Did the Beatles really start a revolution?

by Neil McCormick

Ignore the evidence of your own ears, dismiss the comments of eyewitnesses, scorn the testament of other musicians, reject the opinions of critics and historians, science has spoken: The Beatles were not really all that significant.

There is something very pompous and disdainful about the presentation of new research from the Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College suggesting the Fab Four did not spark the musical revolution they have long been credited with. "They were good looking boys with great haircuts but as far as their music was concerned they weren't anything new," according to Professor Armand Leroi, senior author of the paper. Now he sounds like a lot of fun at a party.

The Beatles combined trends of the time into a seamless electric shock of sound

The gist of his study of underlying chord progressions, beats, lyrics, trends and "tone" in all US hits between 1960 and 2010 seems to be that there is no such thing as a musical revolution, only incremental progression. It is surely the latest dispatch from the department of the bleeding obvious. Our human instinct to create narrative by retrospectively shaping events into manageable storylines has a tendency to focus in on big bang moments, when the direction of history seems to be suddenly and profoundly altered. More subtle analysis always reveals a convergence of underlying trends and influences. No revolution ever came out of a vacuum.

Lenin didn't single-handedly take to the streets and bring down imperial Russia. Picasso didn't spill some paint on a canvas and invent Cubism. Elvis didn't pop out of the womb singing "awopbopalula".

The sensationalist way this group of London academics has chosen to draw attention to their not particularly original or remotely surprising findings is by impugning the Beatles originality.

Yet their smug conclusions are at once completely obvious and fundamentally wrong. Because if pop music ever actually had a big bang moment, it was The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in America in February 1964. The Beatles music percolated with the energy of rock 'n' roll, the drive of rhythm and blues, harmonic shades of jazz, doo wop and soul and melodic elegance of the music hall and Broadway show tunes and formal pop of their childhoods. Yet it was the incredibly singular way they brought all those into one place and combined them into a seamless electric shock of sound that sparked a cultural revolution.

It is all very well to point out that the Beach Boys had taken Surfin' USA into the charts before The Beatles landed in America or that Twist & Shout was actually a cover of an Isley Brothers hit, but the Beatles sound combined both the harmonic daring of the Beach Boys and the raw soulful energy of the Isley Brothers and infused it with their own very particular quality of attack and invention.

And as any teenager could tell you, pop music operates in spheres far beyond quantifiable chord changes and rhythmic patterns. Can you scientifically calculate how much of The Beatles appeal lay in their irreverent gang camaraderie and how that played with the coming of age of the post war Baby Boom generation? Is there a mathematical measurement for the impact of their long forward combed hair style (and should that be in inches or centimetres)? And what part did America's collective shock at the assassination of President John F Kennedy play in their response to the arrival of these upbeat, free spirited, funny, irreverent Englishmen in a traumatised nation?

Every American musician of a certain age that I have ever interviewed has spoken of their intense memories of seeing the Beatles on TV for the first time. 75 million people tuned in to the Ed Sullivan show, almost half of the American population. "It was like the whole world changed overnight," as Tom Petty memorably put it. Beatlemania took America with dizzying speed.

A month later, they occupied the top five consecutive positions on the US singles chart and were in the midst of a thirty week run at the top of the album charts with three different albums. I don't think there has ever been a pop moment like it, and I doubt there ever will. And that, as we all know, was just the beginning.

Yet for the researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College, "it's entirely coincidental. The Beatles didn't make a revolution or spark a revolution, they joined one." All these dry numbers really prove is that you can't measure magic on a graph. And when it comes to pop revolutions, don't count on scientists and statisticians to man the barricades.

-This article was originally published in The Telegraph)