What Goes On: The Beatles, their Music and their Time. By Walter Everett and Tim Riley

Abstract ‘[T]he afterlife of the Beatles’, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker in 1995, ‘shows how it was that people came to write the Gospels: Don’t tell me what it means, just tell me again what happened.’ Although Gopnik’s review introduced one of the early and important examples of Beatles scholarship, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, his observation remains relevant twenty-five years later, as the outpouring of Beatles chronologies, collections, and recollections continues. These popular volumes often retell familiar stories, deservedly celebrating The Beatles but struggling, or declining, to explain, really, why and how they mattered and matter still. The subsequent waves of the band’s popularity have secured their unparalleled status, but the vast particulars of their place in history remain understudied. It’s a tall task, to be sure, but an important one, nearly sixty years after the first writers introduced a growing public to The Beatles.