I recently finished reading the epic rock ‘n roll autobiography of Keith Richards. Interesting to learn that Keith Richards studied advertising before he dropped out and started The Rolling Stones. So, it was little surprise when he attributed”Beatlemania” and “Stone Mania” to an “advertising windup.”
By the late 50′s, teenagers were a targeted new market, an advertising windup. “Teenager” comes from advertising; it’s quite cold-blooded. Calling them teenagers created a whole thing amongst teenagers themselves, a self-consciousness. It created a market not just for clothes and cosmetics, but also for music and literature and everything else; it put that age group in a separate bag. And there was an explosion, a big hatch of pubescents around that time. Beatlemania and Stone mania. These were chicks that were just dying for something else. Four or five skinny blokes provided the outlet, but they would have found it somewhere else.
