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."
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On the Net:
Liverpool Hope University: http://www.hope.ac.uk/
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