“I’ve just seen a face”: The Beatles’ Faces as Aesthetic and Cultural Objects

Abstract

The article stems from the acknowledgment of the popularity of The Beatles’ faces within popular music and popular culture altogether. Unlike some contemporary and successive male rockstars, the band focused their aesthetic appeal entirely on the faces (and on clothing), omitting other body parts, and therefore keeping astray from a “sex symbol” status in a conventional, eroticized sense. The article analyses the cultural role of The Beatles’ faces in terms of aesthetic features (the face as a whole as well as face parts), face expressions (display of emotions such as anger, sadness and others), face performances (movements/activities of the face), and extensions/prostheses (glasses, makeup…). These parameters are applied to the chronological development of the face looks adopted by The Beatles during their activity and to the case study of those album covers featuring face close-ups of the band. Additional notes are presented in the area of face representation within the band’s musical repertoire.