The genre Paul McCartney nailed that John Lennon never could: “He makes ’em up like a novelist”
It’s probably not a debate that really needs to be had, but if you had to categorise them one way or another, would you argue that The Beatles were more of a pop or rock band?
They arguably changed the face of both genres to a degree, and are cited as one of the most, if not the most, important influences for a plethora of artists who have fallen into either camp in the years since they were the dominant force within British music. To dismiss the influence of The Beatles is a true sign of contrarianism, and whether or not you’re personally a fan, erasing their importance is ignorance of the highest order.
Admittedly, they themselves were influenced by the rock and roll movement of the 1950s, and their earlier material was filled with all of the hallmarks of classic pop music fare – take, for example, any album from Please Please Me until Beatles For Sale, and you’ll primarily find yourself listening to a band who are indebted to pop music and constantly trying to remould it into something novel and exciting.
However, the further they developed in their career, the more varied they became, and the more experimental they were with their sound in a way that would have arguably been less expected of a pop outfit – Revolver covers far more ground than anything before it, while Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the band at their most wide-reaching and kaleidoscopic when it comes to fusing pop and rock with different styles.
Obviously, there are plenty of other acts that straddle both camps, such as The Beach Boys, with whom they were in constant competition during the middle part of the 1960s to see who could make the most expansive music of its kind.
But, to question whether they were competent writers of a ‘pop song’ is perhaps a little unusual, given how dominant they were in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, a place where pop has generally been favoured over rock.
In the eyes of John Lennon, there was only one true pop songwriter in the band, and it wasn’t him. Speaking in 1980 about his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney, he said that he was much more adept in this sphere than he was, and that he had a considerably different approach to his counterpart. This, according to Lennon, became most apparent around the release of Sgt Pepper’s, and that the song, ‘Lovely Rita’, is perhaps the best example of McCartney writing something that Lennon couldn’t possibly have mustered up.
“That’s Paul writing a pop song,” he argued. “He makes ’em up like a novelist. You hear lots of McCartney-influenced songs on the radio now. These stories about boring people doing boring things – being postmen and secretaries and writing home. I’m not interested in writing third-party songs. I like to write about me, ‘cuz I know me.”
For all of his criticisms of his bandmate over the years, for Lennon to proclaim that he was inferior to McCartney as a pop songwriter is a stunning admission to make, and it goes to show just how differently they’d begun to approach things towards the end of their careers. For Lennon, it was all about basic instinct and expressing something internal, but for McCartney, it was much more about connecting to a wider audience.
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