sufficiently recovered from the devastation of Depression and the Second World War to challenge the dominance of the American record industry. In the late 1940s, more than half the records in the world were made and sold in the US. Between 1955 and 1960, though, European record sales had doubled as prosperity returned. And then in the 1960s, global record sales exploded. They doubled in countries like Japan, Germany and Sweden, and increased exponentially in the developing world – Brazil, for instance, saw a near tripling of record sales between 1965 and 1971. By 1970, global consumption of records had increased tenfold from 1950s levels. And underpinning the record industry boom were deeper economic and demographic trends – the maturation of the baby boomers and the heyday of postwar capitalism's golden age. Even in the US, the value of record sales skyrocketed from $600 million in 1960 to $1,660 million by the start of the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁶

The Beatles’ international success both reflected this global surge and played a central role in its creation. As entertainment rag Variety astutely noted, the Beatles “fundamentally shook up and globalized the music biz.”Footnote ¹⁷ Although American artists like Elvis had been internationally successful in the previous decade, their international success was little more than a coda to their success in the US market – they had become stars in the US and then, after a lag while international record deals were worked out, become successful overseas. In the six months prior to their success in the US, by contrast, the Beatles had already grossed $17,500,000 internationally, and had topped the charts in Australia, France, Holland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Hong Kong. In August 1964, an unprecedented 1,500 to 1,800 prints of the film A Hard Day's Night were ordered, marking what Billboard felt to be “a global saturation.” By their 1966 world tour, the Beatles would perform to eighty thousand fans in the Philippines. Some 200,000 fans entered a lottery for the thirty thousand available tickets for concerts in Japan.Footnote ¹⁸

American record executives interpreted these developments in light of their experiences of global dominance over the previous decades. No one rushed to bring the Beatles to American audiences, because it was assumed that foreign albums would not sell in the heartland of youth culture (the recent success of British one-hit wonders Telstar and Acker Bilk suggested that cultural trade was equalizing, but nobody thought it a serious trend). Capitol Records had the initial option on the rights to the Beatles’ catalogue because it was the American subsidiary of EMI (which owned the Beatles’ British label Parlophone). But Capitol did not exercise those rights, and an international clearing house, Transglobal Inc., purchased the rights to several Beatles’ tracks. It then leased them to Vee Jay records, a Chicago-based independent R & B label. When Vee Jay's early releases failed to sell, it defaulted on its payment, though not before it had licensed the rights of one song to its new pop subsidiary, Tollie. Either via a third company – Ambassador – or directly from Vee Jay, some of the rights were also licensed to a Philadelphia local, Swan Records. At some point, a number of the rights reverted back to EMI, and in late 1963, Capitol finally decided to exercise their option. In the interim, the decision had also been made to make a Beatles’ film with United Artists, and UA had stitched up the rights to the sound track to A Hard Day's Night. A series of legal challenges over the confusion were ultimately settled out of court, permanently obscuring the details of these murky transactions.Footnote ¹⁹

It was a shambles, but it turned out to be a boon for the Beatles. When the Beatles began to break in the US in early 1964, Capitol, Swan, Tollie and Vee Jay all released records. When the Beatles had their greatest success on the Billboard chart of 4 April 1964, Capitol held positions one and four with “Can't Buy Me Love” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Tollie had the number two record with “Twist and Shout,” Swan had the third-most-popular disk with “She Loves You” and Vee Jay held number five with “Please Please Me.” In addition to these labels, MGM released a few far less successful singles, which were old cuts of the Beatles with Tony Sheridan that had been recorded during the band's stay in Hamburg. Ironically, the confusion over the labels added to the Beatles’ success. Normally, no record company would have allowed an artist to release so many singles at once for fear of reducing profits. But the nationalist assumptions of American record executives, a product of their recent hegemony, helped produce a bottleneck that ultimately facilitated the unprecedented dominance of a foreign group on the American charts.Footnote ²⁰

The nationalist economic structure of the global record industry thus helped to smooth the Beatles’ penetration of the US market. A variety of American record companies made money from the Beatles’ success – even record companies without rights to any Beatles material made money when an overwhelmed Capitol subcontracted rivals MGM and RCA Victor to press records. The Beatles, moreover, helped to revive the flagging American pop music market. As George A. Marek of RCA Victor explained, “everybody benefit[ed]” when the Beatles brought people into record stores.Footnote ²¹

There was, therefore, no protectionist response to the Beatles’ success in the US market. When John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor wondered if “Anglo-American relations can survive the strain” and predicted that the State Department might declare the Beatles an “Unfriendly Act,” his tongue was planted firmly in his cheek. In speaking of a Beatles’ invasion in 1964, Americans were speaking the language of cultural imperialism, but they were doing so with none of the angst, vehemence or pugnacity of, say, French responses to Coca-Cola and Hollywood.Footnote ²² Given global economics and geopolitics, as well as their experience of postwar cultural expansion, it would have been difficult for Americans to turn the Beatles into a proxy for generalized fears about cultural autonomy and civilizational decline. But there were not even economic actors who would have been tempted to rile up such fears. Why would they want to block the success of a foreign group that was producing unprecedented, and widely distributed, domestic profits?

The success of the Beatles raised sustained concerns about only one subject – their dominance in foreign markets. On 1 February 1964, Billboard realized that American artists hadn't topped the UK charts once in 1963, which it saw as a “staggering fact.” Seven weeks later, the situation degenerated, as Billboard noted that “for the first time in the history of the charts, the British Top 10 is now all-British.” Elsewhere, too, the Beatles pushed out American acts. Following the Beatles’ success down under, Billboard observed that “the Australian pop music scene is, at the moment, less dominated by American music than at any time in the past 20 years.” This was a frightening situation not only because the British had overtaken the market in the short term, but also because it might encourage Australian labels to cover American songs, a practice that had been “previously considered taboo.” Thus the American Federation of Musicians sought not to ban the Beatles in the US but to guarantee the continuation of a one-for-one exchange between British and American musicians overseas. Similarly, complaints about the radio saturation that the Beatles were enjoying – up to 50 percent of airtime on some stations, apparently – produced calls for more overseas airtime for American acts, not regulations on the Beatles at home. This was a curious form of American cultural protectionism, fixated on foreign export and accustomed to global dominance.Footnote ²³

Nonetheless, as entertainment journalist Herm Schoenfeld observed as early as February 1964, “the advent of the Beatles … shattered the steady, day-to-day domination of made-in-America here and abroad.”Footnote ²⁴ The Beatles, who had emerged as a result of the spread of American cultural forms to Britain and Europe, had now revealed that it was possible to sell culture back to the rock ‘n’ roll metropole. In the process, they had revealed that there was a vast global market for the sale of rock ‘n’ roll music without an American accent. That success had depended on some surprisingly material factors – the international diffusion of American cultural goods in the 1940s and 1950s, the structure of the international record industry, and the rising tide of a global record industry in the 1960s. But the Beatles had shown it was possible to produce an international market for pop music in which the US was but one segment. And that market was of unprecedented size. By 1965, when they had sold something in the order of 200 million records, the Beatles had already sold more discs worldwide than Elvis – despite the decade-long head start the Liverpudlians had given their American idol.Footnote ²⁵

As their career unfolded, the scale of that accomplishment multiplied the success of the Beatles. The earlier global icons of rock ‘n’ roll had had idiosyncratically truncated careers – Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash, Jerry Lee Lewis had controversially married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Chuck Berry had gone to jail, Elvis had been drafted into the army and then focussed his energies on his film career. The Beatles, however, remained committed musicians, and the sheer mass of their market allowed the Beatles to stop touring and work solely as recording artists. The vast profits that could be earned from each album also allowed the band to stave off the record label's incessant desire for new singles and devote their time to studio experimentation. The increasingly ambitious and sophisticated music of the Beatles in the four short years from “Please Please Me” to the White Album was in part a function of new technological and global vistas open to musicians who had risen to previously unimaginable levels of fame and fortune. And such freedoms allowed the band to expand the range of cultural forms that they appropriated into their increasingly transnational and increasingly experimental music – from the neoclassicism of “Eleanor Rigby,” to the bubble-blowing background of “Yellow Submarine,” to John's fusion of tape loops and Tibetan mysticism on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” to the playful British music hall identity of Sgt Peppers. As a result of their international success, to take one concrete example, the Beatles had both the fame to attract the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's attentions, and the leisure time to indulge in an extended stay in his ashram in Rishikesh in 1968. Harrison's interest in eastern mysticism and Indian music had preceded the band's affiliation with the maharishi – they grew out of a broad, diffuse interest in India that pervaded both the British rock ‘n’ roll scene and the US jazz scene in these years – but these opportunities allowed the Beatles to emerge as figureheads for the counterculture's interest in mysticism.Footnote ²⁶ The international success of the Beatles had become self-reproducing – the scale of their market allowed them to borrow from an ever-expanding cultural palette, which in turn helped to expand the scale of their market.

By 1967, then, it was possible to imagine that the Beatles represented a newly universal culture. Langdon Winner later recalled that “the closest western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna was the week that Sgt Pepper was released.” In the new rock journal Crawdaddy, editor Paul Williams opined that “the summer of 1967 was spent listening to Sgt Pepper. It was unavoidable, inevitable, more constant and universal than the climate.” This was hyperbolic, of course, but the global scale of the hyperbole is impressive and significant, as were the sales of the album. The same summer, when the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union engineered the first international satellite broadcast of a television show, they turned to the Beatles to perform. In June, accompanied by a chorus including the Rolling Stones, Keith Moon, Marianne Faithful and Eric Clapton, the band gave a live performance of a new song, “All You Need Is Love.” The Lennon composition provided an anthem for the global summer of love, and betrayed the Beatles’ increasingly eclectic absorption of a range of music – the song opened with “Le Marseillaise”; incorporated jazz, classical and folk references; and even, with Paul's background quote from “She Loves You,” threw in an early self-reflexive sampling of the Beatles own repertoire. Shown simultaneously to twenty-four countries – we should remember the geographic and technical limitations of 1960s globalism – the song and the moment exemplified the Beatles’ centrality to the increasing globality of 1960s mass culture.Footnote ²⁷

From the beginning, then, the Beatles had been bricoleurs. They had circulated on the economic networks of a transnational pop culture originally centered in the US, picking up cultural elements as they traveled. As the scale of their network expanded, so too did the scale of the Beatles success, as well as the scale of their cultural borrowings.

But if the Beatles could be viewed, from one angle, as representatives of a newly unified international cultural market, their cultural significance continued to be interpreted through local systems of meaning. Take, for instance, those infamous mop tops, soon declared by Life magazine to be the “the hair that turned the tide of teen-age history.”Footnote ²⁸ With hindsight it is easy to see the shaggy Beatles cut as a precursor to the flowing locks of the counterculture. But in 1964 the Beatles’ hair was not seen as threatening. There was, to be sure, the slightest policing of gender roles: some suburban schools banned students from wearing the haircut, and one Beatles haircut contest in a suburban tavern was “restricted to the feminine gender.”Footnote ²⁹ More broadly, however, Americans embraced the Beatles haircut. A number of American commentators praised the hair, seeing it as a form of androgyny that limited the sexuality of the band rather than a challenge to gender norms. When famed sociologist David Riesman was asked about the hair of the Beatles, he interpreted it positively: “well, they are British, and the British are accepted as being eccentric anyway. So the hairstyles don't have the same meaning as they would if the Beatles were unkempt in the American ‘beat’ style. Actually, these young men, although unkempt in one way, are very ‘kempt’ in another.”Footnote ³⁰ In reality, of course, there was nothing distinctively British about the hairstyles – they were a product of a European youth culture that could have been interpreted as a challenge to middle-class American cultural norms.

But the hair was not interpreted in those terms – it was interpreted according to American assumptions about British eccentricity. Similar processes of interpretation accompanied the Beatles everywhere they went. In the remainder of this article, I will zoom in on the early American response to the Beatles to explore the ways that the hybrid culture of the Beatles was interpreted locally. The very hybridity of the Beatles allowed for a contradictory set of meanings to be read onto them – they were simultaneously embraced as representing familiar American cultural forms and praised for the ways that their assumed British-ness distanced them from what middle-class cultural commentators found threatening in domestic culture. The Beatles were not exactly appropriated into American culture. Rather, because of their hybrid, transnational character, they could be interpreted in a multitude of ways that often obscured much of their true significance – Americans projected meaning onto the Beatles as much as they absorbed meaning from them.Footnote ³¹

At first, American commentators were dismissive of the Beatles, assuming that the English band was a laggard British appropriation of American culture from an earlier moment. Time noted that Americans would find the Beatles “achingly familiar.” According to one critic, the Beatles were a musical “anachronism” that came “pure and simple from the early 1950s, the simple halcyon days of rock ‘n’ roll.” According to another, they were “1956 American rock bouncing back at us.” Not even the phenomenal waves of screaming Beatlemaniacs could faze jaded American commentators. Less than a month before the Beatles invasion, Jack Gould of the New York Times confidently predicted that Beatlemania would not cross the Atlantic because “it is dated stuff. Hysterical squeals emanating from developing femininity really went out coincidental with the payola scandal and Presley's military service.” His confidence was unshaken by the February tour, as revealed by his dismissive review of the Ed Sullivan performance – “the boys hardly did for daughter what Elvis Presley did for her older sister or Frank Sinatra for her mother.”Footnote ³²

Daughter might have disagreed. The wailing, screaming, fainting and crying; the emotional highs of spotting a Beatle and the crushing, tearful lows of missing them – these were not the reactions of the jaded. Love letters to the Beatles testified to the subterranean currents of sexuality running through the Beatlemaniacs: “I am 4 feet 8. I weigh 92 lbs. I am all yours”; “I could never love or marry anyone else. No other arms will ever hold me. No other lips will ever kiss me”; “Dear Paul, I think you are very sexy and I don't even know what it means.” No wonder that Beatlemania has been plausibly interpreted by feminist scholars as the “first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution.”Footnote ³³

In the 1950s, the merest whiff of such sexuality and rebellion in teen culture had led to widespread social outrage and a national crisis over juvenile delinquency. As historian James Gilbert has argued, the “predominant metaphor” used to describe juvenile delinquency in the 1950s was “one of contagion, contamination, and infection.” As a corollary, delinquency had been met with a host of attempted cures – censorship, media outrage, and Senate inquiries. Now the kids were infected again – with Beatlemania, that “virulent form of record fever.” But those infected by Beatlemania were in no need of a cure. Variety noted that the “epidemic [was] pleasant enough,” and the New York Times called it a “happy hysteria.”Footnote ³⁴

At the same time that American commentators were identifying the Beatles as “achingly familiar,” then, they were also distinguishing the Beatles from what was still considered threatening in 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. The New York Herald-Tribune commented that “the Beatles stage-manner is decorous – you almost want to say clean-cut – in comparison with that of many American rock ‘n’ roll groups.” Time compared the Liverpudlians favorably to both Presley and Sinatra because “Presley made his pelvis central to his act, and the screams of his admirers were straight from the raunch. Sinatra's Adam's Apple bobbled in Morse code, and no lass misread the message. But the Beatles are really Teddy Bears … they are as wholesome as choirboys.” Symbolically, a number of the critics of mass culture of the 1950s praised the Beatles in direct comparison with the music they had attacked a decade earlier. Vance Packard, a trenchant critic of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, thought that “the Beatles couldn't possibly hope to outdo Elvis Presley in appalling parents … they are no longer roughnecks but rather lovable, almost cuddly, imps.” More broadly, too, the Beatles were embraced as “the very spirit of good clean fun.” Ed Sullivan famously blessed them as “four of the nicest youngsters we've ever had on the show.”Footnote ³⁵

For a group that had recently been playing raucous, intoxicated sets in a German red light district, this was a remarkable makeover. It was attributable in part to the careful self-control of the band, but it was also a product of the ways that American commentators projected an image of British respectability onto the band. As David Riesman put it, warming to the theme of British asexuality he had developed with regard to the mop top, “it's very safe for a young girl to admire these Englishmen … they have none of this somewhat sinister quality that Presley represented for adults. They don't have the quasi-sexual, quasi-aggressive note that was present in Presley.”Footnote ³⁶

The lingering fear of Presley's aggressive sexuality was a legacy of the 1950s critique of mass culture, which had been given social potency by the quintessential cultural concerns of the American middle class. As a number of scholars have shown, the critique of rock ‘n’ roll and juvenile delinquency was underpinned by a deep unease about racial and class interactions in both the South and the industrial city. Even white rockers, covering songs or borrowing liberally from African American music, could not shake the threatening associations cast by the long shadow of putatively libidinal black music, in part because they tended to be working-class.Footnote ³⁷

It would have been entirely plausible to associate the Beatles with the same fears. They had had a quite visceral connection with a particularly seamy urban underbelly in Hamburg. And in John Lennon's phase as an art school Teddy boy, he had been featured in a sensationalist tabloid piece about the inner-city horrors of beatnik Liverpool. In the mid-1960s, moreover, the Beatles had a great debt to African American music, covering more African American songs than many of the white artists of the 1950s did. All six of the cover songs on the band's second American album, for instance, were originally performed by African American artists.Footnote ³⁸ But the Beatles were able to perform a sexually charged, and larynx-shredding, version of “Twist and Shout” and still seem like chaste poms, just as they could get away with making insinuations that would have made Chuck Berry proud: “well she was just seventeen, and you know what I mean.” These borrowings were not lost on some African American cultural critics, who identified the Beatles as just the latest white musicians to “strike it with the brown sound.”Footnote ³⁹

But white American assumptions about British respectability disassociated the Beatles from the “seamier” roots of rock ‘n’ roll. Liverpool, particularly in American eyes, was no Chicago or Detroit or Memphis. Ehrenreich et al. have noted that “Americans couldn't tell a blue-collar, Liverpudlian accent from Oxbridge English” and were thus incapable of locating the foreign group neatly within their class structure. Instead, there was a tendency to assume that the Beatles were upper-class. One fan claimed that she loved to hear George say “rubbish” with his “Oxford accent.” The New York Times described John Lennon as “a kind of upper-class choir boy with a churl's haircut.” Another commentator declared the group to be of lower-middle-class origin. In truth, John was from a split lower-middle-class home, George and Paul were from upper-working-class families, and Ringo, considered the most lovable of the group, was a poor boy from the tough Dingle neighborhood. The Beatles were benefiting from long-standing American associations of Britain with respectability – in the 1910s, Vernon and Irene Castle had helped render modern dance respectable in New York because Americans assumed the English performers to be upper-class; in the 1950s, both movies and television from Britain had become coded as “quality” culture.Footnote ⁴⁰

Because the respectability of the Beatles had more to do with the cultural projections of American audiences than it did with the character of the Beatles themselves, the image of the group was vulnerable to broader swings in American cultural politics. The “Jesus” controversy of 1966 provides a case study of the ways in which a segment of the American audience could project new meanings onto the international culture the Beatles had made. On 29 July 1966, Datebook published excerpts from an interview with John Lennon, in which he claimed, “We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary.” Lennon issued a truculent and grudging apology within days, but it failed to quell the rash of radio bans, protests and record burnings that broke out across the southern states of the US. The dynamics of the controversy, however, were curious. As early as August 1964 Derek Taylor, the band's press officer, had commented in the Saturday Evening Post that “they're completely anti-Christ. I mean, I'm anti-Christ as well, but they're so anti-Christ they shock me, which isn't an easy thing.” But the statement had produced little outrage – Baptist minister David Noebel had toured America in 1965 claiming that the anti-Christian group was part of a “Communist Master Music Plan” to hypnotize American youth, but he was dismissed as a crank by most commentators. In 1965, the Christian Century had calmly commented that “we're not even especially bothered by the fact that the Beatles say they are ‘anti-Christian.’” There had been no controversy when John's “bigger than Jesus” comments had first been published in London in March 1966, or when they were partially republished in the New York Times on July 3.Footnote ⁴¹ The comments in isolation were not enough to produce a Beatles backlash.

Rather, developments within the US account for the sudden outrage over the Beatles in the summer of 1966. With the ratcheting up of political and cultural tensions over Vietnam, the counterculture, and the civil rights movements, the Beatles no longer seemed a “British” group apart from domestic concerns; now they were very much a part of America's cultural controversies. If the band's Britishness had once set them apart from the racialized politics of rock ‘n’ roll, the Beatles could now serve as a proxy for fears about American racial conflict. Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert Shelton, helping to engineer Beatle bonfires in Memphis, opined that “from their appearances and from the calomeration [sic] of colors that they're involved I couldn't identify them as whether they're actually white or black.” Such hyperbolic fears of racial intermixture, once completely absent in conversations about the lily-white Liverpudlians, now echoed across the transnational spaces of the Beatles ban – the boycott that had begun in the US Bible Belt had spread to Spain and South Africa.Footnote ⁴² The Beatles could not completely control the interlinked international culture their music had forged, but they were available as a common cultural symbol to be interpreted and critiqued across multiple national spaces.

Indeed, at the same time as the religious right began projecting its own fears onto the Beatles, the countercultural left began projecting its hopes onto the group. When an antiwar meeting at Berkeley in 1966 sought to end with a collective song, a faltering attempt at “Solidarity Forever” was replaced with the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” – only the words to the latter were universally known. In 1967, the same song provided the soundtrack for a march of war protesters on the Pentagon. In 1969, one group of LA hippies named their collective the Yellow Submarine.Footnote ⁴³

Once again this was a product of the ubiquity and hybridity of the Beatles cultural output, and not because of any necessary alignment between the band and the counterculture – George, for instance, famously declared his disgust with the decadence and despondency of the Haight–Ashbury scene during his 1967 visit. As late as 1968, Lennon was struggling to articulate a radical politics in the context of increasing politicization and violence. “Revolution,” recorded in May 1968, saw him torn between his desire to join with militant activism and his ongoing commitment to pacifism and the utopian politics of love. The first version laid down, which later would be released on the White Album, had expressed this ambivalence most directly – “but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out … in.” But when the group recorded an up-tempo single version, the lyrical ambivalence indicated by the “in” had been removed. Released, unfortunately, on the first day of the Chicago Democratic Convention, protestors who would shortly be assaulted by the police could hear Lennon telling them most emphatically that “you can count me out.” The left-wing press attacked the song as reactionary – “a narcissistic song … that preaches counter-revolution” and a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” As Greil Marcus insightfully observed, the New Left was shocked because it had already projected its own identity onto the Beatles: the outrage over Revolution derived from a sense that the Beatles had betrayed their status as youth spokesmen:

The countercultural appropriations of “Yellow Submarine” were particularly ironic. The song had been written as a children's ditty and novelty tune, and was released in England as the B-side to “Eleanor Rigby” in 1966. In America, Capitol balked at releasing a song with any religious commentary so soon after the Jesus controversy. So “Yellow Submarine” was the single that was promoted in the US. Fans, struggling to make sense of the childishness of the track, apparently assumed there must have been something else going on – and speculated that “yellow submarine” was code for the yellow capsules of the barbituate Nembutal, or a reference to the stained butt of a joint. And then the song's sketches of countercultural allegory had been filled in by the animated film of 1968 in which the band frees Pepperland from the tyrannical grip of the Blue Meanies. But the Beatles had been almost entirely uninvolved in the making of the film (and had supported its production primarily to wriggle out of the remaining film obligations of their contract with United Artists). In the context of massive cultural success, and prodigious productivity, the Beatles began to lose control over the uses to which their symbolism could be put. Their universal success in the mid-1960s meant that their cultural output was available and familiar for interpretation with little regard to their intentions – one need only think of Charles Manson deriving his crazed cosmology from the White Album.Footnote ⁴⁵

An internationally successful group like the Beatles, then, had to be culturally legible in multiple cultural spaces. By necessity, that meant both that their cultural output was a hybridized melange, and that audiences could project onto the Beatles a wide variety of disparate identities: respectably asexual British pop stars, achingly familiar repeats of 1950s American rock, promoters of anti-Christian race mixing, countercultural icons, or reactionary laggards.

Although this essay has focussed primarily on the ways in which Americans made sense of the Beatles, the method could be extended to explore other forms of interpretation, appropriation and rejection. The British, for instance, understandably interpreted the group in nationalist terms. The band's American stylings went unmentioned when Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home dubbed the Beatles “a secret weapon,” or when the Beatles were made Members of the British Empire for the good they had done for the trade balance.Footnote ⁴⁶ Meanwhile, other nations projected fears of westernization onto the Beatles, and used the group for similarly nationalist projects. Indonesian President Sukarno, for instance, banned the Beatles, and on the twentieth anniversary of national independence, Beatles records were burned in Jakarta “to preserve the national identity in the field of culture.” Curiously, whereas Americans partially emphasized what was British about the Beatles, nationalist audiences in Japan and the Philippines seemed to interpret the band as agents of Americanization. In Japan, nationalists protested the Beatles performance in the hallowed Budokan Hall. Identifying the Beatles as the purveyors of Western culture, and as heir to the US occupation, protesters treated the British band as a proxy for anti-Americanism and neatly updated the old “Yankee Go Home” chant –”Beatles Go Home.” In the Philippines, the Beatles were likewise identified as symbols of Americanized modernity – but were embraced by the Marcos regime, and scheduled to play on Philippine–American Friendship Day, 4 July. A well-publicized failure to attend a tea party with Lady Marcos, however, led to the Beatles’ hurried departure to avoid a near riot of insulted fans.Footnote ⁴⁷ Just as diverse groups of Americans projected their own meanings onto the hybridized, international Beatles, so too did audiences in other parts of the Beatles’ international network.

The historian's task is simultaneously to trace the production of the international network that produced the Beatles as a cultural common ground and to map the variety of meanings that were projected onto that common culture. As a cultural form, the Beatles emerged from the postwar hegemony of American youth culture. They stitched together an identity from European, British and American influences, which was then transmitted along the increasingly international circuits of a surging global record industry. The scale of the market they produced then allowed the Beatles to absorb a wider array of cultural influences as they began to appear as an increasingly universal cultural form. At the same time, however, the Beatles were interpreted according to local systems of meaning, as different readings were projected onto the Beatles’ hybridized culture. These meanings varied across social formations and shifted over time, and they had as much to do with the imaginings of the audience as they did with any essential traits of the Beatles themselves: in 1964, the Beatles appealed to middle-class Americans for their “British” respectability; by 1966, the Beatles simultaneously appealed to the counterculture and terrified the religious right for their alleged radicalism.

The key to studying a global cultural form like the Beatles, then, is showing how an integrated cultural network was constructed and how a range of cultural meanings were projected onto the products circulating in that network. That means paying attention to the historical processes – contingent, variable, iterative – that underpin both the construction and the interpretation of a common international culture. The Beatles were not simply British, or straightforwardly Americanized. They were a global force – they were indeed “here, there and everywhere.” But the spectacular history of the Beatles reminds us that as the “everywhere” of global culture was made by a rising tide of commodification, it was always interpreted according to the cultural politics of “here” and in light of the ways in which “there” was imagined.