The Rock n’ Roll of the 60’s and The Beatles

The sixties were the years when Rock n’ Roll started to spread all over the world, the reason why it began to have variations since the original thing of the fifties. Rock n’ Roll becomes world music.

Yet in 1957, even thought everything seemed to be on peace, the world was still resentful of World War Two. The people and the cities were damaged; men and women, in order to reconstruct their world, started to live in hard routines. But, instead, the young people refused to live like that. They started to follow the new American music genre and movement of Rock n’ Roll very closely (Sánchez, 1).

At the beginning of the sixties, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley had already produced their masterpieces that started Rock n’ Roll. Soon this music started to expand throughout the world, taking different forms depending on the place where it settled (Sánchez, 1). After the United States, the most significant country was the United Kingdom. As this music movement became more successful and the young generation felt identified with it, more teenagers wanted to be part of it, among them, the young John Lennon (Sánchez, 1). He is the official founder of the Beatles in 1957.

The development of the Beatles as a rock n’ roll band is parallel to the development of the movement in many ways, and at the same time the Beatles influenced changes in this music. They started their music career mixing the recently resurged “skiffle”* with the American rock n’ roll, contributing to the variations in rock ‘n roll music (Sánchez, 1). After the skiffle stopped being used, they looked for a new sound, the main characteristic that shaped the original rock n’ roll music in those days. The Beatles started playing at clubs, mainly in The Cavern, as many other bands would do in and since that time. The media realized the success to come for those new bands of the rock n’ roll movement and started promoting them through television, as The Beatles would appear in TV shows at the beginning of their career. By 1963 it was almost impossible to get a ticket for one of their concerts, and if you got one, you would see how police officers tried to stop the crazy fanatics. The “Beatlemania” would assimilate the feeling of collective hysteria that would come in the future for the next rock n’ roll bands and for the movement in general; this feeling would contribute to the increasing independence of the young generation from the adult people (Sánchez, 6). When the Beatles separate in 1970, rock music goes through new variations and changes, just like every member of the quartet changed their personal interests in music.

The Beatles were so successful and special in those years because of the things they pioneered in. They were one of the first groups of young boys that also wanted to compose their own songs and get their own new sound. They were revolutionary at their time, because they proposed a variation in Rock n’ Roll which was just what the young generation needed at the time, change, happiness and independence, brought by the Beatles through music (:

The revolution continues.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKHgVN7Bjww&feature=fvst

*Skiffle: “originally used in the U.S. in the 1930s to describe mixtures of blues, boogie woogie, and other popular black music” (allmusic.com).

Works cited

Sánchez Guarneros, Israel. Rock Stars. México: Guarnerius Editores, 2007.

“Skiffle”. allmusic.com. All Music, n.d., Web. August 31, 201.