“The Beatles is coming”: The importance of the grammatical quirk that launched the British invasion
There have been other truly great bands, other pioneering artists and movements, other beloved cultural zeniths, but ever since a particularly lazy cave-dweller excused themselves from the hunt to scribble on a wall, and this thing we call art began, nothing has come remotely close to The Beatles.
The transcendent sensation that they whipped up doesn’t just happen because you’re a great band or even the best band, for that matter. Excuse me, but what even is a superlative like ‘the best’ in something as subjective as art? No, the buzz of Beatlemania was a viral frenzy that put The Fab Four on a pedestal, and we’re still subsumed by its joyous buzz to this day.
Much of the Beatlemania buzz was drummed up in the States with a simple, incorrect tagline. “I lived under a billboard that said, ‘The Beatles is coming’,” Beach Boys lynchpin Van Dyke Parks recalled, “And I got the sense that it was a plague, and that it was going to have cultural implication throughout the world.” The line that heralded this impending invasion was the brainchild of Derek Taylor, the press officer for The Beatles.
Taylor initially came across the fledgling band when he was assigned to write a review on them in May 1963. His jazz-loving editors at the Daily Express were pushing the prevalent angle of slating them as a vapid teen fad. After watching them live, he couldn’t bring himself to partake in this slander. Enamoured by the group’s buoyant performance, he was one of the few journalists who sang their praises, and, with that, he earned their trust.
While much of the criticism had come from afar, by being at the show, he recognised the vitality of the experience. These screaming girls and the onrush of liberation were not going to go away because of the stuffy print by the bourgeoisie. It seemed to connect with the zeitgeist, and it was surely only going to gain more traction. He positioned himself as the man who would accelerate that message to the world.
The US was the premiere frontier. It wasn’t just the largest commercial market, but it was also the home of rock ‘n’ roll. Much has been said about how ‘The Day the Music Died‘, when the biggest stars of the 1950s died in a single plane crash, created a void that British groups happily filled. But it was another thing entirely to pronounce that intent with a campaign that almost ominously stated: The Beatles is coming.
It doesn’t take an Oxbridge scholar to notice the grammatical quirk; it doesn’t even roll off the tongue nicely. The Beatles is a pluralised noun, so it should be met with ‘are’ rather than ‘is’. Even if you were referring to The Beatles as a collective unit, the fact their name ends in an ‘s’ still makes the matter grammatically clumsy. However, without getting into the details, the most important facet of the tagline is simply how it doesn’t sound quite right.
Taylor obviously intended this. He wanted people to pause upon the term. In doing so, they might arrive at the conclusion as Van Dyke Parks, that The Beatles, in this instance, meant more than just the band. Thus, the ‘is’ in question is grammatically correct when viewed in the same light as ‘a storm is coming’. That’s what Taylor’s campaign was hoping to convey, that the group were more than just the next big band on the horizon. They were beyond a collective, and they heralded multitudes more than great songs. The revolution is coming was the undertone, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a tagline.
Taylor got it right. In fact, the band got just about every move they made right, positioning themselves as the pious pop culture antidote to the Vietnam War that was also tragically coming to a head, too. The US was waiting for them, and they promised they were on their way—with everything they represented in tow.
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