Did the Beatles originate the Beatle haircut? boots? collarless jackets? No. Did they start the trend of self-contained rock groups (three guitarists and a drummer) composing their own hits? No. Did the British musical invasion end American performers' careers? Dominate American music charts? No and no. Surprised? Relying on music industry data (Top 40 and 100 lists, U.S. and U.K. hits by British groups, British groups' hits on the 1964 U.S. charts, 1980s television commercials employing oldies music, and other comparisons), The Beatle Myth rebuts the revisionist rock historians who greatly exaggerated the impact of the Beatles and other British groups upon the U.S. pop music scene beginning in 1964. Widely held (and cherished!) myths that have grown over the years are debunked in the process.

From their 1962 debut single Love Me Do to the most recent remastered albums, this is an album-by-album, track-by-track catalogue of every songs ever released by The Beatles Includes: A chronology of key events in the life of the greatest ever rock band Separate sections on compilation albums, the Anthology series and non-EMI recordings Eight pages of colour picturesThis is the books that Beatles fans have been looking for - packed with details, facts and pictures it's the definitive concise guide to the music of The Beatles.

In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame. Riley portrays Lennon's rise from Hamburg's red light district to Britain's Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naivetéf "Love Me Do" to the soaring ambivalence of "Don't Let Me Down"; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon's friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock 'n' roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone. In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.

Hundreds of books have been written about The Beatles. Over the last half century, their story has been mythologized and de-mythologized and presented by biographers and journalists as history. Yet many of these works do not strictly qualify as history and the story of how the Beatles' mythology continues to be told has been largely ignored. This book examines the band's historiography, exploring the four major narratives that have developed over time: The semi-whitewashed "Fab Four" account, the acrimonious breakup-era Lennon Remembers version, the biased "Shout!" narrative in the wake of John Lennon's murder, and the current Mark Lewisohn orthodoxy. Drawing on the most influential primary and secondary sources, Beatles history is analyzed using historical methods.

Did the Beatles originate the Beatle haircut? boots? collarless jackets? No. Did they start the trend of self-contained rock groups (three guitarists and a drummer) composing their own hits? No. Did the British musical invasion end American performers' careers? Dominate American music charts? No and no. Surprised? Relying on music industry data (Top 40 and 100 lists, U.S. and U.K. hits by British groups, British groups' hits on the 1964 U.S. charts, 1980s television commercials employing oldies music, and other comparisons), The Beatle Myth rebuts the revisionist rock historians who greatly exaggerated the impact of the Beatles and other British groups upon the U.S. pop music scene beginning in 1964. Widely held (and cherished!) myths that have grown over the years are debunked in the process.

An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them. Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up? As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.

Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles' artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.