I always hated when you’d ask someone what their degree was in and they’d say something like “procrastination” or “drinking”. Oh, haha, good joke, you are HILARIOUS. But imagine if you asked someone what they got their Master’s in and the response was “The Beatles”–and they weren’t making lame attempts at wit! That’s awesome! No seriously, you can get a Master’s Degree in “The Beatles, Popular Music and Society” at Liverpool Hope University in England. Ummm. Sign me up!
Here is the AP story:
LONDON — The city of Liverpool already has a Beatles museum and its airport is named after John Lennon. Now a local university says it rolling out a graduate program entirely devoted to the Fab Four.
Liverpool Hope University said Tuesday that its new master’s program, “The Beatles, Popular Music and Society,” would give students the opportunity to analyze music and culture through the band’s work.
“There have been over 8,000 books about the Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address,” said Mike Brocken, who is directing the program at the university, which is in the band’s hometown in northwestern England.
Brocken said students would be expected to study the Beatles’ songs, stardom, hometown and cultural impact through four 12-week courses and a dissertation.
Brocken said studying the band was really a way of examining society as a whole.
“If popular music is about anything, it’s about people,” he said. “If we look at popular culture, it simply provides us with a very complex mirror of ourselves.”
I think I just found the answer to the quarter life crisis.
Paul McCartney, no joke, was my first celebrity crush. Of course, I was smitten with the young Paul McCartney. I was also devasted when I realized the pictures were in black and white because they were taken 40 years earlier. Wahhhhhh.
Imagine the classes you could take! Please leave comments with your wittiest/best effort Beatles inspired class name. (I won’t judge you as long as it’s not like “Drinking and Procrastinating to the Beatles!” But–side story– I did, in fact, have a Beatles pregame once. Or thrice.)
[Posted by Kathleen]
six words to change the world. 