‘Big Boys Bickering’: Paul McCartney’s profanity-laden political attack
Paul McCartney is a lot more complicated than many will ever recognise. For every version of ‘Macca’ embraced by popular culture, there are at least a dozen examples pointing to the absolute contrary.
He’s a granny-music peddling throwback (look at ‘When I’m 64’ and ‘Honey Pie’), except he’s also a ferocious rocker (look at ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Jet’), but he’s also a gurning children’s entertainer (look at ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘the Frog Chorus’). So, how does that explain the boundary-pushing experimentalist who formed The Fireman and released ‘Temporary Secretary’?
If anything, the brush people are most comfortable tarring him with is that he was the “safe” Beatle. John was the firebrand activist, Ringo the sauced-up good-time boy and George the spiritualist radical. Paul was the Beatle you could take home to your mum, and today, he’s the knight of the realm wheeled out at “important events” to lead a big singalong of ‘Hey Jude’ at the end of the night.
He’s the guy who does ‘Silly Love Songs’ and nothing more. He’d rather shove his viola bass down his throat than give anyone a bad time, so he keeps the politics at the door and does the ol’ thumbs aloft. If you’ve cottoned onto the pattern artfully and subtly woven through this article, you may be able to see where I’m going with this. Or you’ve just clocked the headline; either’s fine.
How political does the songwriting of Paul McCartney get?
Even those who know Paul McCartney and his songwriting seem to feel that his political work was never as blunt and direct as Lennon’s. Except, as we’ve established with this article, it often was. Three guesses what ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, released the same year as the Irish Bloody Sunday, was about. ‘Blackbird’ was a pointed song supporting the Civil Rights movement, released the same year that Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
As on the nose as all of those songs are, they’ve got nothing on the track released as a B-Side to his 1992 single ‘Hope of Deliverance’, ‘Big Boys Bickering’, which is precisely what it sounds like on the surface. A raging critique of the “big boys” who run the world and don’t notice, through all their childish arguments, that it’s falling apart.
As far as critiques go, it’s not exactly Chuck D, but that’s often what you need, though. Not someone to artfully and delicately go through a list of policy choices that politicians have made and point out how they spit in the face of democracy; there’s a time and a place for music like that, obviously. Some days, you need something a little more basic.
Days like the day I’m writing this, when the UK Supreme Court ruled that transgender women are no longer protected by the Equality Act of 2010, thus legalising all efforts to discriminate against trans people. I’m not interested in discourse or debate right now because bigots pretty much always know they’re lying, deep down, and you can’t win an argument against someone who doesn’t care about the truth.
In the absence of any positive change happening, I’m interested more in screaming at the top of my lungs that these monsters are “fuckin’ it up for ev’ryone… fuckin’ it up in ev’ry way”. Fortunately, Paul McCartney has just the thing for that.
