The Beatles Live!
New generations of fans are cultural archaeologists, working with the materials of the past to create the passion of the present.
by Allegra Rosenberg
This article is brought to you by Fansplaining’s patrons. If you’d like to help us publish more writing like this in the future, please consider becoming a monthly patron or making a one-off donation!
To be a modern-day music fan is to be in love with history in the making. You chronicle as you participate, archiving as you engage, co-creating the mythology of the pop star or band even as new chapters emerge and the story changes.
Music fandom is a big-tent community that’s home to many different kind of fans, including celebrity-focused update accounts; devoted tour-followers, meet-and-greet buying groupies; solo fans covering their lockers and bedroom walls with posters; rack-up-the-streams chart obsessives; and local and indie music supporters.
No matter where one falls in these overlapping groups and practices, music fans form intimate relationships with their objects of fandom—from the Taylor Swifts and BTSes of the world to thousands of counterparts with smaller but just as dedicated contemporary followings, these fandoms are evolving as the artists at their center do.
But then, music fandom today isn’t reserved for today’s artists. I don’t mean older people who still love the bands they loved back in the day: I mean younger fans of a classic or legacy act, people who were born long past an artist’s musical heyday, but have discovered it during their own youth.
There’s a thriving classic rock fandom online, obsessed with bands like Queen, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, among others. These fans are in love with the music and the personalities behind it—just as any fan would have been during each act’s prime—but by temporal necessity, the way they enact that fandom isn’t the same as would be for a modern artist.
“being a classic rock fan is so hard literally all your faves are always dead or terrible people,” bemoans a 2022 TikTok by @yunggremlin.
This distanced, wry post-irony about the cancellability of historical icons speaks to the epic highs and lows of being, say, a Pink Floyd fan. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. And in fact they do, in droves.
The classic-rock side of TikTok is full of youthful enthusiasts of sixties, seventies, and eighties music. Some of them perform their historical music fandom as part of a broader sort of LARPing lifestyle, collecting vintage clothes and practicing vintage-inspired makeup styles. They aren’t completely living in the past—often there’s a big overlap with fandoms for contemporary alternative bands who have historically-inspired sounds, like the Lemon Twigs, Greta van Fleet, and Declan McKenna.
There’s certainly an aesthetic element to their fannish nostalgia, which sees them connecting and identifying with the fans that came before them. But they’re also fully embracing the expanded range of modern-day fan practices: not just listening to music and dressing like their idols, but shipping band members and creating things like fanart, fanfiction, and memes. And no modern-day classic rock fandom has taken to these practices quite like the Beatles fandom.
The original Beatles fandom was a grassroots phenomenon, borne not so much out of canny industry marketing (they had to struggle to be taken seriously by labels, most of whom rejected them out of hand) but out of the lucky combination of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and the emergent phenomena of the music they made and the image they projected.
When the phrase “Beatlemania” was coined in the fall of 1963, it was the UK press’s post-hoc description of the irrepressible, outsized reactions their onstage appearances were causing amongst youthful audiences. The previous decade had seen fan frenzies over artists like Frank Sinatra and Elvis, but those seemed, in retrospect, like practice for the real thing: Beatlemania.
And even though the “Beatles industry” remains an economic force today—their AI-assisted zombie single “Now and Then” hit the Top 100 last year with 11 million streams in its first week—the younger contingent of their modern-day fandom, born decades after the height of “Beatlemania,” is a grassroots phenomenon as well.
It takes a certain stripe of fannish brain to obsess over music from a bygone age instead of modern artists—taking something as broadly popular as classic rock and treating it with all the intimate, loving attention that other fans devote to a sci-fi television show, a fantasy book series, or a cult video game. These fans are cultural archaeologists, working with the materials of the past to create the passion of the present.
The phenomenon is not limited to the Beatles. On TikTok, fans place meme tweets on pictures of the Stones and Bob Dylan; celebrate Freddie Mercury’s style; and make Monkees fancams.
But the Beatles fandom is still top dog, with a kind of default dominance it retains from the dawn of Beatlemania. On Tumblr, you can find gifsets of Beatles movies, fanart, and the occasional Yoko Ono stan post, side by side with more typically Tumblr-esque wackiness along the lines of Paul McCartney posts tagged “#my twink wife”, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” memes, and toxic yaoi polls.
As Tumblr has metamorphosed from a dominant social-media platform to a thriving but still subcultural relic—the digital equivalent of the Salton Sea, where only the hardy freaks remain by its shrinking shores—the tenor of the site’s feelings about the Beatles has changed, moving from anti-pop dismissal to obsession. Liking the Beatles a ridiculous amount has become acceptably alternative—possibly because nobody’s pretending they’re perfect idols anymore.
Olivia, a dedicated Tumblr user and classic rockposter @torturelabyrinth, told me, “I think it’s an interesting case where someone can grow up with the popular line about the Beatles”—peace and love and harmony and suchlike—“and then you dig into their actual actions and behaviors, and realize that they were actually all pretty fucked up and interpersonally deranged.” In her opinion, it’s that chaos which attracts people nowadays, rather than driving them away. It makes for a better story.
This kind of fandom can be fundamentally more of an escape than any kind of ongoing saga. The Beatles—the historical Beatles, that is—are a closed canon. Nothing is going to be jossed; you don’t really have to pay any attention to the ongoing storylines of the still-living members if you don’t want to, because there’s more than enough material from the sixties to sustain fandom practically forever.
Yes, if John Lennon was around today, he would 100% be continually getting cancelled—and that would be stressful and annoying for everyone. But he isn’t, so fans can—and do—work on coming to terms with his flaws and seeing them as integral parts of the artist they love.
This is one of the pros of being able to perform fandom at historical distance. Unlike media fandoms where there can be layers of meaning inherent in character and plot, music fandom (and other celebrity-based fandoms like those around athletes and actors) is by nature intimately close to creators: music is played by, written by, and often about the people behind it.
Today’s young Beatles fans can consume every atom of sound and image from the 1960s, but however fond they are of Ringo’s silly tweets or Paul’s new music, there’s a line of demarcation somewhere in the past which spiritually separates then from now. Real-time, ongoing celebrity pop culture can be full of anxieties, but an older band’s story can be more like reading a book that was already written.
Anyone who has been around music and celebrity fandom understands how an obsessive desire to know and collect everything about a fannish object can quickly turn invasive and boundary-crossing. Tinhatting and other conspiratorial thinking presents a moral issue, especially when it crosses the fourth wall: Kaylor and Larry aren’t for everyone. And even without active tinhatting, modern-day music fandom crosses boundaries so often that it has become major pop-culture news—see Chappell Roan’s recent comments about toxic fan behavior.
But with a bird’s-eye view of the timeline and a surfeit of behind-the-scenes info that has accumulated in the decades since performances and record releases, it’s not quite as invasive to be fannishly obsessive about a band like the Beatles—and that includes shipping.
After all, history is far easier to narrativize than the present—some would say that history is narrative, in fact. Ipso facto, it’s often easier—both practically, based on public availability of juicy personal details, and emotionally, re: the death of involved individuals—to ship historical musicians.
Paul McCartney/John Lennon, or McLennon, is as big today as it’s ever been. Real person fiction, or RPF, can be a contentious topic for any music fandom, where the proportion of non-shippers—at least in my anecdotal experience—is often higher than in media or book fandoms.
But perhaps because of the “closed canon” nature of the relationship–with decades since Lennon died, and McCartney more than half a century on from the intensity of their collaboration—McLennon shippers and even tinhatters who sincerely believe they had a romantic and/or sexual relationship abound quite publicly in online fandom. And because of that distance, they aren’t necessarily presented with the same censure as conspiracists for an active, modern-day ship.
This might be connected to a broader uptick in the acceptance of RPF, helped along by memes like the Ben Affleck/Matt Damon “Which could mean nothing” and the realization that the Phans were right all along. Anti-RPF sentiment is certainly still around, but as the population of fandom swells, increasing numbers of people join the war on RPF on the side of RPF, as it were. When it comes to the Beatles, it’s clear that many fans take McLennon for granted as a source for memes and jokes, as well as more heartfelt media like fan edits set to Phoebe Bridgers songs.
According to the crowdsourced fandom wiki Fanlore, there have long been anecdotal reports of Beatles slashfic circulating during the time the band was active, but no actual documentation has ever surfaced. By the time Anthology, a Beatles multimedia retrospective, was released in 1995, slash was being written and circulated more publicly in burgeoning online fanfiction spaces, and there were many LJ comms devoted to Beatles slash in the 2000s.
Today, there are thousands of Beatles stories on the AO3, many of them slash. The contemporary prevalence of McLennon and other classic rock ships reflect what might be described as a sort of phase shift that occurs when a band passes into history—even if it’s technically still active.
A large transformative fandom based on the Beatles has been a long time coming. Younger, multifannish Beatles lovers are taking practices they previously honed in other arenas—bandom, K-pop, sports RPF, and general non-RPF media fandom—and applying it to classic acts. And with the structure of the modern fannish internet available to all, social media full of shipping content has helped bring shippy Beatles fanworks fully into the light.
That’s not to say the urge to ship hasn’t been there since the start. While Star Trek was birthing a whole subculture of science-fiction slash shipping, Lennon and McCartney were transforming the relationship between the fannish self and the public object(s) of desire in the realm of pop music. But while early transformative Trek fans were mostly adult women who created defined, organized communities—with literary inspiration from both existing science-fiction fan-writing traditions as well as, importantly, published romance novels—Beatles shippers wouldn’t have had those frameworks. Instead, they were often doing it more subtly, teenage girls expressing fandom through the medium of their own lives and imaginations.
During the height of Beatlemania in 1964 and 1965, Beatles fan clubs spontaneously formed all around the U.S. and the U.K.—some run by radio stations, others directly by branches of Brian Epstein’s management company. They were all soon completely overrun, having to hire packs of fangirls in order to sort through enormous piles of fan mail.
In the book Dear Beatle People, accomplished Beatles fan historian Sara Schmidt collected the firsthand accounts of hundreds of Beatles fans who were there, in the 1960s, amidst the height of Beatlemania. It’s an immensely valuable compendium—an on-the-ground view right into the frenzy as it happened.
There was much to do as a Beatles fan. Buying records and merchandise; memorizing the songs; writing fan letters; typing and mimeographing newsletters; waiting for the Beatles at airports and in front of hotels—and if you were lucky enough, attending a concert. Local heads of the fan clubs often got to meet the Beatles themselves when they came to town—encounters that they would never forget. By 1965, many groups, realizing the potential of their collective strength and wanting to improve the public image of Beatlemaniacs, turned to local community involvement and philanthropy, raising money for hospitals and charities.
But these more traditional fan-club experiences existed alongside the more internal world of a Beatles fan—the obsession that ran deeper than records and newsletters, and which could only be expressed through novel ways of behavior and emotional expression. Without the community practice of written fanworks, these stories only exist today in the oral record.
Some fangirls would spend entire fan-club meetings doing “Beatle-talk” in their approximation of Liverpudlian accents. They would act out scenes from “A Hard Day’s Night,” or even make up their own scenes, assigning each other Beatles personas, which they would stick with in the long-term. (Pity the girl who got Ringo!)
One standout memory from Dear Beatle People is that of a fan named Lori Freckleton, who recounted, “I was John and my friend was Paul and the whole den. Then we had extras, so we had to have the girlfriends. Of course, innocent as we were, we had to have a Brian Epstein and have a girlfriend for him.”
Pamela des Barres, the groupie famous for her dalliances with real-life rockstars like Mick Jagger and Keith Moon, recounted her experiences with fantasy ones, too—as a teenage Beatles roleplayer. “We were two girls in a constant state of Beatle skits. I played John and myself, and she played Paul and herself. We could switch personalities with the flick of an accent. We [...] professed undying love with semiperfect working-class Liverpudlian accents. At night, we played all four people at the same time, when we would lie entwined in each other’s arms, pressing our four sets of lips together in an eternal expression of Beatle Love.”
Even younger fangirls engaged in this sort of Beatle-play. One fan who was seven in 1963 recalled: “My best friend and I stopped playing house and started ‘playing Beatle’. She was Paul, I was John. We spoke in fake Liverpudlian accents and ran from fake fans.”
This sort of Lennon/McCartney roleplaying has received its own modern-day representations. In the off-Broadway play SLASH, playwrights and actors Leah Hennessey and Emily Allan engage in some metatextual Beatle-play, as Betty and Veronica from Archie Comics exploring their sexuality by roleplaying John and Paul. Both performers said they independently shipped McLennon when they were younger, but didn’t comprehend the scope of the broader shipping and fanfic community until discovering Sherlock fandom much later in life.
This parallels the way in which many young music fans experience and enact fannish emotions and practices as emergent phenomena, not realizing until they encounter organized media fandom later (if they ever do!) that what they did is part of a larger, defined and ongoing subculture.
A band with handsome boys and catchy music, perhaps more accessible and immediate than plot-heavy books and TV shows, is often someone’s first fandom experience at a young age. That can mean that whether a historical band like the Beatles or a contemporary one like BTS, young fans’ formative fantasies end up reinventing the wheel.
But the accessibility of internet fan culture has in many ways elided this disconnect. Due to the merged nature of all types of fandom online, with practices and techniques of obsession moving between subgroups at the speed of light, the Tumblr and TikTok classic rock heads have often already been trained in the transformative mines, bringing with them to music fandom knowledge of fic, tropes, and shipping.
For many young(er) Beatles fans today, this isn’t their first rodeo—but their use of fandom techniques from past experiences in media fandom can confuse older fans like Dear Beatle People author Sara Schmidt, who recounts being bewildered at how sexual modern-day Beatles fandom tends to be.
As a Gen-X fan active in local and early online fan groups in the 1990s and 2000s, and as a dedicated chronicler of fan tales from the previous generation, Schmidt did not really observe any active interest in imagining the Beatles in sexual or romantic situations—either with each other, or with fangirls themselves, in what we today might term a self-insert, OC, or imagine scenario.
“The fangirls that I talked to from the sixties were very innocent and naive,” Schmidt says. “Many of them told me, ‘I just wanted to hold hands with Ringo.’ It was never anything sexual.” She cites her friend Lizzie Bravo, a prominent first-generation Beatles fan who passed away a few years ago, who once told her, “‘I was a virgin until I was 20. I didn't know. I wouldn't even know what to do if one of them approached me like that.’”
It was the adult female fans of TV shows like The Professionals, Starsky & Hutch, and Star Trek, many of whom were librarians, academics, SFF fans and authors, or otherwise literarily inclined, who began fanfiction as the organized, continuous cultural practice we know today in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The handsome Spock and broad Kirk got the girls going just as Lennon and McCartney did—but instead of screaming, as Beatles fans famously did as their most prominent emotional and erotic expression—they took to their typewriters and sketchbooks and produced notable stories such as Leslie Fish’s “Shelter” and Gayle F’s illustrated “Desert Heat.”
I explained to Schmidt that the reason for the apparent en-masse sexualization of the Beatles was not only due to the relative older ages of the fans involved today—late teens and early twenties—but also because of how fandom as a whole has changed since the first and second generation of Beatles fans.
Schmidt witnessed firsthand the transition from in-person, local Beatles fan clubs to online message boards, chat rooms, and eventually social media, so she understood what I meant when I described how digital platforms like AO3 and Tumblr have empowered fans from disparate communities to take up new practices—including ones revolving around imagining the Beatles in love.
Of course, transformative fanworks and shipping aren’t the only way a modern-day Beatles fan can experience their obsession. 2,500 Beatles works have been updated on AO3 since 2020—well past the cut-off for a “small” fandom, per events like Yuletide, but still a relatively small number.
On Tumblr, there’s an abundance of fanart, gifsets, and discussion of the band’s history, including the more sordid and lesser-known events which tie into the RPF side of things. On TikTok, fans show off their memorabilia and collect rarer images and trivia into slideshows. There are even Beatles fan events on Roblox. And many Beatles fans of today want to feel connected to Beatles fans of the past—which they do by uncovering relatable fan history, from vintage scrapbooks to public love confessions.
And there’s certainly no shortage of ways to experience the band offline—capitalism makes sure of that. Liverpool tourism is a hot prospect, Paul McCartney’s photography exhibit is on tour (now at the Brooklyn Museum and very much worth a visit), and the shows of tribute bands like the Bootleg Beatles and the Fab Four are pilgrimages for young fans who live-LARP the experience of Shea Stadium.
In recent years, record labels have been focusing more and more on the earning potential of their back catalogues, putting intensive resources into marketing old music to new audiences. Last year’s “Now and Then” is one example of what can happen when, well, “Now” collides with “Then.” The release of the song was met with fervor by modern Beatles-heads, who referred to the promotional interviews Paul McCartney and Giles Martin (the son of Beatles producer George Martin) conducted as being “legalized McLennon.”
This can lead to a best-of-both-worlds situation, where a band is a bit of a Schrodinger’s Cat—alive and dead at the same time, present and past, now and then. Leisurely, expansive explorations of the Beatles’ history thanks to archival drops like the Get Back documentary or Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In can be interrupted by Sean Ono Lennon’s anti-woke antics or the sad reality of Paul McCartney’s concert tickets being too expensive for many young fans to afford.
The wider classic-rock fandom’s persistence and popularity within this paradigm speaks to the enduring power of 20th-century music and the stories of iconic groups. But it’s also a fascinating demonstration of the power of fannish media techniques. Fic, fancams, cosplay, and memes become effective emotional stand-ins for the main experience of being in a music fandom: being in the crowd while the artist plays, unavoidably out of reach when they broke up half a century ago.
The Beatles in particular exist in a nebulous and enticing crossover space. The ambiguously closed nature of the canon—historical and yet not—exemplifies the appeal of historical fandom. A certain jouissance issues from the act of looking back in time with affection: just as fans of The Terror, as I have personally experienced in my time in that fandom, find fascination and endless inspiration in the real-life historical mystery of the Franklin Expedition, where archaeologists and archivists might any day make a discovery shedding new light on what we thought we knew.
In this way, modern fannish practices, including shipping and transformative works, expand the possibility of what it means to know and love the Beatles. As long as their stories keep being told, transformed, and reinterpreted by new audiences, they will stay as alive as they ever were during the days of Beatlemania.
If you liked this article, please help us make more! Become a patron for as little as $1 a month, or make a one-off donation of any amount.
Allegra Rosenberg is a writer based in New York City. She has written about fandom, media, tech, and history for outlets including The Verge, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, and The New York Times. Her debut nonfiction book FANDOM FOREVER (AND EVER) is forthcoming from WW Norton.