A Hard Day’s Write

Fan fiction is, ordinarily, nonprofessional writing—premised thematically on media texts, celebrities, or artistic creations. Some fanfic uses public figures as the basis for characters and is called real person fiction (RPF). Bandfic is a subgenre of RPF involving rock musicians. Slash fiction is a subset of fanfic involving same-sex intimacy between central characters. Real person slash (RPS) is a fanfic subgenre that hybridizes RPF with slash and can involve pairs of musicians. One typical Beatles fanfic story on Archive of Our Own, is listed as male-to-male romance between John Lennon and Paul McCartney and tagged with angst, love confessions, rejection, unrequited love, and period-typical homophobia. In academia, discussions about such fanfic have covered copyright, fan labor or play, fan literacy and reading practice, community-created archives, world building, identity politics, or subversion and censorship. This chapter considers a less-discussed question: how does RPF about the Beatles relate to celebrity fandom?

John Lennon as Pop-Cultural and Political Icon

No musician embodied the world-changing turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s more than John Lennon. His work as a composer with the Beatles and as a solo artist reinvented what a rock song could be. As a political and social activist, he was a tireless champion of truth, peace, and world harmony. For many of his fans, Lennon’s music and sociopolitical efforts were intertwined. They loved him for the timeless music he created with the Beatles and on his own. And many admired him still more for his efforts to effect social and political change. But his personal life, which included domestic abuse, heavy drug use, and some epically boorish behavior, did not always match his image rooted in peace and love. Has the growing knowledge of Lennon’s personal shortcomings damaged his relationship with his fans? Judging by the adulation he has received since his tragic death in 1980, apparently not.

Introduction

The introduction explores the Beatles’ influential role in the development of 20th-century fan behavior and celebratory culture. The authors examine the concept of fandom, while also tracing the history of Beatles fan behaviors across the generations. They also distinguish Beatles fan expression from the behaviors of other central rock acts, such as the Rolling Stones, for instance, whose fan activities are far less profuse and not sustained from one generation to the next in the same manner as those of Beatles fans. The introduction also offers an overview of the anthology’s contents and major subsections.

Beatles Fandom

A confluence of demographic, technological, political, and other cultural factors in the 1960s resulted in the Beatles becoming an epochal phenomenon. Never in human history had millions of people around the world received and reacted to the same communication at the same time over a period of years. The nonstop deluge of compelling sounds, words, images, and ideas the band put forth made it a unique source of emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual nurturance, distinct and apart from parents and other traditional sources of socialization. Using a synthesis of sociocultural and phenomenological analyses, this chapter shows how and why Beatles fandom endures as a kind of secular religion, serving the same functions in fans’ lives that religion serves in the lives of believers.

The Beatles: Today . . . and Tomorrow

The Beatles played an important role in the lives of many young people in the second decade of the 21st century. Whether exposed to the Beatles through parents, grandparents, or popular culture, they had not experienced the Fab Four as part of some distant past but as part of their own childhood and growing up. Many colleges and universities now expose students to the Beatles through academic study, making the group an important part of these students’ experience. This chapter illustrates the ways these students have connected with the music of the Beatles and discovered how it can help them cope with and better understand their own lives. As they continue to pass along their love and knowledge of the group, the Beatles’ relevance and popularity will not decline anytime soon. Evidence from online listening and music subscription services reinforce the idea that the Beatles and their music will continue to live on.

Beatles Heritage Tourism in Liverpool

This chapter explores the tension between the Beatles’ story and Liverpool, with imagery and imagination conjuring up compelling beliefs that command narratives of authority. Such heritage strategies have smacked a little of desperation, perhaps masking the changed relationship between surviving Beatles fragments in Liverpool and popular-music heritage tourism across the globe. The rhetoric of the Beatles, Liverpool, and “the ’60s, man” today represents an outdated, white, gendered, anglophone rock meta-narrative in what is now a multifaceted global popular-music (tourism) marketplace. Liverpool’s position as the authentic site for Beatles and Merseybeat tourism and a World Heritage Site has never been more precarious. How can the city continue to attract Beatles tourists as the ’60sslip away into the annals of popular-music historiography? An additional question is how the Beatles’ legacy might be explained to visitors with little knowledge of them as a global popular-music phenomenon.

Magic Circles

Despite technological change, two elements of the Beatles fan community remain stable: community and artistic expression. Fans want to communicate with fellow enthusiasts. In addition, fans want to contribute to that community, whether through fan fiction, fanzines, books, online discussion groups, YouTube channels, or podcasts. In the 1960s and 1970s, fans bonded primarily in person at record stores, concerts, and fan conventions. Desktop publishing and personal computers let fans design their own fanzines at lower cost. Then the internet changed how fans network and how they contribute to participatory culture. This chapter examines these trends and how fans today communicate with one another and ensure the Beatles’ legacy among younger generations. A survey of multigenerational fans and an interview with a video blogger further illustrate how fans connect today. Two forms of Henry Jenkins’s participatory culture will be applied to how technology has impacted Beatles fandom: affiliation and expression.

Anthems of Whose Generation?

This chapter discusses millennial Beatles fan culture and Beatles tribute bands, slash fiction, YouTube, heritage culture, Beatles walks, LeakyCon, and Potterverse. These manifestations of Beatles fandom epitomize the desires of millennials who want to inhabit Beatles art and twist the music and lyrics into new cultural forms. Millennial fans want to be playful with canons and reimagine songs and films. Millennials’ digital “cultural construction” and remix bricolage texts represent a desire to reorganize anthems of the past to make them relevant to the present. Millennials are active fans who mash fan vids, set up Facebook groups, bring personalized signs to McCartney concerts, and collect ’60s memorabilia. Unlike boomer fans, they are not content to be passive: millennial tribute bands, slash fiction, YouTube videos, conventions, and heritage culture make Beatles culture fresh, new, and exciting. This chapter includes interviews with millennials and postmillennials for insight into these fans’ new direction.

The Beatles, Gender, and Sexuality

This chapter addresses the Beatles’ complex gendered and sexual appeal to audiences and the evolution of fan identification processes in the 1960s and beyond. The chapter unites the growing body of scholarship that treats issues of gender and sexuality in relation to the Beatles and their fans. After consideration of the theoretical difference between androgyny and gender fluidity, Beatles texts are discussed in relation to fan responses. Their gender fluidity inspired many girl fans to scream for (and sing about) the Fabs’ representation of freedom early in the decade. But their music shifted from the girl talk of “She Loves You” to the bravado of “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.” No longer clad in matching boyish suits, the Beatles maintained their fluid gender performance throughout the ’60s. The Beatles’ gender fluidity is a key ingredient in their sustained popularity. The band endures because listeners keep finding themselves in the Beatles.

The Beatles and Their Fans

This chapter focuses on the Beatles’ transition from an English sensation to an international phenomenon during the fall and winter of 1963–1964, with particular attention to British and American media’s construction of the Beatles’ image and their evolving fan base during that period. On its surface, due to Capitol Records’ and the American media’s initial dependence on British sources, the Beatles’ image appeared to have been exported to the United States with little change. Yet in American media, the band’s image was stripped of much of the class-based resonance so important in the British context, and because of the Beatles’ teen-idol status, Capitol and the American press extricated their image from the intimations of sex, drugs, and violence found in Liverpool’s “rave” culture.. What was left was an ebullient ideal, a celebration of youth that carried the Beatles through the touring years and beyond.