The artists Paul McCartney wanted to be remembered like: “I’d be very happy”
None of The Beatles were trying to be snobs when they first started writing music. If it sounded good to them, it was more than worth working on whenever they walked into Abbey Road Studios, which explains why some of their experiments worked so well on albums like Revolver and Sgt Peppers. But as strange and eclectic as their material got, you could always expect Paul McCartney to come through with the kind of melody that would leave fans singing along for the rest of the day.
While John Lennon and Macca were always written up as polar opposites in many respects, it’s not like they couldn’t pull from each other when they wanted to. Lennon always claimed to be the most lyrical Beatle, but songs like ‘Julia’ have beautiful melodies, and even McCartney has a few times when he can throw in some intense messages into his tunes like on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and countless solo songs. But it’s not like those stereotypes don’t exist for a reason, either.
From day one, McCartney was moved by the music more than anything else, and when he first got started in the Quarrymen, his goal was to entertain as much as he could whenever he got behind the fretboard and sat down at the piano. Making people happy was a part of his DNA, but that also led to him taking a few too many steps in the wrong direction in Lennon’s eyes.
‘The Intellectual Beatle’ wanted to wake people up whenever he sang his songs, and while it did lead to some of his tunes sounding phenomenal, it could get pretty abrasive for more than a few songs. Lennon was looking to be a revolutionary who happened to have a guitar in his hand, but if McCartney was thought of as an entertainer for the rest of his life, he would have been completely fine with that.
Even when talking about the more lighthearted umbers he would write during the band’s lifetime, Macca said that he wanted to get into the same league as the crooners that came before him, saying, “If I’d have to choose anyone, I’d be very happy to be thought of as a channeller of Nat King Cole or Fats [Waller] or Fred [Astaire]. I don’t think there’s any denying the idea of being a medium. I definitely dreamt ‘Yesterday’, so I’m sure I’ve channelled many other songs.”
Then again, those songs are half the reason why some people have a problem with McCartney’s music. The ‘granny shit’ portion of his catalogue isn’t for everyone, and when listening to The Beatles later, even other legends like Kurt Cobain couldn’t help but take a few potshots at McCartney for being embarrassingly sentimental when it came time to write his tunes.
But is there anything wrong with being sentimental? Sure, many of McCartney’s songs were written and intended to be listened to by everyone, but just because an artist writes songs that the straight media approves of doesn’t make them bad, especially when they boast melodies as great as ‘Silly Love Songs’ and ‘My Love’.
So if McCartney wanted to go down in history in the same vein as people like Cole and Astaire, there were far worse ways to be remembered. If anything, this was the kind of music that made people forget about their problems for a while, and what better way to bring joy into the world than to make people forget about the world’s ugliness for a while?
