It took more than 50 years after their separation for an academic journal devoted exclusively to the Beatles to be created. Edited by Holly Tessler (University of Liverpool) and Paul Long (Monash University), the bi-annual and fully open access Journal of Beatles Studies opens a new era for this research area, focused on field diversification and multi-disciplinarity. Published in autumn 2022, the theme of the first issue – ‘Navigating and narrating the Beatles: establishing a research agenda for the twenty-first century’ – encourages a new approach on how and why to work on the Beatles today. The journal's aims are to facilitate the connection between Beatles scholars, and to include non-academic discussions, fully embracing the cultural weight of the Beatles’ legacy on a wider perspective. This first issue is divided into four main sections: the first is a presentation of the journal and its creators; the second gathers the academic articles devoted to the theme of the issue; there follows a non-academic section called ‘Across the Universe’, devoted to current artistic or cultural events related to the Beatles; the final section is dedicated to book and media reviews.
The first article (pp. 11–38) focuses on Dori Howard's personal experience of the Liverpool Hope University's MA entitled ‘The Beatles, Popular Music and Society’, a post-graduate degree created by Mike Brocken in 2009. Howard stresses the many valid different ways to study the Beatles, and her ‘autoethnographic’ (p. 12) perspective – based on her own narrative and several testimonies from other generations of students – tends to prove the legitimacy of this curriculum and how it has helped students to become complete Beatles professionals. In the second article (pp. 39–67), Clare Kinsella and Eleanor Peters show how the city of Liverpool has based its touristic appeal on the Beatles as a heritage object, through a process of idealisation based on the selectivity and subjectivity of nostalgia. They observe the regeneration of the city alongside the regeneration of the Beatles’ cultural heritage through music tourism, and identify different waves of this process, from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. This convincingly underlines the fact that Liverpool oriented its narrative to enhance the specific heritage of the Beatles’ early years, and both the city and the band benefited from this orientation. Steve Jones’ and Walter Podrazik's work (pp. 68–96) focuses on the Beatles’ effort to keep their chronological narrative under control, even after their separation as a band. If musicians are ‘unmoored from their creations’ (p. 69) when they die – physically or symbolically – the Beatles (now Paul McCartney ad Ringo Starr) managed to control the chronology of their music, to make it history more than a story: their own narrative is preserved as ‘fixed in time’ (p. 90). The last article, by Cass R. Sunstein, follows a more sociological and psychological path with the question ‘why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation?’ The author tends to show how the construction of success is led by the audience decisions, following, among other factors, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ theory. The ‘Across the Universe’ section (pp. 121–162) is a more diverse approach of the Beatles, blurring the border between the academic, the artistic and the fandom fields: Paul Long's contribution to this section deals with Lizzie Bravo's autobiography, about her experience as an Apple Scruff. However, the main interest of this section lies in the ‘80 at 80’ chapter, that celebrates Paul McCartney's 80th birthday by presenting the personal McCartney ‘dream set list’ of Holly Tessler, Paul Long, Christine Feldman-Barrett and Richard Mills, ranked according to different criteria for each academic. A Spotify playlist for every ‘dream set list’ is available via a QR code so that readers can (re)-discover the songs they have chosen.
While not every article will satisfy every reader, everyone will certainly discover original perspectives about the Beatles and their legacy, according to their own sensibility and interests. The online open access and the varied format of the Journal of Beatles Studies make it accessible to a wide and diverse audience, which contributes to a successful and fresh approach to Popular Music Studies. Indeed, the journal brings together a large range of fields of research that embody the diversity of Beatles Studies and bring new topics to the table. For example, Clare Kinsella's and Eleanor Peters’ research about Liverpool urbanicity and attractiveness gathers geographical, economic and memorial questions in a very interesting and original way. Furthermore, the Spotify playlist linked to the ‘80 at 80’ chapter is a playful and dynamic way to introduce sound access to complement the reading. This multimedia approach could be an excellent area to explore and develop in future issues. The only main regret would be that music-focused articles were completely absent from this issue. If the Beatles’ music has already been the subject of many works in the past decades (see Everett Reference Everett1999–2001; O'Grady Reference O'Grady1983; or more recently, Julien Reference Julien2008), there are a lot of new ways to explore their compositions as such. A subsequent issue that would reintroduce music analysis to the discussion would be a perfect way to complete the journal's approach. Finally, readers may not clearly understand the link between the different articles and the theme of the issue: the solution could be to precisely explain and highlight the connection between the different articles in the introduction and make them interact more throughout the issue.
This first issue of the Journal of Beatles Studies shows the importance of Beatles Studies as a major discipline in Popular Music Studies, in a new multidisciplinary research world. There is no doubt that it will impose itself as a central space of cohesion and connection between Beatles scholars and Beatles-related professionals.
