The immense influence of The Beatles on the worlds of music and pop culture has been evaluated, discussed, examined, and restated six ways to Sunday. At this juncture, is there really any need for further analysis of The Beatles, their music, or their overall impact?
The answer you’re looking for is “yes.” So buckle up, because we’re taking it back to 1963.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney set the course for the existence of the entire Emo sub-genre the day they sat down and wrote ”She Loves You” – this, along with countless other developments in popular music over the ensuing decades.
Of course, laying the foundation of a widely successful but polarizing and occasionally reviled sub-genre of rock music was certainly not the grandest of achievements to which the Liverpudlian quartet can lay claim, nor should it be – Could The Beatles be considered the entity responsible for bringing us Machine Gun Kelly? Ouch.
But it speaks to the perpetually evolving and ongoing influence the group continues to hold over popular music as a whole to this day.
Firstly, immediately charging out of the gate with a chorus is a bold musical statement in and of itself to say the least. But to position said chorus in such a way as to launch from the minor forthwith speaks volumes, and cracks open the spectrum within which the melody will navigate throughout the tune’s duration.
In the interest of full transparency, were The Beatles the first popular act to open a song with the hook? Absolutely not. Examples of such structures can be found all throughout the early rock & roll by which the group themselves were influenced and beyond.
In fact, Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” a tune covered by the Fabs themselves in 1964 for Beatles for Sale, predates “She Loves You” by over half a decade.
So one would be remiss to misconstrue the motion at hand to imply that The Beatles pioneered each of these elements definitively – there’s certainly an argument to be made that The Beatles indirectly (or directly) spurred the Emo sub-genre into existence decades after the fact, but do know that sufficient research on the idea so as to establish it as concrete fact has not been undertaken by this writer.
In any case, the convergence of the melodic sensibilities, rampant creative instinct, and enormous popularity – and subsequent influence – are what make The Beatles such a fascinating case study. They are also what make significant the creative offerings which, when originating from other artists, could very well be considered just “pretty good.”
But really, the E minor opener to the chorus progression of “She Loves You” changed everything. This sort of hokey “gee golly gosh” tune which had been the standard in popular music up to that point was suddenly stricken with a subtle but dark undercurrent through which nuance and inference manifested themselves, and in the hook section no less.
There was a certain wash of vocal harmonies on the thing that made it sound enormous, and it’s far and away one of the greatest pop choruses ever written.
By the finish of its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it runtime of just over two minutes – actually considered a bit overlong at the time – there’s a real definity to the feeling of the song having made its intended impact.
This suggestion comes, as it would happen, from the song itself, by way of an added sixth chord, though not the G at the tail of the intro chorus, which carries its own distinct significance.
The final E minor of the track during the “Yeah yeah yeah” coda refrain – heard moments before the song blows the listener’s mind a final time before stuffing all the clowns back inside the car and disappearing just as quickly as it had arrived – throws a C# note into the mix.
This addition – the sixth of the chord’s root of E – brings about a sense of finality to the track due to the harmonic interactions and relationships of the notes in question, according to professional Beatles Scholar Aaron Krerowics.
“’She Loves You’ famously incorporates an added sixth chord at the end of the introductory and concluding choruses,” explains Krerowics. “But the song also contains another, far less well-known added sixth: The penultimate “Yeah Yeah Yeah” is an e minor chord with a C# thrown in making it an e minor with an added sixth. That added tone [is] not heard in any of the previous 14 E minor chords used in the song.
“Why would the band save that extra note for the end? Why not use it earlier, too? Because it creates descending chromatic voice leading that [underscores] its harmonic conclusivity,” he says.
Thus, the coalescence of musical, universal, spiritual. economic, and occasionally arbitrary variables emitted from the ether a dense, radiating brick of honest-to-God magic – stuff that can’t fully be explained through mere language – the greatest pop song ever written.
Additional LOOTPRESS Beatles coverage can be found here.