Paul McCartney greatest flaw as an artist ?

I don’t know what people have against happy, positive music. A song that is joyous can be just as impactful as one that is somber.

 

but its not just the phrasing, its the inflections and sometimes a change in accent, he sounds like a Liverpudlian doing an impression of an American doing an impression of McCartney, its cod Macca and i wish he just ceased to feel the need to do it although now i suspect he could not revert if he tried.

As i have said imho he now puts on a voice to sing most of his standards, a bit like a voice you put on when you are over egging an impression of somebody so everybody knows for sure who you are mimicking, and maybe thats the route of it ?

I'd love to hear him on a piano singing let it be just the way he sang it at Twickenham - even allowing for age changes in the voice cos i could handle those.

 

Ram seems only to have become over-rated relatively recently, before that it was regarded as just another duffer alongside so many Beatles solo duffers. However as with all Beatles duffers there are usually one or two or even three good or even great songs on them, but the rest is often sadly filler.

 

true but there is something in serious and sombre that touches the soul more i find, although i find this more true in classical music than other forms, although you could say the same about some Jazz, trad will never touch my soul for example, neither does much ( save some glorious exceptions ) of Mozart but thats going off topic and the subject of another thread.

 

This 100% my belief

 

Do you feel, then, that all music made in the context of conventional rock or pop (with drums, bass, guitar, etc) should always be laid down by a band live in the studio in order to preserve interplay? Or that the basic rhythm should be done live and then some overdubs later? Just curious...

 

No, it has always been pretty popular with fans. On its release it spent 24 weeks in the US top 10, to put this into perspective Paul's first album only spent 14 weeks, Imagine 12 weeks and All Things Must Pass 11 weeks. Albums don't sustain that type of longevity without some kind of decent word of mouth.

What you are thinking of is critics opinion of the album and critics only really get to review albums upon their release and re-release.

Critics reviewed it in '71 when Paul was hated by them, the man who broke up the Beatles, the 'suit' who was suing the other Beatles and the bully in the Let It Be film who bossed the others around. It seems clear reading some of the reviews of McCartney and Ram that they were reviewing Paul rather than his music with one reviewer famously mentioning "the only Beatle who has stagnated as a human being". Paul's early work was slammed because of who he was and what he represented, not so much his music. One of the great ironies of Ram is that the critics bemoaned that Paul was saying nothing in those songs yet Lennon found meaning in all of them and the same publications gladly covered Lennon's retorts to an that same album.

When Ram was reissued in 2012 the critics of the time did not have the same baggage with Paul as their predecessors did 30 years earlier, they also did not have the same hang ups about 'messages' and changing the world as the critics of the late 60's/ early 70's had. They viewed it as an album and it has had, critically speaking, universal acclaim.

What I would say, as someone born after the 70's, is that the two solo Beatle albums I was most surprised about was POB and Ram as due to the critical response I had read about them before I listened to them in the 90's was that one album was pretty disappointing and the other a revelation. When POB is reissued I wonder if its reviews will match the huge acclaim it was given in 1970.

 

Here's another potential classic that Paul ruined, this time it only takes 0:28 seconds for his un-thought cop-out "and I need love" rant with a funeral organ, which goes from being the chorus to becoming the verse and overtaking the entire song being repeated verbatim 5x for the rest of the track. Unbelievably stupid lyrics like "I need love
like a castle needs a tower, like a garden needs a flower" which my 5 year old could have written and of course the immortal "don't go chasing polar bears, some big friendly polar bear might want to take you home" which makes the song immediately skip-worthy and could never, ever be on any mix-CD or playlist I'd ever play in public for fear of people judging my musical taste level which is otherwise beyond criticism.

Again, to be a McCartney fan means to hide your collection and play them only when you're alone and to eat your gut out with regret over what might have been if the man took an extra hour to create some lyrics that actually meant something and were memorable for the right reasons. So many McCartney songs wasted needlessly by laziness.

 

Good post, we're on the same page.

Giles Martin should give Paul's solo output the "Love" treatment. He could take the good opening from "Somebody Who Cares" and marry it to a fragment of "Waterfalls" and through mashup make a great single song out of it. I'd bet the best McCartney album since Ram and BOTR could be created by taking all the tracks from 1977-1997 and cutting them to pieces, removing all the lousy lyrics, removing the out of place Linda harmonies, and putting them together again differently, like his dad just cut up bits of tape and come out with "Mr. Kite" on the other side.

 

Bingo. I've loved Ram from the first time I heard it as a kid in the 1980s, before I knew about any of the BS that went into the Beatles' split. That early 1970s period was the media and music press wanting to be on the good side of the "cool kids" (i.e. Lennon and Harrison) and piling on Paul. As you said, they more often than not savaged and vilified Paul the person more than the music. Granted, he wasn't perfect and Wild Life and McCartney do have many weak tracks. But look at Lennon's solo output...one stone cold classic (POB), a lush, garishly overproduced album with maybe only half of it consisting of actually good songs (Imagine), and a whole lot of dreck the remainder of the decade (Walls and Bridges being the lone bright spot). Harrison? The overrated ATMP (made up of mainly his leftover cuts written during the Beatles' career, also suffering from ghastly over-production), a couple of good but not great follow-ups (Material World, Dark Horse), and a whole lot of dreck (with the odd decent track or album mixed in). But Paul was the one who was a failure after the Beatles?

 

of course this is true of many artists of the 70's where you would not be seen dead with say an Abba Album, now with the removal of the baggage that came with the naff nature of pop that Abba were deemed to represent the group is regarded much more highly and rightly so.

However just because an album is popular it does not make it great, imho there are very few solo Beatles albums imho from the 70's that are truly great , Band on the Run, POB, Imagine, Ringo and maybe ATMP ( although i think that could lose a disc ) and i think Paul's output since 1989 is far stronger than most things he did 70-89 but thats just opinion of course and others will disagree i am sure.

 

Agreed.

Paul was the best Beatle and the best Solo Beatle too. But unfortunately, the latter isn't saying much.

 

Very true. None of them were as good alone as they were together, although Paul perhaps came the closest (and the most often, too). He had the most talent and the most work ethic...his problem was almost solely the quality control.

 

i both agree and disagree, i think ALL the solo Beatles suffered post Beatles, and although i do rate Imagine highly, aside from POB never made an album remotely as good again, ATMP is indeed over rated ( or more accurately over blown with one disc too many ) so as critical as i am about Paul's solo work before 1989 ( BOTR aside ) i am equally critical about the others as they were imho just as patchy.

However i guess there seems to be a difference of opinion between those of us who were around at the time and those who came to them much much later, however i do have to state again, i am not just down on 70's Macca, I am down on the others too.

 

Paul's biggest flaw is his overwhelming love for humanity.

 

Agree with you (see my post directly above yours which was about 30 seconds before you )

 

Why not?

If something is greatly appreciated by people and critics why can it not be considered great?

Ram [Deluxe Edition] by Paul & Linda McCartney

Or even the people from the Steve Hoffman forum

Fans Rank Beatles’ Group and Solo Albums

 

For me the deterioration of his once awesome voice,is the sad part..For me I think he has about done about 15 songs since the anthology project ,that I think ,are as good as anything he did in the 70's...they're spread over about 6 cd's in about a 15 year period...
which is probably another problem in itself....of course don't expect any of these songs being performed on his latest tour...the new songs that he plays are from his last cd New....

 

Harsh. (I'm trying to think of something to expand on this, but there isn't anything further to add.)

 

Don't know about that, he's a vegetarian but he has a pet dog so that sort of nullifies the effort.

 

This says so little about McCartney's music and so much about your own insecurities.

 

I'll respectfully disagree.

There are situations where you've got a co-worker in the car or you're hosting a party at your home and, sorry, the musical selections that get played are a direct reflection of you no different than the clothes you wear, the cleanliness of your dwelling, your choices of decor, the wine you serve, etc. I can put together a 5 hour "Best Of The 80's & 90's" playlist that I guarantee you my friends and acquaintances would appreciate both for the popular artists and the more avant-garde selections, by the end of the evening I'd have everyone coming up saying how much they enjoyed it.

And in that context, sorry, I can't have any McCartney tracks on it for their cringe-worthy moments mainly, and those that aren't humiliating just don't stand up to tracks of the era from the likes of Talking Heads, U2, REM, Lenny Kravitz, Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths, Prince, Squeeze, Genesis, Jellyfish, Oasis, Cake, Death Cab, Radiohead, and on and on. Name me a single McCartney song from the 80's and 90's that can hold a candle to the A and B tracks from bands like those. You can't. That's the issue. People judge Paul's solo works through jaded eyes, it's graded on a curve, it's given the hometown discount. Hey, I do that too, I'm a big fan, I've seen him live 3 times, but I do it privately, I'll listen to his inconsistent output with fond, rose-colored lenses, give his awful lyrics and questionable key changes the benefit of every doubt. But not in public. Can't subject co-workers and guests to Paul's 80's and 90's output.

 

I see (and sympathize with) both of your points. Fair or not, it's true that Paul's music a lot of the time gets judged harshly, but also think about how much is due to people who lived through the years where he's been critically savaged. In recent years, he's had a huge reevaluation by critics, and most importantly the younger generations discovering his music who have no knowledge of the feuds with Lennon or some of the cheese he dolloped out in the 1980s just like it for the (mostly) good music it is. My own kids (ages 7, 8, 11, 13) fall into this latter group. They love the Beatles and they also love solo Paul/Wings, and for the latter it's just because they think it's good music.

 

Not too many, just little inspiration on any of them. I wouldn't buy them.

 

What happened to the 70's? That's an entire decade that you're just ignoring.