“For me it’s ridiculous, and yet very flattering,” Paul McCartney replied when asked about the Beatles being taught in schools across the United States and England in 2014. “‘Ridiculous’ because we never studied anything, 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!’”
It turns out that the Beatles are in more than just history books. English departments study their lyrics as poetry, while music schools dissect their songs in the same manner as the compositions of Beethoven and Mozart. Historians have found that an analysis of Beatle albums offers unique insights into the years in which they were recorded. Sociologists, meanwhile, employ a comparable approach, using the Beatles to explore the overall culture of the Sixties and not just from a musical perspective.
Because John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were born and raised in the northern England seaport of Liverpool, the studying of the Beatles offers distinctive opportunities for universities in that particular region. Liverpool not only played an important role in the early development of the Beatles but continued to serve as inspiration for such songs as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” after the Beatles themselves relocated to London.
As a result, Liverpool Hope University developed an entire program around the Beatles in 2009 – The Beatles, Popular Music & Society – that explores “the role of music in the construction of regional identities, concepts of authenticity, aesthetics, meaning, value, performance, and the use of popular music as a discursive evocation of place.”
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and halfway across the United States, Punch Shaw launched his own Beatles’ course, The Beatles: The Band, Their Music and Their Times, at Texas Christian University. “Beatles records are significant cultural documents that deserve to be part of our shared cultural knowledge, like Hemingway novels or Picasso paintings,” he wrote in the 2016 anthology, New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today. In addition to crafting his class as an introduction to the Beatles in the same way as a “Great Books” course, Shaw’s class also offered a socio-political overview of the 1960s through their music.
Although the Beatles didn’t write overtly political songs in the manner of Bob Dylan at the launch of his career, there are enough allusions and subtext within both their music and personal evolution for a general exploration of the decade nonetheless.
The first American Beatles album – With the Beatles – was released on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, for instance, allowing for an examination of that tragic event and its aftermath. During their tours of the United States in 1964, 1965, and 1966, the Beatles refused to perform in segregated Southern concert halls, thus tying the Civil Rights Movement into their narrative. Songs like “All You Need Is Love,” meanwhile, take on different meanings when listened through the prism of the Cold War and growing military conflict in Vietnam.
Gordon Thompson at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, began teaching his course on the Beatles in the late 1990s. Much like the Beatles themselves during the Sixties, the class expanded over the next decade to become even bigger than initially anticipated.
Thompson details that evolution in another collection of essays, Teaching the Beatles, released in 2020. As a professor in the Department of Music, Thompson understood the role of ethnomusicology in teaching – the discipline combines the traditional study of music by filtering it through the social and cultural lenses that led to its creation – but also found unique ways to explore the Beatles from an education standpoint.
His first seminar, for example, featured an examination of various Beatle biographies, enabling students to compare multiple histories of the band and explore how the same story could be told differently depending on the author, their primary focus, and the sources utilized.
When the tragic events of 9/11 occurred four years later – coupled with George Harrison passing away shortly thereafter – students at Skidmore College in need of an uplifting distraction approached Gordon Thompson about putting on a Beatles concert. The resulting performance was unofficial, with no promotion other than word-of-mouth, and the only date available was a “study day” between the end of classes and beginning of finals.
The success of the December 15, 2001, performance led to even more students clamoring for a second concert the following year. This time Thompson challenged his music students to go beyond their favorite Beatle songs and learn new ones instead.
Initially these annual excursions were nicknamed “Skidmore Beatlemania,” but later evolved into “Beatlemore Skidmania” to distinguish them from the Broadway musical Beatlemania. In 2010, Beatlemore Skidmania added a fundraising component for local charities. This likewise offered educational opportunities, teaching students how to operate a non-profit. The introduction of merchandise – from T-shirts to posters commemorating each performance – added “design” and “business” elements to the learning experience as well.
Teaching the Beatles features other essays exploring the ways that the Beatles are used in colleges and universities. The wealth of demo recordings officially released by the Beatles and video footage recorded for the Let It Be film, for instance, offers a unique way of exploring the art of songwriting – students can both hear and see John Lennon and Paul McCartney take the smallest seed of an idea, fully develop it, and then record the resulting song in its completed form.
Political science professor Robert Hislope at Union College in Schenectady, New York, meanwhile, uses the Beatles to explore the question that Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli raised in his political treatise The Prince – “Is it better to be loved than to be feared, or the contrary?” The concept of “love” is a defining feature of the Beatles, from the simplistic romantic yearnings of their first hit song “Love Me Do” to the last lines on Abbey Road, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”
In Hislope’s mind, the Beatles and Machiavelli are the perfect yin and yang, leading to an analysis of love as defined by the former and the fear advocated by the latter.
The Beatles left an indelible mark on not only the music of the 1960s but the history of the times as well. They were a genuine cultural phenomenon, serving as trendsetters, pop philosophers, and pied pipers for an entire generation. Their music has garnered comparisons to classical compositions of the past, while many of their lyrics are revered on the level of poetry.
Studying the Beatles is thus more than studying music – and the scope and shear number of college courses offered both in the United States and around the world stand as a testament to that fact.
Anthony Letizia