Oh, Paul McCartney. Ol’ Macca. Groovy Sir Saccharine. Why you gotta be such an easy target with your harmlessness and general contentedness with your lot? The pootling through life, daring to appear at high profile events where you sing your biggest and best known songs and positively force massive crowds to sing along (perhaps at knifepoint, who knows? It’s been ten years since I saw him and things might have changed). ‘Na na na nanana naaaaaaing’ away like some kind of national treasure. Can’t you give us all a break from being so popular? Why do you never sing ‘From a Lover to a Friend’ instead? People seem bored with the classics. Your generic inoffensiveness is offending us, Macca. Why are you so happy? Why do you make everyone so angry?
The above views are not my own. I have many positive emotions firing in the direction of good old Paul. But my god, some people out there don’t like him. I just Googled ‘Paul McCartney is’ and second only to ‘Paul McCartney is dead’ (ah, that old chestnut) in the autocomplete drop down menu is ‘Paul McCartney is a knob.’ Clicking on that yields about 14 million results. The people who don’t like him really don’t like him; they despise and mock with a venom usually reserved for One Direction or whoever the pimply hyperboles of the day are. When they’re not disliking him, they’re unaware of his very existence—the plethora of ‘Who is Paul McCartney?’ tweets during his 2012 Grammys performance highlighted a very Gen Z level of musical ignorance and apathy.
I can understand why people aren’t fans. It’s the twee, isn’t it? There’s a danger in ageing popstars that they become stereotypes of their former selves and our collective consciences have created a mawkish, sagging, be-hair dyed, double-thumbs-up-flashing, ‘Spitting Images’ puppet version of the ‘nice’ one of The Beatles. And there’s nothing people hate more than ‘nice’. Truth is, you can write as many classic songs in your 20s as you like, but if you’re not still churning them out when you’re 70, people get disillusioned. And when your career made the remarkable musical journey from ‘Please Please Please Me’ to ‘Abbey Road’ from age 23–30, the next 40 years are going to be hard to fill.
Anyway, it’s been reported all over the place that McCartney has written a new album, some tracks of which were produced by Mark Ronson, who is saying that there’s a ‘post Bonde de Role, baile funk-Moombahton,’ which sounds interesting and reminiscent of the more adventurous side of McCartney. Experimentation and evolution have been hallmarks of his career over the decades: each new Beatles album is so clearly distinct from the other and Paul well-known for being the driving force behind the ever-changing Beatles sound, to the annoyance of the rest of the band and the eventual dissolution of the group. Consider The Fireman: an eclectic duo comprising McCartney and Youth, peddling improvised ambient electronica and experimental rock. What about Liverpool Oratorio, an autobiographical foray into classical music? Perhaps this article should be about all the really good, groundbreaking, unique songs McCartney has penned, in a misguided attempt to persuade naysayers that there’s more to him than ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude.’ But it’s not, because that can be written another day, and I want to write about the ‘nice’ and the ‘normal’ and the ‘cheesy’ and to celebrate/poke gentle fun at the things about Paul McCartney that makes him so detested by so many. Holla.
Here are Macca’s top five most unabashedly twee moments.
We All Stand Together
Aka 'The Frog Song' or 'The Frog Chorus.' This piece of bellybutton lint was written for the animated kids' film 'Rupert and the Frog Song,' for which McCartney also voiced Rupert, because he's Paul McCartney and why not?
Sample lyric: 'Play the game, fight the fight / but what's the point on a beautiful night? / Arm in arm, hand in hand / we all stand together.'
When I’m 64
An overly sentimental view of old age, originally written by a 16-year-old McCartney, but featured on 1967's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. The preppy, upbeat tune is McCartney set to music and lends itself perfectly to a brass band. In reality, when McCartney was 64, he was recently separated from his second wife, which just makes the whole idealistic dreaminess of the song seem a bit sad.
Sample lyric: 'I could be handy mending a fuse / when your lights have gone / you could knit a sweater by the fireside / Sunday mornings go for a ride.'
My Love
My friend's mum once described this song as 'like wading through molasses,' summing up the 'My Love' experience in a way nobody has yet bettered. Monica and Chandler from Friends walked down the aisle to an instrumental version, saying everything you need to know about the kind of person who finds this in any way more genuinely moving than Wings' far more raw and honest 'Maybe I'm Amazed.'
Sample lyric: 'And when I go away / I know my heart can stay with my love / it's understood / it's in the hands of my love / and my love does it good.'
Wonderful Christmastime
You'd think it would be hard to stand out in the twee stakes at Christmas, but this song is candy cane, diabetes-inducing, post sugar high, sickeningly sweet. It's particularly fun to compare this to John Lennon's Christmas offering, 'Happy Xmas (War is Over),' if you ever wanted to compare the two men's utterly opposing world views.
Sample lyric: 'The mood is right / the spirit's up / we're here tonight / and that's enough / simply having a wonderful Christmas time.'
Silly Love Songs
It's hard to imagine being as famous as McCartney and having your entire musical backlog as equally lauded/hated without becoming fairly self-aware. 'Silly Love Songs' from 1975 album Wings at the Speed of Sound is a tongue in cheek response to his critics, which invites listeners to join in mutual awareness that a harmless, throwaway ditty isn't the end of the world.
Sample lyric: 'You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs / but I look around me and I see it isn't so / some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs / and what's wrong with that?'
