Love Me Do

Love Me Do, released 53 years ago today. The message was love and fidelity wrapped up in a two minute pop song. To us today it seems quite nice, maybe a little too clean cut.  At the time it caused an uproar and an outpouring of adulation. The Beatles managed to tear a hole in the cultural fabric and the old guard heard those cheerful voices and knew they were being swept away. The young were rising and they had their own bards, their own poets. The main force of early rock and roll was its unsettling of class distinctions. Four working class lads from Liverpool were soon playing for the Queen. "Rattle your jewelry", John quipped, and the world was never the same. My mom told me how her father threw away her Buddy Holly and Everly Bros records in the early 60s. It was a callous act, but its indicative of how threatened the old guard felt. They were being pushed off the stage.
Paul says in an interview that their early songs were like love letters to their fans, thanking them for buying the records. If the youth were taking over, love was their secret weapon.  But what is love?  What was it in 1962? And has our concept of love changed? For the post-WWII world pulling itself out of the ashes and trying to bury the Holocaust, love was what everybody needed. And yet the Beatles also used love to get rich; they were selling a dream. But it was wholesome and it was an incremental change towards a better world. We all needed someone to love, someone like you. Paul sang directly to his listeners. It was the anti-Bomb, and it exploded in hearts around the world. A media sensation, ready to sweep the memory of Hitler right under the carpet.

And yet like Hitler, the Beatles used the power of radio in their bid at global domination. Unlike Hitler, they succeeded because they were not merchants of death, they were selling a promise of love and hope and in this field they were early pioneers, forging the first trail into uncharted territory. If there is any major difference between our concept of love today and how it resonated with the public in 1962, its that we have become jaded and cynical about love, our reality is increasingly digital and a screen seems to lie between us and our feelings, whereas for the early Beatles and their generation, love was begging to be released. Love Me Do, with that emphatic and misplaced do at the end, rhyming with you and true, opened the floodgates. The first few buds of a new spring burst forth in an analogue soil not yet trampled by the millions who would soon come searching for more gold. Ironically by commodifying the dream of love, the Beatles changed it forever.