Were the Beatles artists? From this one question flowed scores more concerning the medium, genre, performance, composition, creation, reception, dissemination, evaluation and social context of popular music. The debate over the cultural value of the Beatles was consequently as vehement as it was significant. Cultural critics joined social commentators in seeking to divine the Beatles’ representativeness, importance and desirability. Lennon and McCartney’s early compositions received some critical acclaim, Sgt. Pepper sought to blur distinctions between high and low culture and the band members’ side projects forged links with the avant-garde. To accept the Beatles as artists, however, required critics to rethink their most ingrained assumptions about art and their own status as artists, critics and intellectuals. This chapter uses contemporary commentary, scholarship and fan literature to show that the rethinking process was contested and protracted. No consensus emerged. The claims made for the Beatles' artistry, which contributed to the wider discourse elevating ‘rock’ over ‘pop’, were countered by cultural conservatives intent on exposing the Beatles as kitsch. The Beatles’ detractors were not simply curmudgeons, killjoys and contrarians, but had good reason to believe their cardinal values to be threatened by the band and their assault on cultural hierarchies.

The conclusion argues that, as artists and celebrities, the Beatles advanced ways of living, loving, thinking, looking, talking, joking, worshipping and campaigning which surprised and occasionally provoked their contemporaries. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes unwittingly, they created a distinctive vision which critiqued society as it was and imagined society as it could be. Reactions to the Beatles dealt with the weightiest of subjects, however glibly: the condition of modernity, the meaning of art, the relationship between state and society. The volume, range and fractiousness of disagreement about them from their rise to their demise caution against generalising about the sixties. The band served as a common reference point around which people could argue about the present state and future direction of society. By the end of the century, these disputes had faded in popular memory, as the oral history interviews conducted by the BBC for the Millennium Memory Bank demonstrate. Hindsight had smoothed out the conflicts, resolved the contradictions and marginalised the opposition. What remained was a nostalgic conception of the Beatles as representatives and progenitors of British culture at its zenith. Interviewees looked back to a halcyon age of affluence before Thatcherism, sex before AIDS and liberation before licentiousness.