Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: An Analysis

When The Beatles began to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band they embodied an entirely different persona. They no longer wore their clean cut suits and sang pop hits. With a new name, psychedelic sound, and drugs, they purposely alienated themselves from the crowd. By turning inward, The Beatles album can be seen as a turn from their typical crowd of girl followers. Fans were now left to, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as they listened. After years of being successful in the spotlight with pop hits, The Beatles music changed drastically. They began to make music that reflected the need for separation from society and the crowd. The overwhelming need to please everyone in society no longer had the appeal to the fab four. The Beatles,

In turn, they were more consciously aware of what was going on, and they rejected just about everything that their parents did. According to Granvile,“The cultural shifts of the 1960s produce a more marked generation gap, between baby boomers — the generation that began with children born in the twenty years following World War II — and their parents. A combination of high-conflict social, political, and cultural factors helped to produce this divide, including the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the draft, the women’s rights movement, the growth of the hippie counterculture, and other smaller counterculture movements” (313). As the 1960s was beginning to be more progressive and open-minded, this was a turn from conservative ideals of the prior generation. Granvile states, “The teenagers of the 1960s rejected materialism, conformity, and conservatism that they regarded as the hallmarks of their parent’s generation (313). Counterculture was not only taking place in the United States, it was also occurring in the United Kingdom. According to Miles, “What we consider the British counter-culture began in the mid-60s. There had always been a bohemian underground, a discreet gay scene and a community of artists, but they kept their heads down. Full employment had enabled the growth of youth culture – Mary Quant, the Beatles – but many young people wanted to be

In the film, The Graduate, you can see the generation gap between Benjamin Braddock and his overbearing parents. Although he has a degree, a nice car, and lives quite luxuriously, he is unsatisfied and unsure what to do with the rest of his life. Material possessions don’t seem to matter much to Ben, they matter a great deal to his parents though. His parents clearly don’t understand their son and why he doesn’t go out and look for a job or continue with graduate school after earning his degree. This leads to conflict in their relationship because they have two contrasting ideas of what Ben should be doing with his life. Fairchild states, “The film, despite a plethora of cinematic technique, is rather simplistic in its satirical target: dull, dehumanized parents oppressing a younger generation who must struggle to create a more meaningful world” (140). This struggle is evident throughout the film, no one seems to understand Ben or what he is going through. In the beginning of the film at Ben’s graduation party, Ben continuously tries to escape from his own party. He feels uncomfortable around his parents and their friends and wishes to alienate himself. Fairchild explains, “At the welcome-home party at his parents’ house (third scene in the film, the opening of the novel), Benjamin behaves and is treated as an object. The signs of human-become-automaton abound in the trite gestures and cliches of his parents and their friends and in Benjamin’s response to them. The friends