1Screaming
On the morning of August 25, 2014, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and there were no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk—spaces behind her throat, around her heart, and between her lungs and the walls of her chest were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed. Somehow, the upper half of her body had become bubble wrap.
The doctors were confused until she said that she’d been screaming for hours the night before at the Dallas stop on One Direction’s Where We Are tour. The exertion, they hypothesized, had forced open a small hole in her respiratory tract. It wasn’t really a big deal—she was given extra oxygen and kept for observation overnight, requiring no follow-up treatment. But the incident was described in all its absurd, gory detail in a paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine three years later—titled “‘Screaming Your Lungs Out!’ A Case of Boy Band–Induced Pneumothorax, Pneumomediastinum, and Pneumoretropharyngeum.” The lead physician wrote that such a case had “yet to be described in the medical literature.” Doctors were familiar with military pilots, scuba divers, and weightlifters straining their respiratory tracts, but this case presented the first evidence that “forceful screaming during pop concerts” could have the same physical toll.1
This was a novelty news item: an easy headline and a culturally salient joke about the overzealousness of teenage girls. It was parody made real, and recorded with the deepest of seriousness, for all time, in a medical journal. I stumbled across that article while idly combing Google Scholar for stuff that would be personally interesting to me, a habit I developed in order to waste time at work while describing what I was doing as “research.” I probably typed in “One Direction” and “screaming.” It is kind of funny. When I tweeted about it, a woman I had already interviewed for this book replied immediately, “That’s worse than when I got so excited during ‘One Thing’ and bit down on a glow stick by accident, pouring viscous glow poison into my mouth.”2 I don’t know precisely when that happened to her, but she was thirty-four years old when she wrote the tweet, which I only bring up because loving One Direction enough to cause oneself physical harm is not unique to the teenage years. It’s just teenagers we picture when we talk about it.
I know nothing else about the girl who loved One Direction so much that she collapsed her lungs over it. Her doctor wrote to me that he’d asked, at the time, for her permission to tweet about the incident to Jimmy Fallon—he’d argued that maybe she would get to meet One Direction. “But she was too bashful!!!! Classic teenager,” he said, adding a laugh-crying emoji.3 I’ll never know who she is or hear her personal explanation of what made her scream so much. In this specific circumstance, that’s because of medical privacy laws, which are good. But it’s also emblematic of a bigger lack: we have had so many screaming girls. Every time we see them, we’re like, “They’re screaming.” And that’s it. It’s not that the image of the screaming fan isn’t true—we can all see it; it’s in the medical literature; many of us have embodied it. It’s that the screaming fan doesn’t scream for nothing, and screaming isn’t all the fan is doing. It never has been.
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“Beatlemania struck with the force, if not the conviction, of a social movement,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1992.4
We’ve all seen the famous photos of girls open-mouthed and crying, arms draped over police barricades. Beatlemania was an on-the-ground occupation of Europe’s and America’s major cities. When the Beatles visited Dublin for the first time in 1963, The New York Times reported that “young limbs snapped like twigs in a tremendous free-for-all.”5 When they arrived in New York City in February 1964—a little over a month into the U.S. radio chart reign of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—there were four thousand fans (and one hundred cops) waiting at the airport and reports of a “wild-eyed mob” in front of the Plaza Hotel.6 “The Beatles Are Coming” posters and stickers were distributed all over the country before that first 1964 visit, with Capitol Records sales managers instructed to put them up on “literally” any surface, “anywhere and everywhere they can be seen,” and to enlist unpaid high school students in the effort. (The sales managers were also asked to wear Beatles wigs to work “until further notice.”)7 On the night of the band’s historic Ed Sullivan Show performance, 73 million people tuned in—more than a third of the country’s entire population.8
“All day long some local disc jockeys [have] been encouraging truancy with repeated announcements of the Beatles’ travel plans, flight number, and estimated time of arrival,” the NBC news anchor Chet Huntley reported the evening the Beatles arrived. “Like a good little news organization, we sent three camera crews to stand among the shrieking youngsters and record the sights and sounds for posterity.”9 Ultimately that footage didn’t air—it was deemed too frivolous for the nightly news.
At the time, the media couldn’t figure Beatlemania out. They didn’t see a reason for so many girls to be so obviously disturbed. For The New York Times, the former war correspondent David Dempsey attempted a “psychological, logical, anthropological” explanation of Beatlemania.10 In it, he used German cultural theorist Theodor Adorno’s famous words on the conformity and brainlessness of “jitterbugs”—which was originally a racist excoriation of the dancers in Harlem’s jazz clubs. “They call themselves jitterbugs,” Adorno had written, explaining one of the ideas of his that has held up least well over time, “as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles whirring around in fascination.”11 Dempsey was misquoting him really, playing superficially off the available beetle pun. He was defending the teenage girls by calling their passions stupid and harmless, and he either didn’t know or didn’t remember that Adorno found jitterbugs dangerous, and had also described their movements as resembling “the reflexes of mutilated animals.”12 (In their racism, however, the two were ultimately on the same page: Dempsey chided Black rock ’n’ roll artists for encouraging young white girls to act as vulgarly as “aboriginals,” and compared the Beatles to “witch doctors who put their spells on hundreds of shuffling and stamping natives.”)13
Nearly all the writing about the Beatles in mainstream American publications was done by established white male journalists—many of whom, at the most important papers, were not even music writers. One exception was Al Aronowitz, the rock critic best known for introducing the Beatles to Bob Dylan and to marijuana (simultaneously) in a New York City hotel room in the summer of 1964. That year, he reported that two thousand fans “mobbed the locked metal gates of Union Station” when the Beatles performed in Washington, D.C. Then, when the Beatles came to Miami, seven thousand teenagers created a four-mile-long traffic jam at the airport, and fans “shattered twenty-three windows and a plate-glass door.”14 A plate-glass door! These are compelling images, but I found it challenging to sort through the details in some of the reports of Beatlemania, many of which read to me as improbable or at least difficult to prove. There was the actual hysteria of the fans, and then, it seemed, there was the mythmaking of that hysteria. According to unsourced early reports, some cities tried to ban the Beatles from their airports because of the cost of securing them; legend has it that carpets and bedsheets from their hotel rooms were sometimes stolen by the entrepreneurial, cut up into thousands of pieces to be sold with certificates of authenticity.15 Supposedly, an entire swimming pool in Miami was bottled up and auctioned off after the Beatles swam in it.16
The media, having little to say about the Beatles’ music, had a lot to say about the women who went “ape” for it. After the Ed Sullivan Show debut, the New York Daily News reporter Anthony Burton recapped the event, describing a “wild screaming as if Dracula had appeared on stage.”17 The Simon & Schuster editor Alan Rinzler reviewed the Beatles’ equally famous Carnegie Hall performance for The Nation a few days later with a devastating description of what would become the popular image of a boy band audience:
The full house was made up largely of upper-middle class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist, and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in flood lights for everyone to see and with the full blessing of all authority; indulgent parents, profiteering businessmen, gleeful national media, even the police … Later they can all go home and grow up like their mommies, but this was their chance to attempt a very safe and very private kind of rapture.18
It’s all there: the disdain, the condescension, the awe, the panic, of course the screaming. There’s even, amid the mocking, maybe a little sympathy: “this was their chance.” The media’s bewildered contempt congealed into reflexive disdain and flat dismissal. In The New York Times, a cartoon showed a young woman coyly crossing her legs and explaining to an older man, flat-faced, “But naturally they make you want to scream, daddy-o; that’s the whole idea of the Beatles’ sound.”19 Was the screaming the “whole idea”?
Copyright © 2022 by Kaitlyn Tiffany