Beatles Studies vs. Popular Music Studies?
Résumé
Beginning with William Mann’s seminal 1963 article in the Times, this presentation reviews half a century of so-called Beatles studies, the history of which is examined in the light of the academic research carried out on popular music since the 1960s. From Wilfrid Mellers’s early attempts to the first American theses addressing the Beatles through the prism of Schenkerian analysis, from the rise of 1990s “popular musicology” through what might be described as a Swedish and Finnish boom in Beatles Studies by the end of that same decade, the author investigates the musicological bias that was long characteristic of research on the band, and the way it reflected or influenced the development of popular music studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Scandinavia.