This is a bit of a secret, so keep it under your hats, but apparently Paul McCartney is quite good at music.
That’s not because Paul McCartney was one of the principle songwriters in the world’s biggest-ever band, mind you. No, it’s because Paul McCartney has now been given an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Yale University. Just an honorary one, mind you – Paul McCartney isn’t that good at music.
Despite the token nature of the doctorate, Paul McCartney’s new title means that he now gets to fist-fight Dr Fox to determine who has the most pointlessly hokey medical-sounding title. Careful, Sir Paul – Foxy fights dirty, plus you’re really bloody old. The odds aren’t looking great.
If you’d fallen off a ladder and snapped your leg in 16 places, who would you want rushing to help you – an actual doctor or a wobbly-headed old man who looks more and more like your dead grandmother with every passing day and once wrote a song about some happy frogs?
Of course you’d want the froggy old man, because real doctors are inherently untrustworthy and there’s a chance that the old man would amputate your leg, marry you then divorce you a few months later and give you millions of quid. But only if he’s Paul McCartney, mind you – it’s less likely to happen if he’s the scary old granny tramp who sleeps outside Argos and scream-sings an improvised song called Happy Frogs (Crawling Out Of My Arse) at strangers all day.
Anyway, this is all just a long-winded way of saying that Paul McCartney is Yale University’s newest honorary doctor of music. The Associated Press reports:
Yale said the 65-year-old McCartney awakened a generation, giving a fresh sound to rock and roll and to rhythm and blues. Yale University President Richard Levin evoked some of the songwriter’s most memorable lines. “Here, there and everywhere,” Levin said, quoting a line from a Beatles song, “you have pushed the boundaries of the familiar to create new classics. We admire your musical genius and your generous support of worthy causes.”
Levin then added “Plus you aren’t dead like John Lennon. Seriously, he’d have got this title years ago if he was still alive.”
However, after the year that he’s had – what with his divorce from Heather Mills and his heart surgery and his multitude of alleged sexual liaisons with women young enough to be his daughter – Paul McCartney needed cheering up, and if it took an ego-boosting but ultimately worthless publicity stunt by an American university to do so, then so be it.
Plus, for all his awards and record sales and increasingly legendary status as a musician and songwriter, Paul McCartney never gained any formal qualifications for his music, but at least that can change now. Paul McCartney is now a genuine music graduate, which means he can now follow the path of millions of music graduates before him.
That’s so long as Superdrug will employ a Saturday boy his age, of course.
euclid says
So Mr. Yale gets to be all “I met one of the Beatles, woo hoo!”
And Sir Dr Paul gets a scrap of useless vellum (retail value
of either $.38 or $230,000, depending on circumstances) and
when SDPaul pegs maybe his ‘good friends’ at Yale get some
of that precious post-Mills fortune. Say 10 pounds or something.
That’s nice. After all, I did really like that song about the
walrus. Oh, wait. That was the other one. Ah well, there you are then.
Congrats, scabby. Careful when you wipe – vellum really hurts.
euclid says
oops. forgot to mention.
I do not believe that Sir Dr Paul knows how to read music.
So give him a fucking doctorate. Brilliant.