The Beatles - Can't Buy Me Love: British Invasion & American Music History | Perfect for Beatles Fans & Music Enthusiasts
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Product Description
That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould explains why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise. Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II. From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’ t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.
Customer Reviews
As the author points out, the volume of press given to the cultural phenomena of the Beatles has included few biographies of the band itself. Think of this as a real biography of a band -- the story of a remarkable quartet set against the cultural influences that shaped them, tracing their growth, exploring the many factors that made them more popular, and more revered, than any other musical group before or since, and tracing their demise and peculiar afterlife as never-dimming cultural icons. (Ringo Starr remains a regular guest on talk shows, after all, where he would never appear except that he had *been a Beatle.*) Apart from the writing mechanics -- lucid, clear, easy to read -- I find that Gould has brought out aspects of the people, their city, their times, and their work that no one else has done. He deserves to be commended for this.You are most likely to enjoy this book if you appreciate the band when you hear the music (and tap your feet to it), but also want to build a little bit of understanding of their phenomenon -- to develop some new insights into what made them such a remarkable cultural force. The author puts their breakthrough moments into the context of the Profumo affair and uses sociological theory, especially Max Weber, to interpret why their fans went through such frenzies, after all. You will meet Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung as well. An author can very easily fall into pseudo-intellectual BS by drawing in so many cultural influences, but in this writer's case the story of the band is the meal, while such background events and theories are the seasoning. He talks of these both to draw the reader into that time and place, and (in some cases) to illuminate why each of the band's members took the courses they did. I think he does really well at this. In particular, when he talks about the obvious sexual appeal of the band to its teenage fans, he barely mentions Freud. He stays away from the more pretentious and dubious speculations that initially greeted the band, instead pointing out that two were different kinds of handsome, one was a charismatic rebel, and one reminded people of an adorable puppy, giving the female fans a virtual smorgasbord of options for their infatuations, as well as re-forming social cliques around those totemic figures.If you are simply interested in learning as much as you can about the members and the details of their lives, you will find plenty of that material here. You may want to skip over the analytical bits, which is easier done in a print than the Kindle edition, as he does not separate the analysis neatly into chapters. You may also want to start with Hunter Davies' 1968 authorized biography The Beatles (Updated Edition), and Michael Braun's early and more gritty Love Me Do!: "Beatles" Progress. But for my money, Gould has done the best job of making the Beatles and their times come alive, as if the reader had been, not in the inner circle, but within visual range of it.
