They changed the way we listened to music (advent of the concept albumn- Sgt Pepper), they changed social norms and fashion (long Hair and men wearing colour). They changed the way we look at pop music.
They did /accopmplished all this because of the advent of the “portability” of music… the transistor radio and the idea of being able to listen to music "on the go "… Changed everything. Incidently or intentionally, they rode the wave of portable music, and made history…
So now we are all so "POPOMO (post Post Modernist) and we have the solidification of the internet of a new media, what or who will be the NEXT Beatlemania? (Aside from some marketer’s formulatic wet dream)?
your opinions?
These things are hard to predict. If you expect it, it’s almost certain not to happen. I remembering all the crap about Oasis being the “new Beatles.” THAT turned out to be a farce.
I don’t think we’ve had a movement in music that even comes close to Beatlemania since Nirvana exploded the scene in 1992 - that’s been 15 years now. If the business side of music remains the way it is, which it will - in fact it will only get more efficient - I don’t ever see another Beatlemania happening. People’s tastes are too diverse now for them to feed us all the same thing again like they did with Elvis, The Beatles, then to descending extents Arena Rock, Disco, Hair Rock, Grunge, Rap, etc.
This seems much more like a CS thread, but that’s just me.
The answer is twofold; “it can’t happen again” because the current music market is far too fractured and fragmented into different listenerships and so on.
On the other hand, there could be another pancultural, cross-medium paradigm-shifting mania akin to Beatlemania that could create a new celebrity on par with the celebrity that the Beatles enjoyed, but it would be so foreign and unimaginable to us at this current point that we probably lack the vocabulary with which to predict it. I’m referring to something like (the following is not a prediction in any sense, but a sort of extended metaphor) if an interactive streaming video ipod type device became incredibly affordable, mainstream, and ubiquitous to the point where almost everyone carries one with them, and then a new artist or group of artists appears that create some sort of super-accessible but super-creative interactive video/music/game/hologram hybrid things that people can beam to their devices and play/watch/listen to. Then they innovate within this new medium and completely write the rules that will be followed by everyone else that starts to try to do the same thing. Uhh, or something.