Why Do Female Fans Scream for the Beatles and Other Megastars?

The “Beatlemania” story is familiar to almost everybody. America’s first live exposure to The Beatles came on February 9, 1964, when the already famous and wildly popular band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Some 73 million viewers—and I was among them—tuned in to see what would become a generation-defining cultural moment. As can be seen in recordings available online, the last words of Sullivan's introduction were virtually drowned out by the spontaneous, explosive, and ear-splitting vocal output of the young girls in the studio audience.

The Beatles were neither the first nor last popular act to elicit this reaction. Before them, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra did; in more modern times, One Direction and Justin Bieber have, as well. But screams had a particular impact on the career of The Beatles and other British Invasion groups: in an era before in-ear monitors, the intense and constant screaming of fans was one of the reasons why The Beatles stopped live performances, at which they simply could not hear themselves playing. Similarly, Jeremy Clyde of the British Invasion duo Chad & Jeremy recently reminisced in The New York Times (December 23, 2020) that the sound of girls’ screams was among his most enduring and visceral memories from the era. He described “A wall of sound, a blast, like a jet engine — screeching like a jet engine, never letting up. No pause for breath. It keeps on going.”

Why scream for The Beatles and any other megastar? This phenomenon has attracted attention and analysis in the popular press, but relatively little scientific focus. A few days after The Beatles’ Sullivan performance, the late writer and critic David Dempsey wrote an article, somewhat tongue in cheek, titled “Why the Girls Scream, Weep. Flip; The path to understanding is psychological, anthropological, and a whole lot besides,” for The New York Times Magazine. I must say that the piece, written 57 years ago, meant to be amusing and light-hearted, comes across from today’s perspectives as culturally insensitive, and it fails to provide any real insights—though that was clearly not the writer’s goal. I reference it to note that the screams of Beatles’ fans were noteworthy to many at the time, and the phenomenon still garners interest. For example, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs picked up the topic in a book as well as a Chicago Tribune piece in 1986, and Chris Richards, The Washington Post’s pop music critic, pursued the same question recently. Richards interviewed me for his article and here I would like to elaborate on some of what we discussed.

Why Other Animals Scream and the Unique Screams of Humans

If you have read some of my other posts in Our Natural History, you know that screams, both animal and human, are one of my research interests. Humans share screams with many other animals, and these vocalizations are quite conserved acoustically across even very disparate species. For example, you would recognize a scream as a scream whether it was produced by another human, a chimpanzee, a goat, or a rabbit. Of particular note, though, humans scream in a much greater variety of contexts than do other species, which tend to produce these vocalizations when reacting to the threat of predation or during attack from others of their own species.

One of the distinctive and common contexts for human screams is pleasurable excitement, as any parent of a young child can attest to. Children at swimming pools, playgrounds, school bus stops, and just about anywhere they gather and freely engage with one another, will scream. There has not been much scientific research on why children scream like this, and so whether this tendency is truly species-typical and serves communicative, perhaps even adaptive, functions is not well established.

There is lots of advice, though, from mental health experts (despite the lack of scientific understanding) on the internet for parents concerned and embarrassed about such behavior (e.g., "Here's why your child loves constantly shrieking at the top of their lungs"; "What’s to be done about screaming kids? Do I say something?"). The frequent explanation is that children enjoy being loud and getting attention, and also that they lack the verbal skills to express their emotions in more subtle and nuanced ways. Although there is a lot of individual variation among children with respect to the frequency of screaming, girls tend to do it more than boys. This is more the case for teenagers and young adults, as Beatlemania and other fandoms reveal from even casual observation.

Richards’ Post article cites author Rachel Simmons, who contends that society’s expectations of politeness and modesty for young women create pent-up energy for breaking out of the constraining, imposed rules, and concerts represent such an opportunity. No doubt society’s rules about conformity were far stricter in 1964 than they are now, however. And yet, fans of Justin Bieber today scream in much the same way that fans of the Beatles did then. Ehrenreich and her co-authors pick up sexual energy in the screaming of girls at concerts that I think is pertinent, and Richards also notes that female mega-stars like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus don’t “generate quite the same sonic fervor” as the most popular young male artists do.

Screams Attract Attention and Are Likely Contagious

Screaming like this, however, is not restricted to popular music icons, as a much darker example illustrates. Werner Pusch (1913-1988) was a German politician in the Social Democratic Party who, as a young man, observed a number of Nazi rallies prior to the start of the Second World War. He was interviewed (@ 26 min 53 sec) and provided accounts of the events for the still remarkable 1973 documentary series, The World at War (Thames Television). From 1933-1937, the fall Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival (Das Reichserntedankfest), ostensibly a celebration of the work of German farmers, was staged on the Bückeberg, a hill near the town of Hamelin, of Pied Piper fame. In reality, these huge gatherings (in 1937, some 1.2 million people attended) were propaganda tools the Nazis used to spotlight and declare a connection between Adolf Hitler and German farmers. Pusch was struck by the reaction of many of the young women in attendance when Hitler arrived at the festival. He described how “[t]he whole atmosphere grew more and more hysterical. He was interrupted after nearly every phrase by big applause and, uh, women began screaming … it was like (a) mass religious ceremony …”.

At first glance, it is difficult to find any similarities between a beloved musical act and a monstrous dictator. Why would both elicit a similar response? Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of the venue, which focuses the attention of large crowds on individual figures that are popular and influential within those crowds. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has certainly elicited shrieks and screams from young female fans.

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The frantic and frenetic screaming at concerts appears almost contagious. Emotional contagion occurs in humans and, at least some animals, too, and represents one likely dimension of an explanation for this sort of screaming. It’s a quite well-studied and recognized psychological phenomenon. One of my students, then a senior at Emory University, knowing that I conduct research on screams, told me a funny and fascinating story about her own experience with this phenomenon. At the insistence of her parents, she reluctantly, and most embarrassedly, attended a Justin Bieber concert to chaperon her younger sister. My student insisted she was no fan of "The Biebs" and was utterly perplexed at how—enmeshed in all the screaming of much younger fans—she found herself reflexively (her word) joining in.

Beatles fan, 1964.

Source: William Lovelace 1964 / Getty Images

But while emotional contagion is very likely part of the explanation for the mass screams of (mostly) female fans, this does not account for why they scream in the first place. Fans at sports events cheer loudly, but typically don’t scream. A completely speculative hypothesis derives from some of my research on screams and the literature on the evolution of these vocalizations. First and foremost, screams attract attention. This is true across the various species that scream. That attention might be from an ally, such as a close relative, when a monkey or ape screams in a fight or, in other species, the scream might draw attention and attract others when the caller is a rabbit or other prey in the jaws of a predator whose efforts might be interrupted by another’s approach. Perhaps it is the ability of screams to draw attention to the vocalizer that prompts their usage in, what might be, in the case of concert screaming by female fans, a competitive effort to get noticed by their idols. This need not be (and is likely not) conscious or even voluntary, as my student at the Justin Bieber concert experienced.

Rachel Simmons also views fan screaming as competitive, but more in the sense that the young women are signaling to one another their allegiance and passion for the band. She suggests it’s a group bonding phenomenon. But that does not explain why the fans don’t tend to show such exuberance with highly popular female performers, or why they don’t simply cheer loudly. So that leaves us with the hypothesis that competitive screams are functioning in an arena governed by sexual selection but shaped by the particular cultural context of mass gatherings (concerts) and the presence of a superstar. “Look at me!” is the message, just as it is the message of attention-getting screams of children. The phenomenon shows the complexity of screams as a mode of human communication—and how much more we still have to learn about them.