Without Lennon, McCartney has always been the musical embodiment of the feeling of having had too much dessert.
I like it. Catchy, but not really anything new (no pun intended) from Sir Paul. Hopefully the rest of the album will take a few more chances.
Oh, and a buddy of mine summed it up as, “this song is really hard to twerk to so an unlikely hit.”
McCartney had the least interesting career of the ex-Beatles, including Ringo.
The George Harrison documentary by Martin Scorsese was wonderful - there was a good guy with good friends who made a significant body of work while basically trying to have a decent enjoyable life and spend a lot of time working in the garden.
Maybe that’s true from the '80s onward, but if you think about it, Paul took a pretty radical leap in the early post-Beatles days of the 1970s. He started a new group from scratch–touring colleges and small venues while they were getting their feet wet–and even trying to give it a semblance of egalitarianism by having other sing lead on some songs. He didn’t even perform any Beatles tracks in concert for the first 6 years or so. By the time Wings broke up, though, yeah, he had pretty much settled into putting out a mediocre album every couple of years, peppered with some (few and far between) high points.
Without McCartney, Lennon has always sucked. Well, not quite, but even his best stuff pales in comparison to McCartney. I won’t say he “was” the Beatles, but if any single person had more to do with the quality of their music, it was Paul, who, despite being the sap and the butt of all critics’ jokes, has released more interesting music than any pop rocker in the short history of pop rockers.
If you want to hear something a little different that still has his classic vocal sound, his recent work with the Bloody Beetroots is worth a listen.
I heard that at one point they tried to hook up Paul with song writer Johnny Mercer (“Moon River”) but Mercer was inexplicably acting strange and a year later was dead of a brain tumor.
They let Yoko take the blame for breaking up the Beatles. But mostly it was because everyone in the band wanted Paul dead because he’d become a total control freak despite having no monopoly on talent. Which seems extra believable because of all the times I’ve seen that up close.
What both Lennon and McCartney were missing without the other was an editor — they both put out a lot of indifferent music, and some crud. But Lennon’s solo albums have tracks that stand up easily to all but the very best of his Beatles songs. Walls and Bridges in particular is pretty solid start to finish, and the singles (#9 Dream and Whatever Gets You Through the Night) really great.
I know this is an eternal argument, but one that I feel strongly about since the popular “music critic” POV is so one-sided. All those songs you mentioned are good songs- and yes, Lennon managed some great songs in his career. But in terms of percentages, he had a lot of filer, and lot of his good songs are just rip-offs of his previous songs. He had a formula for how he wrote pop tunes, even if it wasn’t conscious, that you can hear in “I Am the Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields” all the way through his solo stuff like “Imagine”. He wrote some great songs. His lyrics were definitely stronger than any other Beatle. But musically, he doesn’t even begin to approach what McCartney did and continues to do today as an old geezer.
McCartney on his own has rarely fallen into self-indulgent (although his classical stuff is pretty weak.) Every album he’s ever released has at least a few gems, like, real genuine pop brilliance gems- and many of his albums are solid all the way through. Not to mention he’s constantly trying new things, moving from genre to genre, and having a ton of fun in the process. Not only did no other Beatle ever do that, very few songwriters in pop history have ever done that. When he dies, you’ll see all the critics come out of the woodwork to kiss his dead ass. Until then, though, the myth about him being a joke will continue.
It’s been pulled by the record company? Someone gives you free, positive, publicity, and you DMCA it? Weird.
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