The Beatles' New Medium

 

My central argument is that, though The Beatles have been analyzed countless times in terms of popular culture, and their music "as it is written," such analyses fails to take into account the essential new medium by which The Beatles' distinctive sound was enabled: recorded sound. 

The Beatles

- Formed in 1957 as teenagers

- Gained massive popularity in the years 1962-64.​

-As their popularity grew to unprecedented heights, they began to feel more free to experiment with their music.​

-As their music began to utilize more and more studio recording techniques and sound manipulation, producing the same effects at live performances became increasingly difficult.​

-The Beatles retired altogether from live performance in 1966.​

 

The Beatles' retirement from live performance signaled that their true medium was not as performers, but as recording artists.

With the ability to record sound, suddenly the "allatonce," enveloping nature of the aural world was subject to the same freedom of distribution, and reproduction that the printed word had enjoyed for centuries.​

Following the Mcluhan idea of the mythic, The Beatles were able to "put on" their audience.

 

The commodification of The Beatles' image was a side effect of their cultural mythic status.

 

 

 

By harnessing the new medium of recorded sound and image in a way never done before, The Beatles were able to take on the world, “put on” their audience, and achieve a degree of cultural significance not seen before or since. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lyle Rexer Reflection

     Lyle Rexer gave a very interesting talk about the prevalence in contemporary photo art of ‘Bad Pictures of Bad Subjects’. This is not a disparaging comment, however. Rexer discussed how the changing nature and use-cases of photographs have led to this outcome. Today, nearly all Americans have access to a camera attached to their phones at all times. This, along with social media’s meteoric rise, has lead to an unprecedented volume of so-called ‘vernacular’ images being taken as compared to past eras. What do these kinds of images, with little consideration given to framing, composition, or conceptual ideas, say about our contemporary image making culture? Naturally, contemporary ‘fine art’ photographers have been quick to respond to the growing trend. In creating these ‘bad pictures of bad subjects’, scrutiny is placed upon the context of the photographs, rather than the content themselves. I always wonder whether I would be able to tell the difference between these ‘bad’ pictures
Read more
   My goal in this piece was to present an at first "traditional" piece of music, which slowly devolves into inharmonic, atmospheric sound and noise. I was greatly inspired by the McLuhan idea that "everything we do is music." I wanted to use the juxtaposition of a more traditional, acoustic (in timbre) style of music, with the electronic, artificial sounds of the synthesizer. I've always been fascinated with the increasing ability of  electronic instruments to render convincing acoustic sounds. Though it may be an example of new media doing to the work of the old, I think it's extremely useful to be able to have such a vast collection of instruments at one's disposal, requiring only basic keyboard skills in order to play them. This electronic-acoustic hybrid (using samples) gives way to many interesting possibilities involving the combination of acoustic and electronic instruments, which is what I've tried to showcase here.  I experimented a lot wit
Read more

Journal 1: Conveying Meaning in Advertising

Image
  This advertisement for Heinz ketchup is a good example of the kinds of visual rhetoric Barthes talks about in this chapter.  Linguistic The pieces of linguistic information within the image are: 1) The Heinz brand and label, and 2) the tagline "No one grows Ketchup like Heinz." The operative verb here is very telling as to what the intent of the advertiser is. As we all know, ketchup is not grown. However, tomatoes are. The linguistic equation of the product (ketchup) with fresh tomatoes serves to reinforce a positive, fresh, clean, and healthy view of the product in the consumer. This reinforcement happens by way of Barthes' idea of "anchorage," where linguistic information is used to “fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.” That is to say, it steers the viewer towards the “correct” interpretation of the image, underscoring and highlighting the positive, ‘euphoric’, desirable qualities of the connoted i
Read more