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“The Age of the Beatles”: parliament and popular music in 1960s Britain

journal contribution
posted on 2013-04-22, 08:12 authored by Marcus CollinsMarcus Collins
This article examines how the unprecedented popularity and symbolic power of the Beatles forced politicians in Britain to attend to popular music in the 1960s. It argues that parliamentarians were ill-equipped to comprehend not only the Beatles but also the new social forces with which they were associated. They reacted with a mixture of jocularity, partisan point-scoring and earnest debates over art, class, youth and the state. Their general bewilderment testified to how the 1960s ‘cultural revolution’ exceeded the limits of the knowable and actionable in Westminster.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Citation

COLLINS, M., 2013. 'The Age of the Beatles': parliament and popular music in 1960s Britain. Contemporary British History, 27 (1), pp. 85–107.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publication date

2013

Notes

Closed access. This article was published in the journal, Contemporary British History [© Taylor & Francis] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2012.722346

ISSN

1361-9462

Language

  • en

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