Yeah, yeah, yeah: a Newsweek critic focused on those three little words – or rather, one little half-word, repeated – to convey everything he hated about the Beatles: ‘Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.’
In the National Review, the conservative iconoclast William F. Buckley penned a diatribe under the title ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, They Stink’: ‘Let me say it, as evidence of my final measure of devotion to the truth: The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes”.’
But young people felt differently. Roz Chast was coming up to her ninth birthday when she first heard it. ‘That song provided my first inkling that there was another world out there, one that did not include my parents, my relatives, my neighbours, my teachers or my classmates – a world of carefree and attractive young people who did not worry about illness or money, and who did not care about homework or why one was not popular … What was it about “She Loves You” that felt like an anthem of liberation? Perhaps it was that chorus of “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, or maybe it was that thrilling “Wooooo!”, or maybe it was the Beatles themselves. I’d never seen anything like them.’
Later that spring, Roz was staying with her parents at a hotel in Puerto Rico when she paired up with another little girl. One day the two families went out driving together. While the parents chatted away, the two girls began to sing ‘She Loves You’ as loud as they possibly could, though they were shaky on most of the words, except for ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ and ‘Wooooo!’.
‘More than fifty years later, I still remember how thrilling that was. I don’t recall any of the grown-ups getting particularly mad at us. They were just baffled. This was us, this kind of music. Not for them. And that was OK with us.’
In the third grade, Roz found herself close to the bottom of the social pecking order. The four most popular girls in the school dressed up in Beatle suits, Beatle boots and Beatle wigs, and played cardboard guitars. They sang ‘She Loves You’ and went ‘Woooo!’ and shook their heads.
‘When I think about “She Loves You”, and how much I loved that song, how new it sounded, and how happy it made me feel to hear it, I think about how much it represented the mirage of a possible future, one that was more joyful and more interesting than my lonely and borderline-grim childhood with its homework and tests and mean girls and stupid boys and parents who worried about everything and got angry over nothing.’
Joe Queenan had never heard anything like it. Before ‘She Loves You’ came blaring through his sister’s transistor radio in Philadelphia, ‘I had no interest in music, period. Until that moment, I viewed music as an annoyance at best, and at worst as a punitive child-rearing device.’ His parents played Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Perry Como. ‘When the Beatles showed up, we felt the way the French must have felt when the GIs swarmed into Paris in August 1944 … The Beatles held out hope that life might actually be worth living, that popular culture need not be gray, predictable, sappy, lethal.’ For him, that moment he first heard ‘She Loves You’ signalled ‘the first time in my life I heard a song that seemed to speak directly to me and not to adults … I still think it is the greatest song ever written. For me, it is and always will be the song that changed the world. I love that song. I absolutely love it. And with a love like that, you know you should be glad.’