Paul McCartney greatest flaw as an artist ?

I chose:
"6-none of these dumb poll choices his problem is"
Was this sentence made by Yoda?

His 'problem' for decades is the fact that he is, and always will be Paul McCartney. He's they guy who sung "'Till There Was You" and wrote musical-, vaudeville- and country-tunes in the rock 'n roll era. He takes silly tunes like Obla-Di-Obla-Da and Maxwell's Silver Hammer just as serious as Hey Jude and Helter Skelter. If you haven't gotten used to his uneven albums or his strange choices musically by now you should consider never to listen to a McCartney-album again. For every 'Every Night' there's a "Spies Like Us"; it's the way he works for decades now!
As far has I am concerned he can pretty well do what he likes; even his new album (will come out in 2019) will be one or two great tracks, some good ones and three or four mediocre half-baked ditties. I love that!
So for me it's option 6a:
"Paul McCartney has no problems"

 

Sure looks like a McCartney bashing thread

 

Lost direction in the 80's. Desperate superstar collaborations, tuneless motion picture songs, cutesy childrens tunes, and one of the worst movies ever made. Lost credibility as a serious rock artist, and core fanbase deserted him - they simply stopped buying new product. By the time he got his mojo back, it didn't matter - despite a massive world tour, his solid new album Flowers in the Dirt stiffed on the Billboard charts. To this day, even though people will fill arenas to hear his 60's hit parade, he struggles to sell new releases no matter how good they are (and some of them are very, very good).

 

May be because if he wasn’t an ex-Beatles, and is judged only by his solo output, such inconsistency could get him out of the business long time ago?

 

But he IS an”ex-Beatles” as you put it, and it’s impossible to judge him by ‘modern’ standards.
A lot of folks have contempt for that I guess.

 

So....what’s YOUR greatest flaw as an artist?

 

6-none of these dumb poll choices his problem is

 

I chose option 6 - I agree with Yoda

 

Yes, I agree, but as I understand the OP question, the idea is what eventually Paul McCartney could have done (or avoid) as a solo artist, in order to create more consistent body of work. My personal opinion is that he was/is able to achieve even better results as a solo artist if he was able to really concentrate of his strengths, creating well crafted and accomplished song, rather than feel free to do all kinds of half-baked experiments and underdeveloped ideas. Saying all this, on the other hand, there's some charm in all this, because this well deserved freedom to do whatever he wants, and not to be very critical to release it as a final product, gives to his real fans an opportunity to enjoy the creative process and to feel him more as a human being rather than flawless hit making machine. But for the general audience many of his solo creations are not relevant or interesting, so to some extent this could be regarded as a "flaw".

 

15 - all of the above, plus: that gross thing he does with his eyebrow.

 

How can he be all of the above? See 6 & 7.

 

Isn't Paul McCartney pretty much the most successful musician of the 20th century? Seems greedy to point out areas were he could have been even more successful, he is after all still human.

 

His only problem is being alive. If he'd died like the freaks said he did, then no doubt by now you'd have had this grand re-assessment of even his worserer solo work and he'd have had all sorts of box-set reissues, Legion of Honour awards, Legend things and god knows how many tribute shows and albums with top celebrities queuing up to cover his songs and that. As it is, he's doomed to languish in Googled Obscurity which is a thing that happens if you search someone and come up with like the paltry amount of entries Macca has.

 

Pretty sure he does not consider that a problem.

 

I bet if you asked him he'd say that being a shadow of his former critical appraisal about 50 years ago has been an unending nightmare.
There's probably not a single morning when he doesn't look in the mirror and see the words 'NOT AS GOOD AS THE BEATLES' written backwards on his forehead.
I really feel for the guy

 

I think he's had three main problems:

Firstly, he finds composing melody too easy. It means that he can get by without the need to sweat over the writing.

Secondly, he became very rich very young, which means that he really doesn't need to sweat over anything if he doesn't want to.

Thirdly, I think he's received some incredibly mixed messages from the record buying public/music critics over the years. He writes something very personal like, say, Press, and it gets slammed. He writes something trite like, say, Hello Goodbye and it spends 7 weeks at number one. He gets told that We All Stand Together is utterly embarrassing but it gets bought by the lorry load and only gets held off the #1 spot by the biggest selling single of all time (up to that point) and the biggest selling #2 single of all time.

I can see that it becomes very very difficult for him to tell which songs are the good 'uns and which ones aren't.

Take the Memory Almost Full album: Dance Tonight makes #18 in the singles chart, yet Ever Present Past (which has, to my ears, a much more contemporary sound and far better lyrics) stalls way outside the Top 50.

The early 70's must have been very tough for him. He recorded an album of off-the-cuff material (McCartney) and was criticised for the low production values and incompleteness; he works his butt off to produce something full of melody, arrangement and production (Ram) and it gets slammed. What on earth was he supposed to do?

I selected option 1 from the list because, of all his traits, his lyrical mis-steps are the ones I find most frustrating: bad lyrics are much easier to criticise than melody but are also easiest to avoid.

 

Holy God. I was about to object to this statement in its entirety when I realised it's 100% factually correct!
Press IS a personal song, mainly about stress and that while Hello Goodbye is about nothing much and then some.
However, I suspect that We All Stand Together was in support of the miners strike and the Greenham Common women.
Certainly that's what happens if you follow the money

 

An awesome song, the Beatles are stronger for it being part of their catalogue. There is nothing wrong with songs that make people happy, and Hello Goodbye certainly does that. It is one of the most infectious songs of all time.

What is the problem with making a children's song that pleased children? Why can an artist not experiment with different genres? Why should he only concentrate on pleasing people who take music a little too seriously?

 

6. None of these dumb poll choices, his problem is . . . having outlived John

 

abstain

 

Inventing characters or voices that don't ring true. I am simply not interested in fictional characters bar the occasional Eleanor Rigby which is obviously genius albeit still rooted in reality. If he leans on this too much I think the work suffers. I much prefer him singing from the first person, or at least a character he feels close enough to to sing from the first person. I suppose another way of putting this is, when he doesn't write from the heart.

Speaking mainly Beatles era, and I suppose this style of writing was always going to come off badly against the harder or more clever Lennon admissions, voices and revelations.

 

I can't see an option that matches my opinion.

Macca needs better quality control. He says he loves it when people such as Elvis Costello are forthright, and perhaps EC was at some of the songs PM wrote with EC were a return to form. But, what I've read in interviews with other people who've worked with him is that PM is confident that he knows what is right, being one of the greatest pop/rock people ever. But, he needs better quality control, and often that comes from bandmates or others that PM might interact with as an equal. Who could be this person?

 

Too prolific. Should have steeped back, taken a break, spent more time objectively looking at his own work.

Honestly, I also think all the incredibly heavy marijuana use took a toll.

 

It has only come off badly in this sense in the world of swaggering male music journalists living vicariously through Lennon's 'Me Me Me. Everything I think is art even when it's about my toilet roll' type-a-thing.
Of course, Lennon is just a poster-boy for this tendency to require that, after about 1970, everything uttered by someone with long hair on a record should 'Stick it to the man'.
McCartney, being generally uninterested in 'The Man' or swaggering male music journos just gets on with whatever comes down from his muse.
Not that he was unaffected by their opinions and the takeup of those opinions but those record sales sho musta been a comfort.

 

?! Not a tangent I expected, I am selfish and seek only to represent my own view, as that's all I can do honestly at any rate

True as it may be I don't know how it covers how, say, Molly and Desmond come off as fairly inconsequential to the message of the song they're in. Ditto Rocky Raccoon... Decent pastiche, but doesn't touch me emotionally.

Lennon had his misses as well, good character writing is so hard to do. For good, read meaningful, relatable. I simply can't see why someone would say the likes of Ob la Di, Maxwell, Rocky Raccoon, Penny Lane, Lovely Rita etc. are better than Yesterday, Long and Winding Road, Let it Be, For No One.

Sometimes he can't even compete with himself! I suppose to use a point you made well, at least I think he went for all these songs honestly - I'm picking the weaknesses of a genius and I admire him going where he wanted to.

Plus it's gonna be subjective. I just see a correlation between this factor affecting what really, really works... And what merely only really works