The article “‘Beatlepeople’: Gramsci, The Beatles, and Rolling Stone Magazine,” by Michael Frontani, an assistant professor in the School of Communications, was published in the Summer 2002 edition of American Journalism.
The research focuses on the Rolling Stone’s “underground” period (1967-1970), and looks at founder Jann Wenner’s use of the Beatles in promoting the counterculture ideal and promoting the success of his magazine.
“The establishment of Rolling Stone as a mainstream publication exemplifies the workings of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony,” Frontani points out. “The ground the Beatles occupied, the area of struggle between the dominant culture and the counterculture, was also the venue for assimilation of much of the counterculture’s program into the ‘compromise equilibrium’ of hegemony. And it was the sphere in which Rolling Stone became a commercial success and served as a vehicle for integration of the counterculture into the mainstream.”