The Sixties 

In the field of popular music, the Sixties have come to be regarded as the pre-eminently brilliant decade of the twentieth century. Compared to our current age, one would surely have to admit that it had one or two things going for it. However, as regards musical sophistication and poetic elegance, in other words, on a purely aesthetic basis, the songwriters of the Sixties pale into insignificance next to those of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, with one notable exception: Brian Wilson, the man who founded the Beach Boys. He alone can rightfully be linked to the Golden Age of Song. He is in the main line of the great American songwriters, such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, but only as a figure of decadence, as the art form’s last hurrah, as a final glimpse of its former grandeur.  

Quite frankly: by the time Kennedy was shot, the art of song writing had been in decline for some time. Through the increasing scarcity of classically trained, highly skilled composers and the public’s consequent attenuation to increasingly impure expressions of the artistic form, dilettantes like the Beatles found themselves able to make an impact on the public domain.  

When the Beatles wrote their first song, they were a well-rehearsed cabaret act. They had played countless gigs singing other people’s material, in the process of which the stylistic and structural dimensions of that material had become second nature to them. Then, with a practical grasp of the requirements of the craft, they started writing their own songs. They did not set out to write groundbreaking, experimental music. They began by writing traditional pop songs in the style of the ones they had been covering for so long. They still had an instinctive understanding of what strikes most songwriters today as a thoroughly far-fetched proposition: that a songwriter is not ready to break any rules until he knows all of them and is able to apply them in his sleep. 

The musical genius of the Beatles' early albums lay in Lennon and McCartney’s ability to tie a number of stray musical strands together into one comprehensive overview. The early albums safeguard the musical legacy of the Fifties and early Sixties. They are creative ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ albums that provide an elegant summary of the era. More malicious minds might propose that the Beatles’ success was merely a question of timing: black American artists had laboured tirelessly for a number of decades to instill, against prevailing musical attitudes and, of course, bigotry, a taste for their style in the general public. At the exact moment when public opinion had come round to their point of view, a ragtag quartet of Brits swooped down and cashed in on their hard work. The fact that the new style was at root a decadent one, a cancer on the Golden Age of Song, lends the Liverpool swindle a subtle irony.