A Hard Days Night for the Liverpool Working Class

[alice wellintown]

After another quip about Karl Marx (Marx is called a Racist by one of
the more strident narrators of GR), Pynchon turns to the Irish &
English and Jass music as Reef travels to New Orleans. Wonderful
stuff. The contrast there, of Anarchists and Jass Musicians is one of
those passages that jumps off the page.

The essay here is simple and solid. Of interest, certainly, is the
technolgical Capitalist media between the musician and the audience.



The Working Class Audience of Rock Music,
Liverpool in the 1960s
Tetsuya TAGUCH

Abstract: Postwar Liverpool, a de-industrialized and declining port
town, once a centre of Atlantic trade, was animated with American music.
Sailors brought home records of jazz and early R & B. It is there that
began to spark a totally new form of working class culture. In the 1960s
the Beatles, originally an R & B outfit of four Liverpudlian lads, was in
vogue. Unlike mass-produced, marketable American pop music scene,
British rock music was nurtured by its working class audience. Performers
and audiences stimulated each other in an unprecedently crazed manner.
Few indeed understood what was happening. The phenomenon was
visible among the older generation only as delinquency. Why were young
people screaming and yelling? Here is my answer.


the rest is available in pdf form

The Conclusion

Examining John Lennon's lyrics of 'Working Class Hero,' Harker questions
Lennon's working-class credentials. While his argument is interesting, it is
not based on fact. He says:

It is symptomatic that his 'Scouse' accent came as a surprise to his
father: 'He spoke lovely English. When I heard his scouse accent
years later I was sure it must be a gimmick.
It was true that Fred Lennon, the father who left his family, made this
remark to Hunter Davies whom Harker quotes. But Davies states that when
Fred met John, John was only five years old. Harker, as well as Fred
Lennon, took Lennon's scouse accent as a gimmick because their judgement
was troubled by the mass-produced image of the Beatles as superstars.
Biographical data is the most difficult material to deal with. Philip Norman,
the author of The True Story of the Beatles, for example, did not write of the
reemergence of Fred Lennon. I tremble with fear as my research is partly
based on these data.
I am aware of another limitation which is even more serious. The
accounts of the reception and response to the performers by the audiences
were not systematically explored. What I have attempted to show here,
however, is how Liverpool, Americanization and the working-class
audience were related in giving birth to rock music. Liverpool, both
geographically and culturally, stood closer to America than any other place
in Britain. There was an enormous American airbase at Burtonwood and of
course sailors would come back to the port of Liverpool with blues records
from America in the ships. And the time was in the 1960s when older
cultural forms which Richard Hoggart described in his The Use of Literacy
were either disappearing or being dispersed. Rock music was attractive for
working-class youth who had been, up until then not only economically but
also culturally, deprived of their own form of communication.

Here the Beatles began their lunch-time sessions in 1961 and instantly the
queues formed. The place was dismal and symbolic. Literally they met
underground. There is beer, loud music, and dance. That is enough for the
people who got together to spend their leisure time. It was, and is,
impossible for the working class to choose their work, but at least they
could choose their leisure at this time.
It is symbolic that the Cavern Jazz Club, as its name tells, had been a
stronghold of jazz music before it was replaced by rock music. In Britain
from the late 1950s to the early 1960s 'Trad' and Modern only appealed to
the intellectual minority and were gradually giving their place to rock and
roll. The working class audience chose to take new music rather than to
preserve the already established music.
But what distinguished the new audience from those of the former
generation was that the majority of them were young. That is, those who
had left school at fifteen and gone out to work. The more important
difference was that while the former working class community was highly
male-dominated, the new audience to which the Beatles and other rock
groups communicated included girls and later even middle-class youth. This
is not to say early rock music abolished the class and gender distinctions.
But certainly their music forced the puzzled and confused mass media to
seek out the renewed standard of popular culture and class. We must not
forget the economic factor which was working behind the scene. Chambers
quotes Mark Abrams' remark that "not far short of 90% of all teenage
spending is conditioned by working class taste and value."30 Nevertheless, it
remains true that the working class community in Liverpool in the early
1960s created their own form of culture.

http://www1.doshisha.ac.jp/~hnishino/tools/gengobunka/pdf2/02taguchi.pdf