There comes a point in a young girl’s life where she finds her boy band. She chooses a certain member to learn everything about, she blasts her favorite song, and maybe even invests her time in crafting a collage or two. The obsession more often than not ends after the judgement of an older brother or sneering classmate and she moves on to more “sophisticated” tastes. For girls since 1960, that beloved boyband could very well be The Beatles.
The craze the Beatles created fundamentally changed our relationship with both artists and their music. While still debated by music critics and fans alike, many point to the Beatles as the first major “boy band”, a label generally given based on the distinction of a primarily female fanbase.
Looking back, Beatlemania truly was a sight like few others. Photos from 1963 show police officers concealing smiles while holding back hordes of fervid, shrieking girls, fans hurling themselves at moving limos to get even a glimpse of John, Paul, George, or Ringo’s earlobe. Ultimately, the girls’ screams were so loud that the band had to stop touring; they couldn’t hear each other, themselves, or their music.
The band eventually outgrew their bowl cuts and the era that defined them. They became more “sophisticated”, masculine, and pensive, no longer singing about holding hands but about societal issues and personal strife. Gradually, female fans were isolated from the fan base they created as it became more male dominated and less accepting of young women. But even before this shift, female “teenyboppers” faced immense misogyny from male onlookers. A 1964 New Statesman piece is a rather egregious example of this disproportionate scrutiny as author Paul Johnson describes members of the supposed “generation enslaved by the commercial machine” with “ huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the broken stiletto heels”.
Ideas that fangirls were plastic packaged products of capitalism remained prevalent, even 50 years later, when the British boy group One Direction stole the hearts of millions of young girls. This 2010s band rose to fame through a different vehicle: the internet. In fact, the way in which young “directioners” interacted with platforms like Twitter (now X) and Tumblr permanently changed internet culture.
Fan spaces were places for memes, fanfictions and fan interactions, not just work or personal promotion. Trending hashtags became tools to grow their fandom and captions served as ironic inside jokes that only those that were fans of the band would understand. Satirical comments like “One Direction ruined my life” were taken at face value by nonfans because shrieking girls could not possibly be capable of humor!
More generally, outsiders’ mislabeling fangirl culture as hysteria or reflects a failure to interpret their excitement as the feeling of being a part of something bigger. There is comfort in having automatic acceptance into a group based on a shared interest, and it may be particularly empowering for girls that can’t find that community elsewhere.
It was recently announced that a Beatles biopic is in process, and young women and girls have provided no shortage of commentary. TikTok comments under a post revealing the cast have the passion of a 1964 Ed Sullivan crowd, everyone nominating who they think should play their favorite Beatle. It’s comforting that there will always be these communities uniting us, even as both the musicians and we age.
