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1964 and The Beatles didn't just mark a change in music. It marked a change in entertainment in general. An episode of This American Life shows this beautifully

1964 and The Beatles didn't just mark a change in music. It marked a change in entertainment in general. An episode of This American Life shows this beautifully: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/281/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/281/transcript, look for "Act One, Take My Break Please." This tells the story of a vaudeville comedy act, a husband and wife team, booked on the Ed Sullivan show, on the day that The Beatles made their American debut. They were completely blindsided. They didn't have any comprehension of what was happening until they were in the middle of it. They didn't really get it until later. The story includes an encounter with John, surreal for the juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the interaction, and the symbolism -- these two completely different eras encountering one another without any awareness of what was represented. To push the point too far maybe, what was changing was the very sound of life in the US. You hear these old timey comedians, and they have the rapid fire delivery, the tone of voice, the corny jokes, the style that characterized vaudeville and TV sitcoms. And then you have The Beatles, ushering in something brand new (to the vast majority of Americans). I think it's the same sort of difference you see in movies: Before the mid or late 60s you had this very stylized and artificial way of speaking, often with this weird and phony "mid-Atlantic" accent. And then you had much more realistic movies and ways of speaking, e.g. anything from that era with Jack Nicholson.

galaxyLogic 2y ago
I had the same observation about old movies from 50s and 40s. But I just assumed that's the way people spoke in older times, just like they dressed differently.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  In fact it was notable for not being anyone's native accent! Although it was supposed to capture some of the perceived "classiness" of some British accents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent > According to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Linguistics expert Dr. Geoff Lindsey on mid-atlantic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoDsZFwF-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoDsZFwF-c Summary: Dudley Knight (and most other people commenting on M-A) are full of shit.
  - galaxyLogic 2y ago
    You could think of it as an effort to unify the way people speak English in the US. Not a bad idea I think, if it works. Less "otherness". I read somewhere that many people with Brooklyn accents were taking lessons to get rid of their accent. I had som much fun when I met this girl who spoke like the girl in "My Cousin Vinny". It was so "authentic". The cool thing about US is that there are so many immigrants who speak English but they speak it in their own accent. But I think it is only natural that eventually they will all speak more like each other.
- mmooss 2y ago
  In film, I think Breathless by Godard may be seen as a dividing line, though of course it's never that simple.
- Exoristos 2y ago
  Certainly there were people who spoke similarly to movies and radio, like my grandmother. However, the full truth is rather sad: Anglo-American speech at the time comprised many beautiful and very diverse accents. As media became ubiquitous, these began to die off and most seem extinct today.
zoogeny 2y ago
I think this kind of change is maybe more common than we think. I mean, when Nirvana showed up and was juxtaposed next to the hair metal kind of vibe of the day you had the same weird juxtaposition. Or think how weird that 90s vibe of movies like the Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark feels compared to Marvel (so much so that Stranger Things was able to feel nostalgic). I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK. I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.
- geophile 2y ago
  I am a boomer, and I think that these two things are true: 1) The stuff that happens in your teens is special because of your age. That may well explain why I think The Beatles (and the music of that era) was so special. 2) The music from the 60s really was special. There was certainly rock and roll well before The Beatles, and it grew out of black music, and blues, and can be viewed as nothing really new. And yet: it really was a significant break from the past in the global adulation for their music and the quantum change in tastes that they ushered in. Not to minimize Nirvana (whose music I love) or metal, or anything else, but the musical examples that you cite were simply not as globally shattering as The Beatles. They just weren't. They were variations within the world of rock and roll. The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
  - solumunus 2y ago
    I guess I’ve never really considered it before but that’s so true. If you observe mainstream music the influence of rap has been absolutely colossal.
mmooss 2y ago
How do we define the difference? Like technological and social disruptions, I think usually the difference is that the new thing has a different agenda than the old - different goals. As a result, the old can't make sense of it - by their goals the new thing is obviously worthless. To the market-dominating Blackberry phone maker, obviously their phone was far superior for email, so why would someone in business buy an iPhone? My working theory is that the new thing 60s rock'n'roll aimed for was personal expression. Vaudeville acts weren't expressing things about themselves (very much - it's always a matter of degree). There was no 'Let It Be' moment, or expressions of aggression or deeply felt love. Vaudeville and a lot of the pre-Beatles pop music was (very generally) entertainment, not so much art. Look at jazz too, going from Ellington to Coltrane. Look at the rise of folk music. 50's crooners mocked the singing voices of rockers because that was their goal - an aesthetically beautiful voice; they perhaps didn't see the point of rockers was personal expression. Again, that's speaking very generally. There were many beautiful voices post-Beatles, and there was self-expression before them, and the dividing line isn't perfect. Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. If true, I think partly it's an outcome of culture wars: it's associated with liberalism, so many reject it; and real personal expression can be uncomfortable and non-conformist, and that's divisive and provocative to many. But I am building speculation on speculation.
- johnny22 2y ago
  > Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. Are we? Can you expand on that?
  - balamatom 2y ago
    What personal would there be left to express in a world reduced to a market of bespoke customers—not only their tastes, but their very spectra of conceivable interior experiences preemptively curated by adaptive recommender systems? Pop music was always the instrument of creating such consumers; the inevitable replacement of subsistance farmers by sub-subsistence factory workers; the media industry as a core tool in the toolbox of the infinite growth death cult, robbing people of certain things previously considered essential human, by channeling their personal experiences through the designated—the Japanese have a great word for it—idols. You can't have global power projection without an unidirectional informational channel to common working folk, you see, to make sure they know which way the wind is blowing, and to keep them unable to imagine an alternative to what they're trapped in. We're just on a new level of that, one where the expression of that reality which any of us personally experiences is left perpetually in the rear view mirror; all that remains in the here and now is "content production", and its layers upon layers upon layers of technical facilitators in cutthroat competition for the largest crumb of the donut hole. It's the reification of post-post-post-so-far-post-that-it's-kind-of-meta-modernism: it's all about how it's about nothing at all! And yet it's massive. The kids, those ultimate judges of practicing vs preaching, have spoken: can't sell out of your "authenticity" if you were authentically in it for the money and fame in the first place. There's still room in all that for originality, even creativity, but it's explicitly just business, never anything personal because that'd be bad taste; drawing a line between the interior world and the social game—or worse, trafficking in those goods which can only be found in the former—has completed its transformation into a social taboo. Hence, the exquisitely crude, the blatantly false, the unapologetically predatory, has won the battle for the hearts and minds, and is now officially in control of the planet. If you think anything else is going on, you just don't know it yet, and we wish the best of luck to you and yours. https://youtu.be/0FcDXL5Aw0o?feature=shared&t=273 https://youtu.be/0FcDXL5Aw0o?feature=shared&t=273
chrisdhoover 2y ago
By 65 the neighborhood teens were all atwitter with the Beatles. Its one of my earliest memories. The girls laying claim to one Beatle or another. “I like Paul” “I like George!” I hadn’t heard any of the Beatles songs. My limited musical exposure was from church and The Wonderful World of Disney. By the late 60’s I listened to WPGC and Kasey Kasims countdown. Growing older this all became so annoying. The overt loudness. The repetition. Seeking solace in alternatives I embraced punk and new wave. The thing that cracks me up is hearing the clash sing about Supermarkets while in the supermarket. Oh man oh man the 2020s are a great time to be alive
EFreethought 2y ago
Interesting bit of trivia: The husband later appeared in a couple of episodes of "Star Trek", both the original and DS9: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_Brill https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_Brill
milesrout 2y ago
The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than the "BBC English" sort of accent - largely developed/taught in expensive fee-paying schools, but nevertheless not 'phony' as such, because it was the genuine accent of the people that spoke that way. They didn't speak differently at home. Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying. I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).

galaxyLogic 2y ago

I had the same observation about old movies from 50s and 40s. But I just assumed that's the way people spoke in older times, just like they dressed differently.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
In fact it was notable for not being anyone's native accent! Although it was supposed to capture some of the perceived "classiness" of some British accents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent > According to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Linguistics expert Dr. Geoff Lindsey on mid-atlantic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoDsZFwF-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoDsZFwF-c Summary: Dudley Knight (and most other people commenting on M-A) are full of shit.
- galaxyLogic 2y ago
  You could think of it as an effort to unify the way people speak English in the US. Not a bad idea I think, if it works. Less "otherness". I read somewhere that many people with Brooklyn accents were taking lessons to get rid of their accent. I had som much fun when I met this girl who spoke like the girl in "My Cousin Vinny". It was so "authentic". The cool thing about US is that there are so many immigrants who speak English but they speak it in their own accent. But I think it is only natural that eventually they will all speak more like each other.
mmooss 2y ago
In film, I think Breathless by Godard may be seen as a dividing line, though of course it's never that simple.
Exoristos 2y ago
Certainly there were people who spoke similarly to movies and radio, like my grandmother. However, the full truth is rather sad: Anglo-American speech at the time comprised many beautiful and very diverse accents. As media became ubiquitous, these began to die off and most seem extinct today.

zoogeny 2y ago

I think this kind of change is maybe more common than we think. I mean, when Nirvana showed up and was juxtaposed next to the hair metal kind of vibe of the day you had the same weird juxtaposition. Or think how weird that 90s vibe of movies like the Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark feels compared to Marvel (so much so that Stranger Things was able to feel nostalgic). I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK. I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.

geophile 2y ago
I am a boomer, and I think that these two things are true: 1) The stuff that happens in your teens is special because of your age. That may well explain why I think The Beatles (and the music of that era) was so special. 2) The music from the 60s really was special. There was certainly rock and roll well before The Beatles, and it grew out of black music, and blues, and can be viewed as nothing really new. And yet: it really was a significant break from the past in the global adulation for their music and the quantum change in tastes that they ushered in. Not to minimize Nirvana (whose music I love) or metal, or anything else, but the musical examples that you cite were simply not as globally shattering as The Beatles. They just weren't. They were variations within the world of rock and roll. The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
- solumunus 2y ago
  I guess I’ve never really considered it before but that’s so true. If you observe mainstream music the influence of rap has been absolutely colossal.

mmooss 2y ago

How do we define the difference? Like technological and social disruptions, I think usually the difference is that the new thing has a different agenda than the old - different goals. As a result, the old can't make sense of it - by their goals the new thing is obviously worthless. To the market-dominating Blackberry phone maker, obviously their phone was far superior for email, so why would someone in business buy an iPhone? My working theory is that the new thing 60s rock'n'roll aimed for was personal expression. Vaudeville acts weren't expressing things about themselves (very much - it's always a matter of degree). There was no 'Let It Be' moment, or expressions of aggression or deeply felt love. Vaudeville and a lot of the pre-Beatles pop music was (very generally) entertainment, not so much art. Look at jazz too, going from Ellington to Coltrane. Look at the rise of folk music. 50's crooners mocked the singing voices of rockers because that was their goal - an aesthetically beautiful voice; they perhaps didn't see the point of rockers was personal expression. Again, that's speaking very generally. There were many beautiful voices post-Beatles, and there was self-expression before them, and the dividing line isn't perfect. Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. If true, I think partly it's an outcome of culture wars: it's associated with liberalism, so many reject it; and real personal expression can be uncomfortable and non-conformist, and that's divisive and provocative to many. But I am building speculation on speculation.

johnny22 2y ago
> Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. Are we? Can you expand on that?
- balamatom 2y ago
  What personal would there be left to express in a world reduced to a market of bespoke customers—not only their tastes, but their very spectra of conceivable interior experiences preemptively curated by adaptive recommender systems? Pop music was always the instrument of creating such consumers; the inevitable replacement of subsistance farmers by sub-subsistence factory workers; the media industry as a core tool in the toolbox of the infinite growth death cult, robbing people of certain things previously considered essential human, by channeling their personal experiences through the designated—the Japanese have a great word for it—idols. You can't have global power projection without an unidirectional informational channel to common working folk, you see, to make sure they know which way the wind is blowing, and to keep them unable to imagine an alternative to what they're trapped in. We're just on a new level of that, one where the expression of that reality which any of us personally experiences is left perpetually in the rear view mirror; all that remains in the here and now is "content production", and its layers upon layers upon layers of technical facilitators in cutthroat competition for the largest crumb of the donut hole. It's the reification of post-post-post-so-far-post-that-it's-kind-of-meta-modernism: it's all about how it's about nothing at all! And yet it's massive. The kids, those ultimate judges of practicing vs preaching, have spoken: can't sell out of your "authenticity" if you were authentically in it for the money and fame in the first place. There's still room in all that for originality, even creativity, but it's explicitly just business, never anything personal because that'd be bad taste; drawing a line between the interior world and the social game—or worse, trafficking in those goods which can only be found in the former—has completed its transformation into a social taboo. Hence, the exquisitely crude, the blatantly false, the unapologetically predatory, has won the battle for the hearts and minds, and is now officially in control of the planet. If you think anything else is going on, you just don't know it yet, and we wish the best of luck to you and yours. https://youtu.be/0FcDXL5Aw0o?feature=shared&t=273 https://youtu.be/0FcDXL5Aw0o?feature=shared&t=273

chrisdhoover 2y ago

By 65 the neighborhood teens were all atwitter with the Beatles. Its one of my earliest memories. The girls laying claim to one Beatle or another. “I like Paul” “I like George!” I hadn’t heard any of the Beatles songs. My limited musical exposure was from church and The Wonderful World of Disney. By the late 60’s I listened to WPGC and Kasey Kasims countdown. Growing older this all became so annoying. The overt loudness. The repetition. Seeking solace in alternatives I embraced punk and new wave. The thing that cracks me up is hearing the clash sing about Supermarkets while in the supermarket. Oh man oh man the 2020s are a great time to be alive

EFreethought 2y ago

Interesting bit of trivia: The husband later appeared in a couple of episodes of "Star Trek", both the original and DS9: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_Brill https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_Brill

milesrout 2y ago

The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than the "BBC English" sort of accent - largely developed/taught in expensive fee-paying schools, but nevertheless not 'phony' as such, because it was the genuine accent of the people that spoke that way. They didn't speak differently at home. Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying. I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).