When American Teenagers Spat on the Beatles and Why Bright People Become Radicals
By
David Gottfried
Note: The relevant portion of this video begins at about 1 minute, 24 seconds after the video commences.
My critics have advised me that I should brighten (or is “mar” a more apt verb) my substack posts with videos as the little people in idiot box land are like pretty little seven-year-olds who expect their textbooks to be liberally sprinkled with pictures of Snow White and cute little elves in tights.
I have elected to give you a video of teenagers, on American Band Stand, in 1967, reviewing two of the most brilliant songs the Beatles ever recorded, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.”
The teenage girls are decked out in the latest fashions, and they are as stodgy and puritanical as the stuffiest hens in Peyton Place. The teenage girls tell us, in no uncertain terms, that the Beatles had become absolutely horrible. Among other things, the Beatles had become “weird” as anything with more intellectual complexity than the sentence “I want to hold your hand” gave the girls’ delicate brains a headache. Also, the Beatles had committed the sin of growing mustaches, and hence becoming unabashedly male, and this was an egregious offense to females who were still dressing their neutered Ken dolls in swimsuits that were less than an inch big. Furthermore, the girls, completely internalizing the totalitarianism of the youth cult, said the Beatles were no longer cool because they had gotten old. Finally, almost all of the girls, and half the boys, did not like the Beatles because they just did not look good.
Someone should have put a nuclear-powered amplifier next to their ears and shouted-out the message, “They are musicians, and their music is more important than their looks.” Of course, if the message were truly delivered in deafening decibels, the girls would no longer be able to hear. That might seem like a powerful penalty for their stupidity, but those girls, who seemed to possess all the bible-belting hostility of the old gals in “The Scarlett Letter,” might respect epic, Old Testament punishment.
Finally, before I move on to another issue lest I convince all my readers that I am nothing but a misogynistic homosexual scold, I think this video teaches us that people, very often, are just too stupid to know what is good for them. Just as Scarlett Ohara did not want Rhett Butler to fuck her when she came home from Miss Melanie’s birthday party for Ashley, she was absolutely delighted the next morning as Rhett’s savage thrusts the night before were proof positive that she was absolutely, positively stunning.
Similarly, the little princesses of propriety may have thought that the Beatles were dirty, arty, unshaven weirdos, but they soon learned that being a weirdo was a whole lot cooler than being Lieutenant William Calley, the ringleader, in a group of soldiers, who slaughtered over one hundred innocent civilians in My Lai, in South Vietnam.
Of course, the genius of the Beatles was so potent, and the pot was so potent, and the war in Vietnam was so horrible, that this country witnessed a transvaluation of values greater than the metamorphosis that Friederich Nietzsche had dreamed of. By the end of 1968, intelligent American kids believed that Nancy Sinatra’s boots (She sang “These boots were made for walking”) should have been shoved up her and her Daddy’s ass, that Wayne Newton should stop singing, hide in Georgia and just pick cotton, and that Bob Hope should be kidnapped by the Vietcong. And, by the end of 1968, most bright kids loved the Beatles.
However, most of the time, good stuff is buried, and most of the time geniuses are spat on.
We live in a capitalist country. This means we live in a land in which one virtue and one goal is all-important: SELL, SELL SELL.
Something is good if it sells. Something is bad if it does not sell.
What sort of stuff sells: Stupidity sells. The Brady Bunch sells. David Cassidy, singing cutesy songs with his Mommy, Shirley Jones, sells. Hogan’s Heroes (My, isn’t it a funny show, it’s all about prisoners in Nazi Germany) sells. Cooking shows, in which cakes are made from store bought cake mixes, sells.
Consequently, the prevailing culture is a brain dead, domesticated, cotton candy culture of unrelenting mediocrity, vacuity and overwhelming boredom. The idiots listen to sit coms with laugh tracks which instruct them when to giggle like morons and to jokes which are as tiresome and boring as constipation (Actually, sitting on the toilet bowl can be more fun as the moment when one releases one’s shit affords a climax and a crescendo, and the concomitant excitement of one’s bodily wastes plopping in the toilet bowl is so unlike American comedy which is often devoid of any snap, crackle and pop.)
Of course, if one is a semiliterate nincompoop, the vacuous fare of American culture can be somewhat pleasing. When one is a big fat human turd who has just consumed a gallon of fast-food garbage, and one’s blood sugar is shooting up to the stratosphere, one’s hyperglycemia will induce the sort of somnolence and intellectual sloth that makes dumb culture just what Nurse Ratched, of “One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” ordered.
At the same time, the vacuity of American culture is what often makes bight people radical and enraged. If one has a discerning mind and critical intellect, one may, on occasion, feel like fire-bombing the television studios which serve up abominations such as Barbara Walters, Andy Griffith, Hugh downs syndrome Downs, Mafia Don Donald Duck Trump, Family Feud, Hee Haw, and the Love Boat. All of it is unrelenting boredom.
Some people have said that John Lennon became an ornery, dyspeptic grouch in the latter part of his life. Quite frankly, he had every right to feel what Elvis Costello articulated in “Radio, Radio” (1978), “I want to bite the hand that feeds me.”