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by oxlongm_Archive
Not crap, but I'll go off on a tangent here, and the subject of my tangent is this: People who really hate Paul McCartney are invariably assholes. There are no exceptions.
I haven't heard him say a whole lot of immodest or arrogant things. But let's imagine that you wrote and performed a song forty years ago. It was all over the radio then and everyone bought the record, and even now tens of millions of people still turn the radio up when it comes on, and stay in the driveway after the car is turned off just so they can hear the whole thing. Sure, they're really remembering a high-school girlfriend or their first dog or something, but still, it's your song that evokes the memories and not someone else's. They also play the song for their kids, who inexplicably buy the album in huge numbers forty years after it's released. And they seem to love it, because it's impossible to find copies in used CD bins. Lately, your fans' kids have been playing your album for their own kids.
It would be forgivable, even inevitable, for you to develop a big head if you had made a record like this. Paul McCartney has done it at least twenty times.
And still, he didn't dump his wife, seems to have raised nice kids, didn't leave his home country to save a hundred million or so in taxes, and basically seems like an approachable goofball of a guy with maybe one-tenth the jaded rock-star attitude of Mick Jagger or David Bowie.
Yeah, the solo stuff hasn't been so good. And the vegetarian proselytizing gets old faster than unrefrigerated pork, and I really like to think that if Paul McCartney had foreseen all of the horrible self-indulgent dreck that Sgt. Pepper's would make rock bands believe they had a right to release, he would have burned the master tapes. But still... hatred of Paul McCartney is less an opinion than a symptom. A symptom of being an asshole.