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“Helter Skelter” et l'héritage polémique des années 1960 (trans. ‘Helter Skelter’ and Sixties Revisionism)

In 1968 critics found The Beatles’ song ‘Helter Skelter’ difficult to classify, and subsequent associations with cult murderers the Manson Family made it notorious. Overlooked for several years, early covers usually rendered it as hard rock; but soon the song would come to signify the ‘dark’ side of the decade when later, more generically diverse and deviant renditions would reinflect it as a critique of the sixties’ countercultural project. A musicological analysis shows how patterns of reclamation and contestation have made covers of the song a telling index of revisionist attitudes to the nineteen sixties and their legacies.