At the time of writing, it’s the day after Ozzy Osbourne passed away.
He was one of the founders of heavy metal, an excellent vocalist and a charismatic frontman. However, before he was any of these things, it’s worth noting that Ozzy was a big lover of music. He never stopped listening, from when he was a kid to his final days, and his adoration for the art form was wonderfully reflected in how he spoke about different bands.
One of the bands that he spoke the most fondly of was The Beatles, as he said that they didn’t just make good music but gave a depressed country permission to have fun again. “When I heard The Beatles. I knew what I wanted to do,” said Osbourne. “My son says to me, ‘Dad, I like The Beatles, but why do you go so crazy?’ The only way I can describe it is like this: ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white, and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
Osbourne, of course, isn’t alone in his praise for The Beatles, as the four lads from Liverpool were musical powerhouses, responsible for changing the way the music industry worked and amassing millions of fans in the process. When they took to the States and initiated the British invasion, they sparked innovation in the minds of every music lover and brought joy to the masses.
Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist for the E Street Band, and one of the many who was influenced by The Beatles, said that their performance of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was “the first salvo of the British invasion”. He described the influence, noting, “It transformed America […] On February 8th, there were no bands in America; on February 9th, we had Ed Sullivan and on February 10th, everybody had a band in their garage. It was literally overnight.”
No one is under any illusion that The Beatles brought joy to plenty of people, but the question remains: Does their music bring joy objectively? It’s hard to use the word objective when you talk about the arts, because the whole point of it is that it remains subjective. However, there are some common trends which mean there can be universal opinions when it comes to something like music.
For instance, a study completed at Miami Palmetto Senior High revealed that our music tastes change with the seasons. “We definitely change up our sound by season,” said Victoria Sintes, who helped run the study, “When it’s summer, for example, we change our sound to be a little more upbeat and fun to represent the season.”
The Department of Psychology at James Cook University did a similar study, but specifically focusing on The Beatles and whether their music has the ability to lift the listeners’ mood. They found that, in a sense, yes, the music of the Fab Four can be mood-altering. They looked at a few different characteristics when making this assessment.
They obtained data concerning “Acousticness, danceability, duration, energy, key, loudness, mode, popularity, tempo and valence”. When they analysed the data pertaining to these factors, they found that The Beatles’ music was “more positively-valanced, more energetic, faster, louder, less acoustic, and shorter”. They also found that their music was more innovative than a lot of their musical counterparts in the 1960s.
Of course, there isn’t any kind of music that can genuinely change a mood; if that were the case, people would be prescribed LPs instead of antidepressants. However, The Beatles’ music is above average in enough characteristics to say that it does trigger emotionally positive reactions in people. In essence, to answer the question, yes, listening to The Beatles can lift your mood.
