... we just loved our popular music: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc. And it wasn’t a case of ‘studying’ it. I think for us, we’d have felt it would have ruined it to study it. We wanted to make our own minds up just by listening to it. So our study was listening. But to be told – as I was years ago now – that The Beatles were in my kid’s history books? That was like ‘What?! Unbelievable, man!’ Can you imagine when we were at school, finding yourself in a history book?!I had to look up LIPA. From the Wikipedia disambiguation page, I cut right through the Liquid Isopropyl Alcohol, League for Independent Political Action, and the Long Island Power Authority, and saw that it's the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
So it’s very flattering, and I think it’s a kind of cool idea really, you know, like in LIPA. So yeah, it’s very flattering. At the same time, I don’t think that by studying popular music you can become a great popular musician; it may be that you use it to teach other people about the history, that’s all valuable. But to think that you can go to a college and come out like Bob Dylan? Someone like Bob Dylan, you can’t make. It was an early decision when we were thinking of our policies for LIPA, we said: ‘We want to train people to be all rounders. Give them as much info as we can. But you can’t tell them how to become a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon, because you know, nobody knows how that happens’.”
December 31, 2014
For Paul McCartney, "it’s ridiculous, and yet very flattering" that college students now take courses on the music of The Beatles.
"Ridiculous because we never studied anything..."
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19 comments:
Those who can't do..."study"?
Beethoven commented that everything he did outside of music was clumsy and stupid. It probably was. Wagner was in most respects a second rate human being, but he considered himself a kind of god and a cult surrounded himself and his works. Hayden had to wear the livery of a court servant. He found it humiliating........How to judge a gifted musician? Nowadays we like to think they have some great insight into life and wisdom rather than a knack for catchy chord progressions. In our era, rock musicians were overpaid and over praised. Now with file sharing and the Internet, they will no longer be able to exploit minimum wage teenagers. McCartney is the richest musician who ever lived. That's part of glamour. I wonder if in a hundred years he will be ranked higher than Jerome Kern?
Paul is exactly right in his assessment of The Beatles and their legacy.
The Beatles did more than "study" popular music. They actually learned to play it. Before they had written more than a couple of songs they had a repertoire of over 300 song (at least that's the number that has been documented.) They were a great cover band before they were a great original band. I think the one had a lot to do with the other. Actually doing it beats all the theoretical discussions in the world.
The biggest problem with these courses in popular music is how little musical knowledge is required. My daughter is a TA for a history of rock course, and they feel they have accomplished something if they can get most of the class to recognize a 12-bar blues. We were talking about the Indiana University course on Frank Zappa the other day. I was going to comment that if you didn't require some musical background, I didn't see how you could teach Zappa in more than a very shallow way. (Maybe I'm wrong. I'd be interested to see the approach.)
"MA in Popular Music".
'nuff said.
Are there any college courses that teach/produce greatness?
I think... not.
Well said, Sir Paul.
I get the impression he's putting the emphasis on "ridiculous," and the "flattered" part is to offset the possible ruffling of feathers of young Beatles fans taking these courses.
I am the walrus.
Intellectuals always have to intellectualize everything. Sometimes you just have to shut up and enjoy.
Laurence Sterne's writing style is best described as "learned wit," oft compred to the writing of Rabelais.
I'll go out on a limb and declare the Beatles to be a musical version of the complete opposite, and leave it at that.
I still find myself humming their melodies and singing their lyrics in my head much more often than I find myself quoting Sterne.
I think Paul and most of the commenters have really missed the point. You don't study Shakespeare because you intend to become a playwright, or history because you intend to be an historian. You do it to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of your world; the practical benefits are less obvious but quite real. And a good course about the Beatles or Dylan has plenty of material to provide students with useful knowledge about American and world history, politics, popular culture, how to write well, and how to be open to new ideas in music and other areas of life. I'm sure there are bad Beatles courses, but the basis for a good one is very rich.
William said...
Wagner was in most respects a second rate human being...
..but his music isn't as bad as it sounds.
I think the saying is, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." It's attributed to Mark Twain.
Hint: the courses are for the teachers, not the students. They have to teach something to get paid.
Harvard has the Hiphop Research Institute, which delves into the delights and enchantments of hiphop culture.
"I wonder if in a hundred years he will be ranked higher than Jerome Kern?"
Not higher but probably as high, and I'm a huge Kern fan. If the only two songs he had ever written were "All the Things You Are" and "The Way You Look Tonight" he'd still be one of the greatest songwriters ever. But the Beatles (really mostly L & M) wrote dozens of tuneful, memorable pop songs, a rare feat.
As for the general subject I think popular culture is not an unfit subject for academia. How much of it is worth a department or major, as opposed to just a course (or even a course), is another question.
For the sake of completeness, Kern "only" wrote the music for the above two songs. The lyrics (also excellent in both cases) were written by Oscar Hammerstein II (All the Things You Are) and Dorothy Fields (The Way You Look Tonight). I'm especially taken by Fields' lyrics on TWYLT.
I think Paul and most of the commenters have really missed the point. You don't study Shakespeare because you intend to become a playwright, or history because you intend to be an historian. You do it to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of your world; the practical benefits are less obvious but quite real. And a good course about the Beatles or Dylan has plenty of material to provide students with useful knowledge about American and world history, politics, popular culture, how to write well, and how to be open to new ideas in music and other areas of life. I'm sure there are bad Beatles courses, but the basis for a good one is very rich.
True, but there is no shortage of MFA programs, the attendees of which are nearly all aspiring artists and writers and the like. I have no issue with people paying instructors to teach craft, but the tuition seems rather outrageous, and why bother with a degree?
What McCartney and others are probably getting at is that instruction can only take you so far in creative endeavors, and with most arts you'd be far better off learning from other artists and just practicing your craft. MFAs seem to exist simply as a means of providing salaries to professors (who also received MFAs) so they can raise the next generation of revenue-producing MFA professors.
Come on! If the professor didn't teach this, what would he (or she) do for money?
Students pay tuition so people like the professor can teach courses that students can take when the students would be better off -- and learn more -- by doing things themselves. But then, of course, they would not get that oh-so-important "college credit".
I think that Eric Idle, in his wickedly funny Beatles spoof, "All You Need Is Cash," made the point very nicely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jdujUF0was
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