The song Paul McCartney used to defy his critics: “What’s wrong with that?”
While Paul McCartney’s place in the musical canon is now very much confirmed, he’s an artist who arrived there after enduring years of critique and commentary. Years of pushing and pulling at pop music’s sonic capabilities are ultimately what has cemented his legend retrospectively, but it would be foolish to think that his pop music has escaped all forms of criticism.
While McCartney experimented with an ever-progressive songwriting style over the years, his signature penchant for penning sweet and idyllic lovesongs has seemingly always been a constant in his critical adulation.
‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Arrow Through Me’, and ‘My Love’ are three examples of McCartney’s ability to weave lyrics of adoration and devotion into tender and groovy soundscapes. And it’s a blueprint followed by modern artists world over – Mac Demarco even went as far as calling the track dedicated to his girlfriend, ‘K’, as a “a ’lil sweet Paul McCartney tune for her”. But in McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, a podcast in which McCartney talks to poet Paul Muldoon, he revealed that the romantic predisposition of his songs hasn’t always been a source of praise.
During the episode, Muldoon explained that “harder-boiled” music fans and critics often perceive McCartney’s romantic songs as being “sentimental”, “schmaltzy” and “lacking in sophistication”. It was a position McCartney was quick to refute, as he responded: “I think a lot of people who are cynical about it, haven’t been lucky enough to feel it. You often wonder what the critic who damns it looks like, what his or her life looks like.”
The songwriter continued: “I often want to get a photograph of them and go, ‘Oh it’s him, of course, I’m not listening to him.’ Because you kind of outlive them, anyway. They come and go”. But while critics lacking a real-life perspective of love is one thing, accusing McCartney’s sunny songwriting style as being a by-product of artifice is another. Muldoon later pointed out that some critics within the crowd were more disappointed with what they perceived as an “over-earnest” attempt to depict Hollywood-esque feelings of “love… schmaltz and musical grandeur”.
For McCartney, perhaps the greatest response method to those accusations was in the medium of song. Wings’ 1976 hit ‘Silly Love Songs’ may seem lustfully McCartney-esque on the surface, but what lay beneath was a grinning response to criticisms of artifice.
In the track, declarations of “I love you” sit above a flurrying track of piano and saxophone melodies that to the untrained listener, would be an appropriate soundtrack to dewy-eyed cuddling. But as the title suggests, it was a tongue-in-cheek response to the aforementioned criticisms: “I was being accused of just writing silly love songs and was in danger of starting to buy into this idea that you should just be a bit tougher and more worldly,” he told Muldoon.
Rather than be deterred, McCartney doubled-down: “But then I realised that’s exactly what love is – it’s worldly. So this idea came to me, where you would think that people had had enough, then I look around me and see it isn’t so. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs… what’s wrong with that?”.
As one-half of music’s most iconic songwriting duo, alongside John Lennon, whose more twisted and brooding outlook on the world gave way to a more socially complex songwriting style, McCartney became a musical antidote to whatever social struggles existed at that time. Thereafter, his take on love, laughter and all things between was sought after, for we always knew that the melodic landscape it lived on would at least fill the void of nuanced interest.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.