Over half-a-century after the band broke up, its new AI-powered song “Now and Then” has debuted to reach the top of Billboard’s digital sales ranking.
The devotion of the fans of the band bordered on being religious. Concertgoers often wet their seats or fainted. This was Beatlemania.
The reaction of band’s teenage fans to songs such as “Baby You Can Drive My Car” often showed a retaliation to sexual repressiveness.
The Beatles also revolutionised what it meant to be a young man. Their public imagery defied the mystique of masculinity unlike early rock and rollers such as Jerry Lee Lewis.
When John Lennon told a journalist in 1966 that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’, it led to massive conservative backlash, and eventually to Lennon's assassination in 1980.
Forbes reported in 2021 that 18-to-29-year-olds represent 47 per cent of the listeners of the Beatles’ billions of streamed songs. That’s how their fandom goes across generations.