America’s young people were in a dismal place in late 1963. President Kennedy had been assassinated in November, his assassin murdered on national television shortly thereafter. Furthermore, the country was just entering the conflict in Vietnam. On the pop culture front, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be on the decline as well. Buddy Holly’s plane had crashed four years prior, a moment later memorialized as “the day the music died.” Picking up the slack, Elvis would return from his service in Germany as a pop icon.

The music industry was gearing up for a folk revival, not a rock renewal. But before the year’s end, a single called “I Want to Hold Your Hand” began circulating on U.S. airwaves. The song, thanks to an extensive marketing campaign and the enthusiasm of a largely teenage fan base, went on to sell more than 1 million copies within four weeks, forever changing the scene of 1963. Feb. 9 marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” one of the most mythologized TV performances of all time. The initial broadcast – featuring the hit “All My Loving” and the chart topper “I Want to Hold Your Hand” – drew more than 73 million viewers.

By the time the foursome had landed at the recently renamed JFK International Airport they had already developed a strong fan base in the U.K. But convincing American record labels to release The Beatles’ music wasn’t as easy.

“In 1963, manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin were offering these (early) records to Capitol Records, and Capitol wasn’t going for it,” John Kimsey, a professor in the School for New Learning who teaches a course called “The Beatles and the Creative Process,” said. “They would listen to a U.K. hit like ‘Please Please Me’ or ‘She Loves You’ and say things like ‘we don’t think this would be a good fit for American audiences because this seems like rock ‘n’ roll’, which is kind of a passé thing from the ’50s.”

Eventually Capitol Records relented, the single was released, and Beatlemania spread to infect teenagers throughout the country. But that craze might not have merely been a phase of lovestruck young women chasing a boy band, Kimsey said citing an article called “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

The early Beatles may have empowered young women by allowing them to express their emotions more openly, a precursor to the feminist movement.

“According to feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich and some other social theorists, young women in America took the cue of Beatlemania in the U.K. and they made it this arena where they could express somewhat raw and ecstatic feelings in public, something for which they had no other outlet in the early ’60s,” Kimsey said.

DePaul sociology professor Deena Weinstein, who teaches the course “Sociology of Rock Music,” attributes much of the early success of The Beatles to Brian Epstein’s brilliant management and the group’s ability to have personable interactions during press conferences. They were cute, cheeky and articulate, and their working class British accent gave the impression that they were everyday young men.

And, of course, the hair. “(Their hair) was seen, at least by the adults, as a challenge to the foundations of society,” Kimsey said. In the early ’60s, men were expected to be tough and masculine and to have short hair. The Beatles’ long androgynous bowl cuts countered the norm from the start. Weinstein said that the early Beatles also helped revive and shift the face of rock music. Unlike many rock ‘n’ roll icons in the ’50s, the foursome wrote all of their own music, and they didn’t adopt the moniker of a frontman in the band name. It wasn’t Paul McCartney – or John Lennon – it was The Beatles. They were individuals in a collective, a somewhat radical notion in rock music’s infancy.

Outside of the entertainment industry, the world was quickly becoming more culturally volatile. The Vietnam War had fully begun, social norms were shifting and counterculture movements – spearheaded by those who now identified as the youth – were surging into the spotlight. Beyond their cheeky facade and musical prowess, The Beatles became cultural icons. And much of their longevity can be attributed to their capability to both respond to and reshape culture.

“The Beatles were influenced by the counterculture, and then the counterculture was influenced by The Beatles,” Kimsey said.

In 1966 The Beatles stopped performing live. The decision to end their concert career was supposedly because they were unable to hear each other over their screaming fans.

“They became artists, not merely entertainers,” Weinstein said. Their later albums showcased an ability to utilize the space of the studio as an instrument of sorts. Though the practice of spending hours tracking a song is now commonplace, The Beatles were one of the first to adopt and popularize this practice.

On a small scale, The Beatles began to mimic what was occurring in culture. Like the youth who were dropping out and challenging society, The Beatles questioned the concept that rock music was simply for entertainment. Instead, they saw a potential to make it an art and adopted a sound and lifestyle that was in line with such countercultural attitudes.

“It’s not often that an artist or group that is the biggest thing in show business is also regarded by a huge swath of people as visionary poets,” Kimsey said. With such a varied and extensive discography, there are multiple avenues for listeners of different generations and preferences.

Singles like “She Loves You” are accessible and family-friendly, and others like “Tomorrow Never Knows” are works of avant-garde art. “It was such a new thing for pop artists to also make these huge artistic statements like ‘A Day in the Life’,” Kimsey said. “The fact that they did that so well is a big reason they’re still remembered today.”

Turn on, tune in, drop out 
On Sunday, Feb. 9, at 7 p.m. CT – exactly 50 years later to the moment – CBS will air The Recording Academy’s pre-recorded telecast “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles.” According to Billboard, the special will feature modern artists covering Beatles’ classics, including “Here Comes the Sun” by Brad Paisley and Pharrell Williams and an Imagine Dragons rendition of “Revolution.” The night will conclude with performances by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

Music and lyrics

We all know the lyrics to some of The Beatles’ most popular songs, but the meanings and origins of the songs often get lost in their repetition on the air waves. Beatles songs are more than tunes to mindlessly sing along to. They represent stories, musical innovations and the intimate details of the making of the band. “Tomorrow Never Knows” True to its colorful and strange aesthetic, much of its lyrics – such as the opening “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream” – are based on the book “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead” by psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary.

“A Day in the Life”
This song is a testament to the different ways that Lennon and McCartney approached songwriting together. Lennon’s verses, based on newspaper headlines, were paired with a midsection that McCartney had previously drafted. The space between these two segments was then filled with the track’s signature orchestral crescendo.

“Hey Jude”
According to “Revolution in the Head” by British music critic Ian MacDonald, this McCartney composition was written for Lennon’s five-year-old son Julian. Originally titled “Hey Jules,” McCartney wrote the track while driving to visit Cynthia Lennon and Julian shortly after the Lennons’ divorce following John’s affair with Yoko Ono. McCartney wrote the song to comfort the young boy as his family was splitting up. Lennon later called the song McCartney’s best work.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
After the “Sgt. Pepper” track was released, fans immediately began speculating that it was a direct reference to psychedelic drugs. Lennon vehemently denied it, asserting that though the song’s title and colorful imagery seemed to be pointing to LSD, it was actually inspired by a drawing his son Julian made of one of his preschool classmates. It was not until a 2004 interview with Uncut Magazine that McCartney openly admitted the drug reference.

‘Yesterday’ and today

Besides their infectious songs and albums, The Beatles’ greatest strength is perhaps their ability to adapt to the times. Today a new generation of fans is being cultivated not through listening to the radio and LPs, but through downloaded digital tracks. Their discography was notoriously absent from iTunes until late 2010, when Apple Inc. announced it had struck a deal with music recording company EMI and Apple Corps, the media conglomerate founded by The Beatles. According to Techradar, this agreement and its exclusivity clause is one of the reasons why The Beatles are not on Spotify and other streaming services.

More than 2 million Beatles songs were downloaded within the first week of iTunes sales, according to Billboard, including 13,000 digital box sets priced at $149. The best-selling U.S. album download was “Abbey Road.” But not everyone is willing to pay $1.29 for “Here Comes the Sun.” Last year anti- piracy organization MUSO released its list of the Internet’s most-pirated artists, with The Fab Four topping the list.

According to Music World, MUSO estimates that more than 180,000 files of The Beatles’ tracks have been downloaded illegally. Assuming each track has been downloaded 1,000 times, this equates to approximately 190 million illegal downloads.