Beatlemania: A Past Paper PDF

# Beatlemania ## 1. Girls Just Want to Have Fun ...witness the birth of eve—she is rising she was sleeping she is fading in a naked field sweating the precious blood of nodding blooms... in the eye of the arena she bends in half in service—the anarchy that exudes from the pores of her guitar are t...

# Beatlemania ## 1. Girls Just Want to Have Fun ...witness the birth of eve—she is rising she was sleeping she is fading in a naked field sweating the precious blood of nodding blooms... in the eye of the arena she bends in half in service—the anarchy that exudes from the pores of her guitar are the cries of the people wailing in the rushes a riot of ray/ dios… **Patti Smith, “Notice,” in Babel** The news footage shows police lines straining against crowds of hundreds of young women. The police look grim; the girls' faces are twisted with desperation or, in some cases, shining with what seems to be an inner light. _The air is dusty from a thousand running and scuffling feet. There are shouted orders to disperse, answered by a rising volume of chants and wild shrieks. The young women surge forth; the police line breaks_ **Beatlemania** Looking at the photos or watching the news clips today, anyone would guess that this was the sixties a demonstration or maybe the early seventies—the beginning of the women's liberation movement. Until you look closer and see that the girls are not wearing sixties-issue jeans and T-shirts but bermuda shorts, high-necked, preppie blouses, and disheveled but unmistakably bouffant hairdos. This is not 1968 but 1964, and the girls are chanting, as they surge against the police line, “I love Ringo.” Yet, if it was not the “movement,” or a clear-cut protest of any kind, Beatlemania was the first mass outburst of the sixties to feature women—in this case girls, who would not reach full adulthood until the seventies and the emergence of a genuinely political movement for women's liberation. The screaming ten- to fourteen-year-old fans of 1964 did not riot for anything, except the chance to remain in the proximity of their idols and hence to remain screaming. But they did have plenty to riot against, or at least to overcome through the act of rioting: In a highly sexualized society (one sociologist found that the number of explicitly sexual references in the mass media had doubled between 1950 and 1960), teen and preteen girls were expected to be not only "good" and "pure" but to be the enforcers of purity within their teen society drawing the line for overeager boys and ostracizing girls who failed in this responsibility. To abandon control to scream, faint, dash about in mobs—was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture. It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution. Beatlemania, in most accounts, stands isolated in history as a mere craze—quirky and hard to explain. There had been hysteria over male stars before, but nothing on this scale. In its peak years—1964 and 1965 -Beatlemania struck with the force, if not the conviction, of a social movement. It began in England with a report that fans had mobbed the popular but not yet immortal group after a concert at the London Palladium on October 13, 1963. Whether there was in fact a mob or merely scuffle involving no more than eight girls is not clear, but the report acted as a call to mayhem. Eleven days later a huge and excited crowd of girls greeted the Beatles (returning from a Swedish tour) at Heathrow Airport. In early November, 400 Carlisle girls fought the police for four hours while trying to get tickets for a Beatles concert; nine people hospitalized after the crowd surged forward and broke through shop windows. In London and Birmingham the police could not guarantee the Beatles safe escort through the hordes of fans. In Dublin the police chief judged that the Beatles' first visit: was “all right until the mania degenerated into barbarism.”¹ And on the eve of group’s first U.S. tour, _Life_ reported, “A Beatle who ventures out unguarded into the streets runs the very real peril of being dismembered or crushed to death by his fans.”² ## 2. Re-making Love When the Beatles arrived in the United States, which was still ostensibly sobered by the assassination of President Kennedy two months before, the fans knew what to do. Television had spread the word from England: The approach of the Beatles is a license to riot. At least 4,000 girls (some estimates run as high as 10,000) greeted them at Kennedy Airport, and hundreds more laid siege to the Plaza Hotel keeping the stars virtual prisoners. A record 73 million Americans watched the Beatles on _"The Ed Sullivan Show"_ on February 9, 1964, the night "when there wasn't a hubcap stolen anywhere in America." American Beatlemania soon reached the proportions of religious idolatry. During the Beatles' twenty-three-city tour that August, local promoters were required to provide a minimum of 100 security guards to hold back the crowds. Some cities tried to ban Beatle-bearing craft from their runways; otherwise it took heavy deployments of local police to protect the Beatles from their fans and the fans from the crush. In one city someone got hold of the hotel pillowcases that had purportedly been used by the Beatles, cut them into 160,000 tiny squares, mounted them on certificates, and sold them for $1 apiece. The group packed Carnegie Hall Washington's Coliseum and, a year later, New York's 55,600-seat Shea Stadium, and in no setting, at any time, was their music audible above the frenzied screams of the audience. _In 1966, just under three years after the start of Beatlemania, the Beatles gave their last concert-the first musical celebrities to be driven from the stage by their own fans._ In its intensity, as well as its scale, Beatlemania surpassed all previous outbreaks of star-centered hysteria. Young women had swooned over Frank Sinatra in the forties and screamed for Elvis Presley in the immediate pre-Beatle years, but the Fab Four inspired an extremity of feeling usually reserved for football games or natural disasters. These baby boomers far outnumbered the generation that, thanks to the censors, had only been able to see Presley's upper torso on _“The Ed Sullivan Show.”_ Seeing (whole) Beatles on Sullivan was exciting, but not enough. Watching the band on television was a thrill—particularly the close-ups—but the real goal was to leave home and meet the Beatles. The appropriate reaction to contact with them—such as occupying the same auditorium or city block was to sob uncontrollably while screaming “I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die,” or, more optimistically, the name of a favorite Beatle, until the onset of either unconsciousness or laryngitis. Girls peed in their pants, fainted, or simply collapsed from the emotional strain. When not in the vicinity of the Beatles—and only a small proportion of fans ever got within shrieking distance of their idols—girls exchanged Beatle magazines or cards, and gathered to speculate obsessively on the details and nuances of Beatle life. _One woman, who now administers a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group, recalls long discussions with other thirteen-year-olds in Orlando, Maine:_ I especially liked talking about the Beatles with other girls. Someone would say, “What do you think Paul had for breakfast?” “Do you think he sleeps with a different girl every night?” Or, “Is John really the leader?” “Is George really more sensitive?” And like that for hours. This fan reached the zenith of junior high school popularity after becoming the only girl in town to travel to a Beatles' concert in Boston: “My mother had made a new dress for me to wear [to the concert] and when I got back, the other girls wanted to cut it up and auction off the pieces.” To adults, Beatlemania was an affliction, an “epidemic,” and the Beatles themselves were only the carriers, or even "foreign germs.” At risk were all ten- to fourteen-year-old girls, or at least all white girls; blacks were disdainful of the Beatles' initially derivative and unpolished sound. There appeared to be no cure except for age, and the media pundits were fond of reassuring adults that the girls who had screamed for Frank Sinatra had grown up to be responsible, settled housewives. If there was a shortcut to recovery, it certainly wasn’t easy. A group of Los Angeles girls organized a detox effort called "Beatlesaniacs, Ltd.,” offering “group therapy for those living near active chapters, and withdrawal literature for those going it alone at far-flung outposts.” Among the rules for recovery were: “Do not mention the word Beatles (or beetles),” “Do not mention the word England,” “Do not speak with an English accent,” and “Do not speak English.” In other words, Beatlemania was as inevitable as acne and gum-chewing, and adults would just have to weather it out. But why was it happening? And why in particular to an America that prided itself on its post-McCarthy maturity, its prosperity, and its clear position as the number one world power? True, there were social problems that not even _Reader's Digest_ could afford to be smug about - racial segregation, for example, and the newly discovered poverty of “the other America.” But these were things that an energetic President could easily handle or so most people believed at the time—and if "the Negro problem," as it was called, generated overt unrest, it was seen as having a corrective function and limited duration. Notwithstanding an attempted revival by presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, “extremism” was out of style in any area of expression. In colleges, “coolness" implied a detached and rational appreciation of the status quo, and it was de rigueur among all but the avant-garde who joined the Freedom Rides or signed up for the Peace Corps. No one, not even Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, could imagine a reason for widespread discontent among the middle class or for strivings that could not be satisfied with a department store charge account—much less for "mania." In the media, adult experts fairly stumbled over each other to offer the most reassuring explanations. _The New York Times Magazine_ offered a “psychological, anthropological," half tongue-in-cheek account, titled “Why the Girls Scream, Weep, Flip.” Drawing on the work of the German sociologist Theodor Adorno, _Times_ writer David Dempsey argued that the girls weren't really out of line at all; they were merely “conforming.” Adorno had diagnosed the 1940s jitterbug fans as "rhythmic obedients,” who were “expressing their desire to obey.” They needed subsume themselves into mass, “to become transformed into an insect.” Hence, "jitterbug,” and as Dempsey triumphantly added: "Beatles, too, are a type of bug … and to 'beatle,' as to jitter is to lose one's identity in an automated, insectlike activity, in other words, to obey." If Beatlemania was more frenzied than the outbursts of obedience inspired by Sinatra or Fabian, it was simply because the music was “more frantic,” and in some animal way, more compelling. It is generally admitted "that jungle rhythms influence the 'beat' of much contemporary dance activity,” he wrote, blithely endorsing the stock racist response to rock 'n' roll. Atavistic, "aboriginal" instincts impelled the girls to scream, weep and flip, whether they liked it or not: “It is probably no coincidence that the Beatles, who provoke the most violent response among teen-agers, resemble in manner the witch doctors who put their spells on hundreds of shuffling and stamping natives." Not everyone saw the resemblance between Beatlemanic girls and “natives” in a reassuring light however. _Variety_ speculated that Beatlemania might be “a phenomenon closely linked to the current wave of racial rioting.” It was hard to miss the element of defiance in Beatlemania. If Beatlemania was conformity, it was conformity to an imperative that overruled adult mores and even adult laws. In the mass experience of Beatlemania, as for example at a concert or an airport, a girl who might never have contemplated shoplifting could assault a policeman with her fists, squirm under police barricades, and otherwise invite a disorderly conduct charge. Shy, subdued girls could go berserk. “Perky," ponytailed girls of the type favored by early sixties sitcoms could dissolve in histrionics. In quieter contemplation of their idols, girls could see defiance in the Beatles or project it onto them. _Newsweek_ quoted Pat Hagan, “a pretty, 14-year-old Girl Scout, nurse's aide, and daughter of a Chicago lawyer who previously dug ‘West Side Story,' Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “They're tough,' she said of the Beatles. ‘Tough is like when you don't conform. You're tumultuous when you’re young, and each generation has to have its idols.' ” America's favorite sociologist, David Riesman, concurred, describing Beatlemania as “a form of protest against the adult world." There was another element of Beatlemania that was hard to miss but not always easy for adults to acknowledge. As any casual student of Freud would have noted, at least part of the fans' energy was sexual. Freud's initial breakthrough had been the insight that the epidemic female “hysteria” of the late nineteenth century -which took the form of fits, convulsions, tics, and what we would now call neuroses—was the product of sexual repression. In 1964, though, confronted with massed thousands of “hysterics,” psychologists approached this diagnosis warily. After all, despite everything Freud had had to say about childhood sexuality, most Americans did not like to believe that twelve-year-old girls had any sexual feelings to repress. And no normal girl or full-grown woman for that matter-was supposed to have the libidinal voltage required for three hours of screaming, sobbing, incontinent, acute-phase Beatlemania. In an article in _Science News Letter_ titled “Beatles Reaction Puzzles Even Psychologists,” one unidentified psychologist offered a carefully phrased, hygienic explanation: Adolescents are "going through a strenuous period of emotional and physical growth," which leads to a “need for expressiveness, especially in girls.” Boys have sports as an outlet; girls have only the screaming and swooning afforded by Beatlemania, which could be seen as “a release of sexual energy." For the girls who participated in Beatlemania, sex was an obvious part of the excitement. One of the most common responses to reporters' queries on the sources of Beatlemania was, “Because they're sexy.” And this explanation was in itself a small act of defiance. It was rebellious (especially for the very young fans) to lay claim to sexual feelings. It was even more rebellious to lay claim to the active, desiring side of a sexual attraction: The Beatles were the objects; the girls were their pursuers. The Beatles were sexy; the girls were the ones who perceived them as sexy and acknowledged the force of an ungovernable, if somewhat disembodied, lust. To assert an active, powerful sexuality by the tens of thousands and to do so in a way calculated to attract maximum attention was more than rebellious. It was, in its own unformulated, dizzy way, revolutionary. ## 3. Sex and The Teenage Girl In the years and months immediately preceding U.S. Beatlemania the girls who were to initiate a sexual revolution looked, from a critical adult vantage point, like sleepwalkers on a perpetual shopping trip. _Betty Friedan_ noted in her 1963 classic, _The Feminine Mystique_, “a new vacant sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.” But for girls, conformity meant more than surrendering, comatose, to the banal drift of junior high or high school life To be popular with boys and girls—to be universally attractive and still have an unblemished “reputation”—a girl had to be crafty, cool, and careful. _The payoff for all this effort was to end up exactly like Mom - as a housewife._ In October 1963, the month Beatlemania first broke out in England and three months before it arrived in America, _Life_ presented a troubling picture of teenage girl culture. The focus was Jill Dinwiddie, seventeen, popular “healthy, athletic getting A grade" to all appearances wealthy, and at the same time, strangely vacant. The pictures of this teenage paragon and her friends would have done justice to John Lennon’s first take on American youth: When we got here you were all walkin' around in fuckin' Bermuda shorts with Boston crew-cuts and stuff on your teeth… The chicks looked like 1940’s horses. There was no conception of dress or any of that jazz. We just thought what an ugly race, what an ugly race. Jill herself, the “queen bee of the high school,” is strikingly sexless: short hair in a tightly controlled style (the kind achieved with flat metal clips) button-down shirts done up to the neck, shapeless skirts with matching cardigans, and a stance that evokes the intense posture-consciousness of prefeminist girls’ phys ed. Her philosophy is no less engaging: "We have to be like everybody else to be accepted. Aren't most adults that way? We learn in high school to stay in the middle.” "The middle,” for girls coming of age in the early sixties, was a narrow and carefully defined terrain. The omnipresent David Riesman, whom _Life_ called in to comment on Jill and her crowd observed, “Given a standard definition of what is feminine and successful, they must conform to it The range is narrow the models they may follow few." The goal, which Riesman didn’t need to spell out, was marriage and motherhood, and the route to it led along a straight and narrow path between the twin dangers of being “cheap” or being too puritanical, and hence unpopular. A girl had to learn to offer enough, sexually, to get dates, and at the same time to withhold enough to maintain a boy's interest through the long preliminaries from dating and going steady to engagement and finally marriage. None of this was easy, and for girls like Jill the pedagogical burden of high school was a four-year lesson in how to use sex instrumentally: doling out just enough to be popular with boys and never enough to lose the esteem of the “right kind of kids.” Commenting on _Life’s_ story on Jill, a University of California sociologist observed: It seems that half the time of our adolescent girls is spent trying to meet their new responsibilities to be sexy, glamorous and attractive, while the other half is spent meeting their old responsibility to be virtuous by holding off the advances which testify to their success. Advice books to teenagers fussed anxiously over the question of ‘where to draw the line,” as did most teenage girls themselves. Officially everyone—girls and advice-givers-agreed that the line fell short of intercourse, though by the sixties even this venerable prohibition required some sort of justification, and the advice-givers strained to impress upon their young readers the calamitous results of premarital sex. First there was obvious danger of pregnancy, an apparently inescapable danger since no book addressed to teens dared offer birth control information. Even worse, some writers suggested, were the psychological effects of intercourse: It would destroy a budding relationship and possibly poison any future marriage. According to a contemporary textbook, _Adolescent Development and Adjustment_, intercourse often caused a man to lose interest (“He may come to believe she is totally promiscuous”), while it was likely to reduce a woman to slavish dependence (“Sometimes a woman focuses her life around the man with whom she first has intercourse”). The girl who survived premarital intercourse and went on to marry someone else would find marriage clouded with awkwardness and distrust. _Dr. Arthur Cain_ warned in _Young People and Sex_ that the husband of a sexually experienced woman might be consumed with worry about whether his performance matched that of her previous partners. “To make matters worse,” he wrote, “it may be that one’s sex partner is not as exciting and satisfying as one’s previous illicit lover.” In short, the price of premarital experience was likely to be postnuptial disappointment. And, since marriage was a girl's peak achievement, an anticlimactic wedding night would be a lasting source of grief. Intercourse was obviously out of the question, so young girls faced the still familiar problem of where to draw the line on a scale of lesser sexual acts, including (in descending order of niceness): kissing, necking, and petting, this last being divided into “light” (through clothes and/or above the waist) and “heavy” (with clothes undone and or below the waist). Here the experts were no longer unanimous. _Pat Boone_, already a spokesman for the Christian right, drew the line at kissing in his popular 1958 book, _Twixt Twelve and Twenty._ No prude, he announced that “kissing is here to stay and I'm glad of it!” But, he warned, “Kissing is not a game. Believe me! Kissing for fun is like playing with a beautiful candle in a roomful of dynamite!” (The explosive consequences might have been guessed from the centerpiece photos showing Pat dining out with his teen bride Shirley then as if moments later, in a maternity ward with her; and in the next picture, surrounded by "the four little Boones.") Another pop-singer-turned-adviser, _Connie Francis_, saw nothing wrong with kissing (unless it begins to “dominate your life”), nor with its extended form, necking, but drew the line at petting: Necking and petting-let's get this straight-are two different things. Petting, according to most definitions, is specifically intended to arouse sexual desires and as far as I'm concerned, petting is out for teenagers. In practice, most teenagers expected to escalate through the scale of sexual possibilities as a relationship progressed, with the big question being How much, how soon? In their 1963 critique of American teen culture, _Teen-Age Tyranny_, Grace and Fred Hechinger bewailed the cold instrumentality that shaped the conventional answers. A girl's "favors,” they wrote, had become “currency to bargain for desirable dates which, in turn, are legal tender in the exchange of popularity.” For example, in answer to the frequently asked question, “Should I let him kiss me good night on the first date?” they reported that: A standard caution in teen-age advice literature is that if the boy “gets” his kiss on the first date, he may assume that many other boys have been just as easily compensated. In other words, the rule book advises mainly that the [girl’s] popularity assets should be protected against deflation. It went without saying that it was the girl's responsibility to apply the brakes as a relationship approached the slippery slope leading from kissing toward intercourse. This was not because girls were expected to be immune from temptation. Connie Francis acknowledged that "It’s not easy to be moral, especially where your feelings for a boy are involved. It never is, because you have to fight to keep your normal physical impulses in line.” But it was the girl who had the most to lose, not least of all the respect of the boy she might too generously have indulged. “When she gives in completely to a boy’s advances,” Francis warned, “the element of respect goes right out the window.” Good girls never “gave in,” never abandoned themselves impulse or emotion, and never of course, initiated a new escalation on the scale of physical intimacy. In the financial metaphor that dominated teen sex etiquette, good girls "saved themselves" for marriage; bad girls were "cheap." According to a 1962 Gallup Poll commissioned by _Ladies’ Home Journal_, most young women (at least in the Journal’s relatively affluent sample) enthusiastically accepted the traditional feminine role and the sexual double standard that went with it: Almost all our young women between 16 and 21 expect to be married by 22. Most want 4 children, many want … to work until children come; afterward, a resounding no! They feel a special responsibility for sex because they are women. An 18-year-old student in California said, “The standard for men-sowing wild oats-results in sown oats. And where does this leave the woman?” Another student ”A man will go as far as a woman will let him. The girl has to set the standard.” Implicit in this was a matrimonial strategy based on months of sexual teasing (setting the standard), until the frustrated young man broke down and proposed. Girls had to "hold out” because, as one Journal respondent put it, "Virginity is one of the greatest things a woman can give to her husband." As for what he would give to her in addition to four or five children, the young women were vividly descriptive: I want a split-level brick with four bedrooms with French Provincial cherrywood furniture… I’d like a built-in oven and range, counters only 34 inches high with Formica on them… My living room would be long with a high ceiling of exposed beams. I would have a large fireplace on one wall with a lot of copper and brass around. My kitchen would be very like old Virginian ones-fireplace and oven. So single-mindedly did young women appear to be bent on domesticity that when Beatlemania did arrive, some experts thought the screaming girls must be auditioning for the maternity ward: “The girls are subconsciously preparing for motherhood. Their frenzied screams are a rehearsal for that moment Even the jelly babies [the candies favored by the early Beatles and hurled at them by fans] are symbolic.” Women were asexual, or at least capable mentally bypassing sex and heading straight from courtship to reveries of Formica counters and cherrywood furniture from the soda shop to the hardware store. But the vision of a suburban split-level, which had guided a generation of girls chastely through high school, was beginning to lose its luster. _Betty Friedan_ had surveyed the “successful” women of her age-educated, upper-middle-class housewives and found them reduced to infantile neuroticism by the isolation and futility of their lives. If feminism was still a few years off, at least the "feminine mystique" had entered the vocabulary, and even Jill Dinwiddie must have read the quotation from journalist Shana Alexander that appeared in the same issue of _Life_ that featured Jill. "It’s a marvelous life this life in a man’s world,” Alexander said. “I’d climb the walls if I had to live the feminine mystique." The media that had once romanticized togetherness turned their attention to “the crack in the picture window”—wife swapping, alcoholism, divorce, and teenage anomie A certain cynicism was creeping into American view of marriage In novels of John Updike and Philip Roth the hero didn’t get the girl, he got away. When a Long Island prostitution ring, in which housewives hustled with their husbands’ consent, was exposed in the winter of 1963, a Fifth Avenue saleswoman commented: "I see all this beautiful stuff I’ll never have, and I wonder if it’s worth it to be good. What’s the difference one man every night or a different man?" So when sociologist Bennet Berger commented in _Life_ that “there is nobody better equipped than Jill to live in a society of all-electric kitchens, wall-to-wall carpeting, dishwashers garbage disposals [and] color TV,” this could no longer be taken as unalloyed praise. Jill herself seemed to sense that all the tension and teasing anticipation of the teen years was not worth the payoff. After she was elected by an overwhelming majority to the cheerleading team, “an uneasy, faraway look clouded her face.” “I guess there’s nothing left to do in high school,” she said. “I’ve made song leader both years and that was all I really wanted.” For girls high school was all there was to public life the only place you could ever hope to run for office or experience the quasi fame of popularity. After that came marriage—most likely to one of the crew-cut boys you’d made out with—then isolation and invisibility. Part of the appeal of the male star—whether it was James Dean or Elvis Presley or Paul McCartney—was that you would never marry him; the romance would never end in the tedium of conventional, monogamous terms, for example, picking their favourite Beatle and writing him a serious letter of proposal, or carrying placards saying, “John, Divorce Cynthia.” But it was inconceivable that any fan would actually marry a Beatle or sleep with him (sexually active “groupies” were still a few years off) or even hold his hand. Adulation of the male star was a way to express sexual yearnings that would normally be pressed into the service of popularity or simply repressed. The star could be loved noninstrumentally, for his own sake, and with complete abandon. To publicly advertise this hopeless love was to protest the calculated, pragmatic sexual repression of teenage life. ## 4. The Economics of Mass Hysteria Sexual repression had been a feature of middle-class teen life for centuries. If there was a significant factor that made mass protest possible in the late fifties (Elvis) and the early sixties (the Beatles), it was the growth and maturation of a teen market: for distinctly teen clothes, magazines, entertainment and accessories. Consciousness of the teen years as a life-cycle phase set off between late childhood on the one hand and young adulthood on the other only goes back to the early twentieth century, when the influential psychologist G. Stanley Hall published his mammoth work _Adolescence_. _The word “teenager”_ did not enter mass usage until the 1940s.) Postwar affluence sharpened the demarcations around the teen years: Fewer teens than ever worked or left school to help support their families, making teenhood more distinct from adulthood as a time of unemployment and leisure. And more than ever had money to spend, so that from a marketing viewpoint, teens were potentially much more interesting than children, who could only influence family spending but did little spending themselves. Grace and Fred Hechinger reported that in 1959 the average teen spent $555 on "goods and services not including the necessities normally supplied by their parents," and noted, for perspective, that in the same year school-teachers in Mississippi were earning just over $3,000. "No matter what other segments American society—parents, teachers, sociologists, psychologists, or policemen—may deplore the power of teenagers," they observed, “the American business community has no cause for complaint." If advertisers and marketing men manipulated teens as consumers, they also, inadvertently, solidified teen culture against the adult world. Marketing strategies that recognized the importance of teens precocious consumers also recognized importance of heightening their self-awareness of themselves as teens. Girls especially become aware themselves occupying a world of fashion of their own—not just bigger children’s clothes or slimmer women’s clothes You were not a big girl or a junior woman, but a “teen,” and in that notion lay the germs of an oppositional identity. Defined by its own products and advertising slogans, teenhood became more than a prelude to adulthood; it was a status to be proud of—emotionally and sexually complete unto itself. Rock ‘n roll the most potent commodity to enter the teen consumer subculture. Rock was originally a black musical form no particular age identification, and it took white performers like Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley to make rock ‘n’ roll accessible to young white kids with generous allowances to spend. On the white side of the deeply segregated music market, rock became a distinctly teenage product. Its "jungle beat” was disconcerting or hateful to white adults; its lyrics celebrated the special teen world of fashion (“Blue Suede Shoes,” “Teenager in Love,” and passive opposition (“Don’t know nothin’ 'bout his-to-ry”). By the late fifties, rock ’n’ roll was the organizing principle and premier theme of teen consumer culture: You watched the _Dick Clark_ show not only to hear the hits but to see what the kids were wearing; you collected not only the top singles but the novelty items that advertised the stars; you cultivated the looks and personality that would make you a “teen angel.” And if you were still too young for all this, in the late fifties you yearned to grow up to be —not woman and house-wife, but a teenager. Rock ‘n’ roll made mass hysteria almost inevitable: It announced and ratified teen sexuality and then amplified teen sexual frustration almost beyond endurance. Conversely, mass hysteria helped make rock 'n' roll. In his biography of _Elvis Presley, Albert Goldman_ describes how Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, whipped mid-fifties girl audiences into a frenzy before the appearance of the star: _As many as a dozen acts would precede Elvis—acrobats, comics, gospel singers, a little girl playing a xylophone—until the audience, “driven half mad by sheer frustration, began chanting rhythmically, ‘We want Elvis, we want Elvis!’”_ When the star was at last announced: Five thousand shrill female voices come in on cue. The screeching reaches the intensity of jet engine. When Elvis comes striding out on stage with his butchy walk, the screams suddenly escalate. They switch to hyperspace. Now you may as well be stone deaf for all the music you’ll hear. _The newspapers_ would duly report that “the fans went wild.” Hysteria was critical to the marketing of the Beatles. First there were the reports of near riots in England. Then came a calculated publicity tease that made Colonel Parker’s manipulations look oafish by contrast: Five million posters and stickers announcing _“The Beatles Are Coming”_ were distributed nationwide. Disc jockeys were blitzed with promo material and Beatle interview tapes (with blank spaces for the DJ to fill in the questions, as if it were real interview) enlisted in a mass “countdown” to the day of the Beatles’ arrival in the United States. _As Beatle chronicler Nicholas Schaffner reports:_ Come break of “Beatle Day,” the quartet had taken over even the disc-jockey patter that punctuated their hit songs. From WMCA and WINS through W-A-Beatle-C, it was “thirty Beatle degrees,” “eight-thirty Beatle time” [and] "four hours and fifty minutes to go." By the time the Beatles materialized on _“The Ed Sullivan Show”_ in February 1964, the anticipation was unbearable. A woman who was a fourteen-year-old in Duluth at the time told us, “Looking back, it seems so commercial to me, and so degrading that millions of us would just scream on cue for these four guys the media dangled out in front of us But at the time it something intensely personal for me and, I guess, a million other girls The Beatles seemed to be speaking directly to us and, in a funny way, for us.” By the time the Beatles hit America, teens and pre-teens had already learned to look to their unique consumer subculture for meaning and validation. If this was manipulation—and no culture so strenuously and shamelessly exploits its children as consumers—it was also subversion. Bad kids became juvenile delinquents, smoked reefers, or got pregnant. Good kids embraced the paraphernalia the lore, and the disciplined fandom of rock ’n’ roll. (Of course, bad kids did their thing to a rock beat too: the first movie to use a rock ’n’ roll sound-track was _“Blackboard Jungle,”_ in 1955, cementing the suspected link between “jungle rhythms” and teen rebellion.) For girls, fandom offered a way not only to sublimate romantic and sexual yearnings but to carve out subversive versions of heterosexuality. Not just anyone could be hyped as a suitable object for hysteria: It mattered that Elvis was a grown-up greaser, and that the Beatles let their hair grow over their ears. ## 5. The Erotics of The Star-Fan Relationship In real life, i.e in junior high or high school, the ideal boyfriend was someone like Tab Hunter or Ricky Nelson. He was “all boy,” meaning you wouldn't get home from a date without a friendly scuffle, but he was also clean-cut, meaning middle class, patriotic, and respectful of the fact that good girls waited until marriage. He wasn’t moody and sensitive (like James Dean in _Giant_ or _Rebel Without a Cause_), he was realistic (meaning that he understood that his destiny was to earn a living for someone like yourself). The stars who inspired the greatest mass adulation were none of these things, and their very remoteness from the pragmatic ideal was what made them accessible to fantasy. Elvis was visibly lower class and symbolically black (as the bearer of black music to white youth). He represented an unassimilated white underclass that had been forgotten by mainstream suburban America—or, more accurately, he represented a middle-class caricature of poor whites. He was sleazy. And, as his biographer _Goldman_ argues, therein lay his charm: What did the girls see that drove them out of their minds? It sure as hell wasn't the All-American Boy. Elvis was the flip side of [the] conventional male image. His fish-belly white complextion, so different from the "healthy tan" of the beach boys; his brooding Latin eyes