Not available to order
Publication date:
06 November 2014Length of book:
204 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9780810886278
Before The Beatles landed on American shores in February 1964 only two British acts had topped the Billboard singles chart. In the first quarter of 1964, however, the Beatles alone accounted for sixty percent of all recorded music sold in the United States; in 1964 and 1965 British acts occupied the number one position for 52 of the 104 weeks; and from 1964 through to 1970, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Kinks, the Hollies, the Yardbirds and the Who placed more than one hundred and thirty songs on the American Top Forty.
In The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence, Simon Philo illustrates how this remarkable event in cultural history disrupted and even reversed pop culture’s flow of influence, goods, and ideas—orchestrating a dramatic turn-around in the commercial fortunes of British pop in North America that turned the 1960s into “The Sixties.” Focusing on key works and performers, The British Invasion tracks the journey of this musical phenomenon from peripheral irrelevance through exotic novelty into the heart of mainstream rock. Throughout, Philo explores how and why British music from the period came to achieve such unprecedented heights of commercial, artistic, and cultural dominance.
The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence will appeal to fans, students and scholars of popular music history—indeed anyone interested in understanding the fascinating relationship between popular music and culture.
In The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence, Simon Philo illustrates how this remarkable event in cultural history disrupted and even reversed pop culture’s flow of influence, goods, and ideas—orchestrating a dramatic turn-around in the commercial fortunes of British pop in North America that turned the 1960s into “The Sixties.” Focusing on key works and performers, The British Invasion tracks the journey of this musical phenomenon from peripheral irrelevance through exotic novelty into the heart of mainstream rock. Throughout, Philo explores how and why British music from the period came to achieve such unprecedented heights of commercial, artistic, and cultural dominance.
The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence will appeal to fans, students and scholars of popular music history—indeed anyone interested in understanding the fascinating relationship between popular music and culture.
Philo offers one of the best treatments to date of the ‘British invasion’ of popular American music. Beginning with the 1950s skiffle craze in Britain, he takes his study through to about 1970, adding a brief epilogue that looks further. Not surprisingly, the Beatles are at the book's core, with Dylan getting most of the attention on the American side, but many other well-known artists are also discussed. What makes the book exceptional is its strong contextualing in the socioeconomic conditions of the late 1950s and 1960s, particularly youth culture. Philo makes excellent use of Billboard's charts to demonstrate both the range of popular music in the 1960s and how the impact of British artists was most strongly felt in the US in 1964; after that, the number of British hits, relative to domestic offerings, in the charts declined as American artists adjusted to new tastes. As the subtitle points out, the musical influences went both ways across the Atlantic: British artists responded to American music that was invigorated by British groups, and British groups were then influenced by new American artists such as Dylan and Brian Wilson. Readers will appreciate the fine annotated bibliography and ‘further listening’ sections. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.