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The Beatles' "Twist and Shout" is beloved for its blemishes: John Lennon's voice is moments away from disintegration — a raw snapshot of a singer wrestling a rock song in real time. And while Lennon ...

The Monkees were widely accused of ripping off The Beatles. “Ripping-off” was usually too strong a word for the inspiration that the Prefab Four took from the Fab Four, but the word applied well to a ...

“Twist and Shout” was co-written by Phil Medley and Bert Berns. The latter used the pseudonym Bert Russell. Berns also produced other hits such as The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and Van ...

As part of our series Blogging the Beatles, we’re featuring occasional excerpts from Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, a thrilling song-by-song history of the Beatles’ records which Slate’s ...

The Beatles re-entered the U.S. singles chart more than 15 years after they broke up, with the re-release of “Twist and Shout” for the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on this day in 1986. The 1963 ...

The dance craze known as the twist seemed to take over the music world for a few years. When Hank Ballard wrote “The Twist” and put it out as the B-side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” in 1959, it was ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. In the June 2013 issue of The Atlantic, Colin Fleming argued that 1963 ...

The Monkees were widely accused of ripping off The Beatles. "Ripping-off" was usually too strong a word for the inspiration that the Prefab Four took from the Fab Four, but the word applied well to a ...