Why did girls go crazy over The Beatles?

A group of girls were paid by CIA to scream when they see the Beatles at the airport. Then the other girls saw that on television and started to mock that behavior.

That's why stars are created - they have influence over people.

You guys are all clueless. The girls screaming at the Beatles didn't know anything about WWII. It was a phenomenon that mostly affected only teenage girls. I was in 6th grade in 1963-64 and all of my classmates were 11 or 12. And the girls in the class absolutely did lose their minds and become different creatures with anything related to the Beatles. Most adults had no idea why and the boys in the class were completely clueless as well.

There was definitely a sexual component involved. The Baby Boomers were by far the largest cohort in the history of the world and many girls were all entering or had just entered puberty. The Beatles were a new sound, with different accents and hair styles and everything just coalesced to create a cultural spectacle. Also, the Beatles were cute without being overtly sexual in the was that someone like Elvis was, so less threatening to a 12-year-old girl.

Also, the media was not fragmented the way it became later. Everyone watched the same 3 channels and listened to the same radio stations with the same top-40 hits. For just about anyone who is my age the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan was a cultural event that people still associate with a particular time and place in their life.

well yeah the girls didn't know much about WW2 but they did know that suddenly they, the girls, had money to spend for the first time, and they sensed a national youth culture had formed up for the first time. Having enough money to buy records, concert tickets, fan magazines and enough money for the family to have a TV...these were new things and helped the Beatles become as close to a monoculture as we've had.

Mass affluence was new and it brought on the 60s youth culture. Beatlemania was one of the results.

I remember when, You're correct.

The Beatles wanted to hold your hand, The Stones wanted to spend the night together and the wild band, The Animals, would do what they want.

I agree. Some points to add to and amplify yours:

Girls went crazy over the Beatles when they became a worldwide sensation starting in late 1963 because the Fab Four were extremely talented, clever, adorably attractive, mop-topped but clean-cut, nicely dressed young working-class British white blokes in their early 20s with great senses of humor who made fantastic, exciting, catchy music that appealed to pretty much everybody back then - and which evoked a slew of positive, powerful emotions.

Girls also went crazy for the Beatles back then because the marketing men behind the Beatlemania phenomenon was directly aimed at girls. Girls in their early and mid-teens, but also girls much younger than that too.

(This was the case with the marketing behind many of the other "British invasion" bands who made the big time in North America in the early-mid 1960s like The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Yarbirds, The Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, The Kinks.)

Girls of all types were drawn to the Beatles because the band consisted of four individual guys with distinct, very different personalities, looks and talents, each having "broad appeal" in his own unique way. So girls could each pick their own particular Beatle to be in love with, whilst still adoring the whole lot.

Although each Beatle was his own man, all the Beatles were remarkably photogenic and telegenic - with pretty good teeth for working-class Brits of their era - plus they were really smart and funny. They had a way with words that meant they gave great, engaging interviews in every medium - print and radio/audio as much as on TV. The Beatles were known for their verbal wit - a wit that was often cheeky and sometimes wee bit risqué, and always razor-sharp.

The Beatles were complete hams and cut-ups too who loved performing for the cameras - which made them a lot of fun to watch on stage and off.

The smart marketers who engineered Beatlemania put these particular talents of the Fab Four to good use by having them star in two feature length popular movies released early in their career - "A Hard Day's Night" from 1964 and "Help!" from 1965.

The Beatles also all came across as well-mannered, decent chaps who would treat girls and women kindly and respectfully as gents should. The Beatles were sexy, and they certainly aroused the sexual passions of girls, but at the same time the Fab Four evinced a kind of male sexuality that seemed safe and non-threatening to girls. They didn't exude the same sort of overtly steamy, potentially dangerous male sexual heat and swagger as Elvis, Eric Burdon of The Animals and Mick Jagger did - or as later rock stars like Jim Morrison of The Doors would.

IIRC, the Beatles' two early movies made a point of showing the stark difference between the "safe for girls/women of all ages" sex appeal of the Beatles and the dangerous, unseemly kind of male sexuality typified by the leering, groping, lecherous "dirty old men," smut merchants, sex pests, connivers and creeps that girls and women back then as now were all too familiar with.

I have one more point to add explaining another major reason why girls in the early-mid 1960s went crazy for the Beatles. Will post it later.

The biggest thing is that teenage girls are, and always have been, very impressionable and desperate to feel special and marketers used, and continue to use, the latest technology to exploit that. Social contagion begins with teenage girls, almost always. Source: I was once a teenage girl.

Youth culture in the post WW2 period. Audiences went nuts for Elvis before that. Check out his appearance on the Ed Sullivan show.

The Beatles were to music what the Third Reich was to war.

The Beatles were the frontline of what was to become known as the British Invasion. Moody Blues, Herman's Hermits, Rolling Stones, Who, Yes ect. followed their invasion into America.

The girls loved the Beatles because they wanted their hands held. Simple as that. You want a woman or to keep the one you have happy, hold her hand. No matter what type of cheapskate or skinflint you are, hold a woman's hand. It won't cost you anything to do so, and if you're lucky, you might even get "something" out of it.

But yea, if you need to ask, then I'm not surprised why you haven't asked yet why grown men wore powder wigs in the 18 century.

The Beattles' manager actually paid a lot of young women to sit in the front and scream. As often happens in group settings the screaming influenced others to also scream.

Money, sex appeal, influence.

Yet that "screaming sustained" unlike the screaming for other bands that quickly and quietly died out.

Of course it was sustained, they were getting paid to do it.

So what then change the channel. They have 200 other songs you might like. Obviously the girls like them so who cares!

Mass formation psychosis. They realized in the future they may be forced to take THE VAX, so they wanted to direct their energies elsewhere before contributing to elevated all-cause mortality rates.

This phenomenon happened over a hundred years before that...

en.wikipedia.org

Lisztomania

Lisztomania or Liszt fever was the intense fan frenzy directed toward Hungarian composer Franz Liszt during his performances. This frenzy first occurred in Berlin in 1841 and the term was later coined by Heinrich Heine in a f...

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one of the amazing thing is, only mccartney and maybe harrison were good looking at all. but that didn't matter. Same with the stones. Only mick was good looking but being on stage got the gals going.

I first heard that song while driving back to my military base. I felt immediately that a lot of performers at that time would be be overshadowed like the Four Tops. There were a lot of black groups at that time beginning to cross over. But the Beatles rocketed.

Plus, they liked the music.

The deeper levels of this question ARE interesting, because it represents extreme fandom or mania by a specific population subset (teenage girls) towards one (or a few) pop artists, and during a specific era (60s). Really have seen very little quite like it since. A little Google uncovered a pretty interesting article from the Chicago Tribune in the mid-80s. I think this adds to what some have said and brings up some more interesting points.

chicagotribune.com

SCREAMS HEARD `ROUND THE WORLD

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