This general idea seems to work for facial hair since, say, Nixon’s resignation. To see this process at work, we might look to the 2010s boom in post-Great Recession beards as a response to a loss in earning potential. Sociologists and historians have often made the reductive-but-salient point that, in white hetero Euro-American culture anyway, facial hair on men tends to appear at moments when hegemonic masculinity is under threat.
The psychedelic mustaches, like the moptops of their earlier days, signaled difference through sameness: Epstein might make them wear matching bespoke suits, but their long hair suggested rebellion. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to inaugurate a new sound in rock ’n’ roll. The mustache covered a wound, but it also allowed the Beatles to disassociate themselves from their Fab Four identities and invent a totally new group, Sgt. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea, that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache!” Paul recalled in Anthology. “It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we’d all tend to do it. Paul was the first Beatle to grow a mustache, which was intended to hide the facial injuries resulting from a dangerous spill off a moped in 1966.
The boys were pointedly cleanshaven during their astronomical rise to fame. To understand the cultural currency of Paul’s Beard, in 1969 and today, we need to look to a general semiotics of Beatle facial hair. It’s also a part of the story Jackson’s new documentary tells about a different, more palatable, end to the Beatles, in which the Fab Four play one last gig and then grow up, move on, and acquire the cultural currency of fatherhood. Paul’s Beard is a portent of things to come and the end of what the Beatles had been. The beard is an articulation of Paul’s desire for authority, undergirded by a hegemonic masculinity that associates facial hair with virility, and also of his iconoclasm within the group-an iconoclasm that Paul’s genius for melody, which he has sometimes pursued past the bounds of taste (c.f., the duets he produced with Michael Jackson “Wonderful Christmastime”), has often obscured. But Paul’s shag is the perfect length for tossing back insouciantly during a jokey riff on Chuck Berry or Bob Dylan, his beard tempering his hair’s former boyishness into something more mellow. Some of the Beatles seem to have rejected the sexual power of hair by this period during the Get Back sessions, John often seems to recede behind his long, center-parted bob, shutting himself off from the world.
PAUL MCCARTNEY HOW TO
The Beatles always knew how to use their hair to suggest sex. He has a penchant for dressing in black during this period, the better, it seems, to offset the beauty of his whole head situation.īut Paul’s Beard is more than just fanciable. It perfectly balances out his glossy, glossy hair and big giraffish eyes. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: George is right.
The beard appears as subtext for the first episode’s initial twenty or so minutes, until George Harrison tells Paul what we’re all thinking: “I think your beard suits you, man.” Paul grins and says nothing, which is rare, so I think we can assume he’s pretty chuffed.
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And his team’s restoration of the formerly “chunky, grainy desaturated” film, long moldering in Apple’s vaults, has given viewers another gift: a full appreciation of the beauty and symbolic power of Paul’s beard. In its place, across more than eight hours of footage that manages to be both banal and thrilling, Jackson bequeaths viewers with a sense of a band maturing through and past each other who still, despite everything, loved one another deeply. Get Back, Peter Jackson’s meticulous and beautiful reimagining of footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions in early 1969, has forever altered the old narrative that the Beatles absolutely hated each other at this moment in time, a narrative that even McCartney and Ringo Starr have publicly said they believed. At the intersection of #HairStudies and contemporary Dad Discourse lies Paul McCartney’s beard.