- Allen Ginsberg: “Portland Coliseum” (1965) - June 20, 2022
- From @meaigs: “Misogyny Aimed At Paul McCartney” - June 10, 2022
- From Faith Current: The Subversive Madness of Sgt. Pepper - June 6, 2022
Frequent commenter @meaigs recently expressed some thoughts about sexual politics and public perception of Paul McCartney, which I asked her to expand into a post. I hope you find her insights as interesting as I did; for me, some things snapped into place that had never made much sense.—MG
Paul, facing the Press about LSD, 1967
Paul McCartney is a man who gets treated as though he were a woman, and that is weird and bad. Not because being a woman is bad, but because women get treated badly.
Before watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back I was a casual Beatles fan. I didn’t have strong preconceived notions about the band members, their interactions, or their breakup. I hadn’t heard the claim that John was A Great Artist trying to escape the stifling environment of The Beatles, and that Paul was a showbiz-besotted control-freak who drove everyone crazy and wrecked the dream. The Beatles were simply a band I quite liked. I was about to start a wild ride.
From the moment Paul walks into his first scene he exudes masculinity. Not the fragile masculinity of puffed chests and barked orders. Something much more subtle and deep. It’s partly the luxurious beard, but it’s mostly the way he moves. “Swagger” is the wrong word, that would imply an attempt to display, to be seen. Maybe “saunter” is better. He comfortably strolls in, swings his coat aside, and grabs his guitar.
I was immediately struck by his easy physicality. That first time watching, as I saw him swing and climb, nonchalantly hopping over chairs and scaling walls, all I could think of was how male it was, but like, in a hot way.
I’m a bisexual woman, but I rarely find men attractive. I joke with my husband: “I’m straight for you and Paul McCartney.” All this to say that gender and sexuality were live issues for me as I began my descent into Pepperland. I was surprised to find myself attracted to Paul, and alert to his gender presentation. There was nothing in Get Back that hinted to me that Paul was womanly, or might suffer for being perceived that way. But then I expanded my reading.
The first word that caught my eye was “bossy”.
It’s impossible to read about the Beatles for any length of time without seeing that label applied to Paul. But it’s such a female-coded word, with connotations of power usurped (rather than legitimate). Once you notice that linguistic sleight-of-hand, you start seeing it everywhere: Paul is “pretty,” “cute,” “motherly.” He is “jilted,” “vacuous,” “a diva,” even “shrill.”
Why would this patriarchal language of female oppression be applied to Paul? If he were stereotypically effeminate this would be a familiar story; sadly no-one would be shocked to see him treated as inferior for his womanliness. The effect I want to highlight is not so obvious, but it is pervasive. (That said, you should try Googling “immovable heterosexuality”).
Let’s be honest: as much as I was originally struck by Paul’s masculinity, there is something ambiguously feminine about him. I can’t quite put my finger on it, maybe it’s the Disney Princess eyes, or the lips so often described as cherubic. It comes and goes, sometimes he couldn’t be more masculine, and sometimes facial hair makes him look like a woman in drag. His vocal range goes considerably higher (and considerably lower) than mine. My point is he doesn’t come across as an effeminate man, but he does sometimes trigger a “that is a woman” response in whatever part of the brain is desperate to categorize people in those terms.
No doubt Paul would put it down to being a Gemini.
Maybe what I’m getting at is that “effeminate” isn’t the same thing as “feminine.” Effeminate refers to a (much maligned) set of male behaviors that have been associated with femaleness, homosexuality, and by all-too-predictable-extension, weakness. But they’re not actually female behaviors and characteristics, they’re male.
Whatever signals Paul is giving off (be it facial structure or micro-expressions or something else), they are more like actual female signals than effeminate male signals. My contention is that the subtlety of this effect has meant that he’s been unconsciously categorized as a woman by many people who treat him with misogyny, but not necessarily homophobia.
I am by no means the first person to notice this. It’s a common theme on tumblr (where the demographic skews female, so familiarity with the mechanisms of misogyny is high).
One of the ways this manifests is how often Paul is considered an unreliable witness. In several ancient law codes the testimony of women was explicitly invalid (or multiple women’s testimony was required to be equivalent to one man’s). This was a codification of an existing prejudice, one that continues to this day. Women are not believed, especially when they are speaking alone (I won’t go into loads of examples, but Bill Cosby comes to mind). I haven’t seen anything to suggest Paul is particularly prone to lying. He’s conservative with what he reveals for sure, and his memory is about what you’d expect for an 80-year-old with a history of drug abuse, but he’s certainly no less reliable a witness than Ringo. John, who codes male, freely admitted to making things up, but it is Paul who consistently gets accused of “rewriting history.”
For example: many people discount Paul’s story of his inspiration for the song “Blackbird.” Some time in the early 2000s he started recounting that it was originally about the Civil Rights movement in the US. Rather than assuming that Paul had simply never publicly mentioned it before, many people accused him of making it up. That Paul has no need to bolster his credibility as a supporter of African-Americans should be obvious to anyone who’s at all familiar with Beatles history, but there has been a lot of sneering and eye-rolling about this claim. Well, there’s a recording from 1968 in which Paul tells Donovan:
“I played it for Diana Ross the other day. She took offense [laughing]. Not really [smiling] [Donovan laughs]. I did mean it like that originally! I’d just sort of read something in the paper about riots and that.”
This evidence might convince the eye-rollers that he’s telling the truth in this specific instance, but I can guarantee that it won’t change their minds about how believable he is in general. Their problem is not what he says, but who is saying it.
As for rewriting history:
“Revisionism is a part of historiography, and simply because a narrative has been revised does not mean that the new, revised version is incorrect.” – Erin Torkelson Weber, The Beatles and the Historians
We know that John “I said that but I lied” Lennon was very successful in establishing a particular narrative about the breakup of the Beatles. Despite the cognitive dissonance required to believe everything John said, some people seem determined to try. Why shouldn’t Paul be given room to correct the record as he sees fit?
This phenomenon—Paul being interpreted as a woman—might be key to why Allen Klein so completely misread and “mishandled” Paul. I think he had bought into the idea that Paul was feminine and weak. He tried to bully Paul, calling him The Reluctant Virgin (which is not only female-coded, but sexually threatening), expecting him to be cowed. Which is not to say that no woman could have stood up to Klein the way that Paul did, rather that Klein was the kind of man who thought no woman would.
It’s also an undercurrent in the PR campaign against Paul that started in the early 1970s, and is still haunting him. I’m not old enough to have read hit pieces about “granny music,” and “insipid lyrics” when they were written, but they all soaked into the wider cultural understanding of Paul as an artist. Under that narrative John is lauded for his honesty in expressing anger and regret, but Paul is soft and weak for singing about domestic bliss and for empathizing with women, for suggesting that music is for grannies too (including grannies who like “Check My Machine”).
Can we take a moment to acknowledge how fucking sad that is? We as a society prefer Lennon-style toxic expressions of masculinity—lashing out in violence, giving full vent to anger – over Paul’s self-restraint, meeting personal responsibilities, caring for your family.
Patriarchy sucks. For all of us. Under patriarchy everyone is restricted from things they might freely choose, and subjected to things they don’t want. Misogyny is perpetrated by men and women, in ways that are sometimes subtle and often unconscious. Is it manly to have angst over having hurt loved ones and anger over them hurting you, but vacuous to enjoy fatherhood? Fuck that noise. When we laud John’s honesty for admitting he hit and hurt people, shouldn’t we admire Paul even more for not having done that? If we laud John for coming around to the joys of family and fatherhood in 1975-80, shouldn’t we praise Paul even more for having those values seemingly from the beginning?
In many (most?) accounts of the Beatles, John is the protagonist. We talk about The Day John Met Paul (not the day Paul met John, or the day John and Paul met). I think Paul is interpreted as John’s wife, in a metaphorical marriage. That makes it sound much less subtle than the actual effect I’m trying to describe, but I think it holds up. For example—and this still blows my mind—some people went so far as to say in public that it should have been Paul who died. Perhaps it makes narrative sense to them that the woman should be fridged to advance the man’s story, not the other way around.
I do wonder if Paul’s empathy with women, his remarkable ability to tell a story about a woman as though she were a fully realized human, stems from this direct experience of misogyny. Is he (consciously or not) able to put himself in women’s shoes because the world has insisted on putting him there for so long?
There is also something to be said about the subtle collective androgyny of the Beatles, which threatened adults right from the start of Beatlemania, but this is already long, and my thoughts on how that relates are underdeveloped.
Obviously Paul benefits from the privilege of not actually being a woman, so the misogyny aimed at him is less consistent and pervasive, but I do think it sheds an interesting light both on his mistreatment by the rock press, and on patriarchy as a phenomenon.
Paul is in many ways very masculine, but he is often treated like a woman in the language and narrative we use when we talk about him and the Beatles. By thinking carefully about how that negatively impacts him, we can learn something about what gender means to us, and what we do with that meaning. It gives us a new perspective on the pervasive misogyny in our society, and the many ways patriarchy drags us all down.
Related posts:
Do female Beatles fans understand John and Paul better?
Paul McCartney Makes Mashed Potatoes
Paul McCartney: The Lyrics
Ethical Reflections on John/Paul
Happy Birthday Paul McCartney, Friend of the Jews
Krall does Paul: McCartney cover on “Wallflower”
Were John and Paul Lovers?
McCartney and Critics
Paul McCartney: Screwed by life
Paul Better Than John? Hell Has Frozen Over!
McCartney Opens Sacramento Stadium with a Bang
Miley Cyrus’ Boobs Made Paul McCartney Uncomfortable
I think the reason Paul has been seen as “womanly” is that to the baby boomers of 1964 John was their dad and Paul was their mother. John upset the neighbours, Paul smoothed things over; John hit you, Paul hugged you; John got drunk and insulted the waiter, Paul said “It’s OK, he doesn’t really mean it”. Those roles were set in stone for all time in the minds of that generation.
@Dan, if we’re going to bruit this theory, let’s really go into it: Father-John also supported people fiercely, protected them from outsiders, took them into the wide world, gave them license, showed them how to be their own person. John’s rage is also definition of the tribe, protection of his own.
It seems there’s some truth in this paradigm, for the Boomers and even older Gen X. But it wasn’t John’s flaws that made it stick. It was the other stuff. People of those generations really looked to Lennon.
This is very thought-provoking, meigs — thank you for writing it!
You write: ” I do wonder if Paul’s empathy with women, his remarkable ability to tell a story about a woman as though she were a fully realized human, stems from this direct experience of misogyny,” and that is certainly a possibility.
I in turn wonder if this sequence may have worked in reverse — if McCartney’s affinity for telling stories about women is part of what leads him to be coded as “feminine” in some respects. It’s the old “you’ll get cooties from playing with / talking to girls” playground taunt.
Excellent post. As you say, this topic has been in focus elsewhere (e.g., a recent episode of Another Kind of Mind) but you bring in a lot of new angles and insights.
“In many (most?) accounts of the Beatles, John is the protagonist.”
A key point. “Protagonist” is the male role. A caveat: I do think that the 1957 fete is commonly described as “the day John and Paul met.” But it’s always “John asked Paul to join the Quarrymen,” never “Paul agreed to join the Quarrymen.” He had the most talent, knew the most chords. He had choices.
And this ties in to something I’d been thinking about:
There’s a well-known Lennon quote about how Paul and Yoko were the only two people he’d chosen as partners. It’s cited and discussed in the context of his putting the two on an equal footing as creative forces, and as his life’s “partners” in general. But is it ever mentioned that this formulation accords neither Paul nor Yoko any agency in choosing John? The discourse follows John himself in envisioning him as a sovereign potentate choosing first one consort and then another. The ultimate patriarch.
I don’t think that image accords at all with what’s observable about his relationship with Yoko. But that’s not directly pertinent to this topic. With regards to his relationship with Paul — well, it’s a real two-edged sword.
There’s of course a mountain of evidence for how highly John rated Paul’s talents, the quote referenced above being one data point. But over time an unhealthy tinge appears. There’s tape of him telling Paul that he had to constantly manage his jealousy for him in order to continue the partnership. (This is part of the “flowerpot conversation” from the Get Back sessions that wasn’t included in Jackson’s edit.) And then there’s his complex about “Yesterday,” his allowing Klein to claim that much of Paul’s most admired work was actually John’s, etc., etc. In other words, evidence for both massive admiration and equivalent insecurity — since I think “jealousy” is a manifestation of insecurity in this instance.
Which to me suggests that Lennon had internalized the notion that his partnership with McCartney was a one-way choice — and therefore HADN’T internalized what it meant that McCartney valued the partnership and wanted to preserve it. If he couldn’t understand that McCartney had “chosen back,” that it was a two-way choice, then he couldn’t understand that the admiration also went two ways. How much did this insecurity play into his behavioral disintegration during the pre- and post-breakup period, with all the grandiosity (declaring himself a genius, and a crucified one at that) and the publicity stunts intended to bolster his status in realms OUTSIDE of the one in which Paul was a competitor. I think of him as a fragile male, not a toxic one, and the grandiosity was a token of the fragility.
@Katya, one thing I think often gets lost in these discussions is just how difficult it would be to be Paul McCartney’s partner in terms of pure music-making; and how difficult it would be to be John’s partner in terms of audience connection or cultural importance. Of course John had a complex about “Yesterday”–any songwriter would. It was the most popular song of that generation, an instant classic, an instant standard, and something that Paul didn’t need a single other Beatle to pull off. There isn’t a creative person alive who wouldn’t look at their partner differently after that. Paul’s prodigious musical talent was John’s cross to bear, as much as we might want that to be different (for their sake, and ours).
Drawing on my own long experience in a creative partnership, far from competition being the hallmark of Lennon/McCartney, I think that partnership is extraordinary in its long period of collaboration/helpfulness/support. After about 1965 or so, Paul goes on this huge run of genius, culminating in Pepper–or “Hey Jude”–or Abbey Road? Any partner would have to be extraordinarily secure/patient/supportive to remain connected through that, and John did. But eventually he also pivoted to his own area of strength, which was audience connection, individual experience, and cultural significance.
Lennon’s “Yesterday” was the totality of his adult life in the public eye. Paul McCartney, God bless ‘im, is never going to be seen as culturally significant as John Lennon. Paul McCartney is a genius songwriter; John Lennon is a genius songwriter PLUS a political and cultural icon. (Only Dylan is comparable, and I suspect Dylan falls short as well. Lonnon’s not-just-a-musician status was recognized even before The Beatles broke up–he was anointed one of three “Men of the Decade” in December 1969. The outpouring of grief when he died was akin to a political figure, not a musician. None of this is meant as a criticism of Paul, but forty years after Lennon’s death, it’s really undeniable.
The appropriate stance as appreciative outsiders is empathy for both men. John, when confronted with Paul’s genius, did what most people would, which was hang in for as long as he could, then pivot to doing something slightly different than what Paul was clearly the best in the world at doing. That’s not a flaw in John’s character, it’s completely understandable and, to some degree, psychologically healthy.
Paul, on the other hand, turned towards pop music success even more intently, and has done this for fifty years. As with John, understandable, and no shame in it. Paul’s turn in the dunk tank came after December 8, 1980, and lasted for probably 20 years after that. Just as Paul’s zillion-sellers between “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” pushed John’s buttons, John’s elevation ‘way above mere songwriter/entertainer similarly put Paul on the back foot. That’s why Paul then tried to reverse the song credit, etc.
Nobody wants to be the Garfunkel. And if you’re guys as talented as Lennon and McCartney, eventually the knives are going to come out for each other, to make sure you’re not the Garfunkel. As a pure pop songwriter–as a Beatle, defined as Beatledom was in 1964–by 1969, Lennon was McCartney’s Garfunkel, or felt like it. And occasionally throughout some of the 1970s, and definitely after 1980, McCartney was Lennon’s Garfunkel, or felt like it. And both men acted badly under those conditions, as one would expect them to.
I’m just glad they held it together as long as they did. That also is a kind of genius.
@Micheal.
Jumping in here to make a few points, which I hope doesn’t offend you.
First off, I’m not sure how Katya’s post denies empathy to both men, ie. to Lennon. Recognizing that John had insecurity which affected his behavior during/after the breakup does not mean that John is a bad person, but human. From your response, it seems like you believe Katya is implying this?
“Any partner would have to be extraordinarily secure/patient/supportive to remain connected through that, and John did.”
-From his own words, Lennon wasn’t any of those things. He felt resigned, depressed, and lacked confidence. Alongside other causes, it was McCartney’s success that directly sparked and fed his depression.
“Lennon’s “Yesterday” was the totality of his adult life in the public eye.”
-The public does not take into account the totality of Lennon’s adult life in the public sphere. What they see is his music and activism from 1969-1975 as reported and maintained by the Lennon estate. Lennon’s naked album covers, post-modern art shows, baggism, and erection movies are not generally considered to be part of his brand. Which is to the point, John’s “Yesterday” was not the ‘totality of his adult life’, but the establishment and creation of the Lennon brand. And this brand was partly created by capitalizing on the Beatle-fame he had already (derived from his partnership with Paul/Beatles) whilst putting down his work in the Beatles/ denigrating his partner, McCartney.
“John, when confronted with Paul’s genius, did what most people would, which was hang in for as long as he could, then pivot to doing something slightly different than what Paul was clearly the best in the world at doing.”
-Lennon did more than pivot by jumping into activism. He put down McCartney’s genius in a long campaign using interviews/songs. He and Ono pushed for the public to see McCartney as conservative and not a real artist on the level that he was.
Lennon’s behavior to me reveals his insecurity. Which is to say, he was a deeply troubled human. I don’t think saying this robs Lennon of any empathy.
A few other points:
“Paul, on the other hand, turned towards pop music success even more intently, and has done this for fifty years.”
-I think its more accurate to say that he turned towards music as much as he ever did in times of trouble. He has had success because he is a good songwriter.
“John’s elevation ‘way above mere songwriter/entertainer similarly put Paul on the back foot.”
-This and also the fact that Beatle biographies at the time were writing him out of his own history. For example Shout (“John was three quarters of the Beatles”).
Oh God, another Lennon vs McCartney debate. Can’t anyone laud Paul on his own merits without dragging John’s negative aspects into it?
I consider myself a strong feminist. I don’t like John for his “toxic masculinity” but for his kindness in spite of not being pampered like Paul was growing up. He had many sides to him. But I do like masculine men, of which John was one. Does it always have to be toxic?
Man, this take has been everywhere the last year or so and it makes me uncomfortable for reasons I have a hard time putting my finger on. I will say this is a beautifully written article, so thank you for sharing it, but I do wanna push back a bit. While I agree there’s an undercurrent of misogyny and homophobia in the way certain sections of the Rockerati were just WAITING for a reason to hate the member of The Beatles their little sisters all had taped above the bed, by that metric every member of the Backstreet Boys experienced misogyny too, not to mention guys like Leonardo DiCaprio or whatshisface who played Edward in Twilight (sorry I don’t know much about specific celebrities lol). Like, is there any reason to think that Paul’s trip through this particular social wringer is more akin to actual misogyny than what’s happened with any other teen idol popular with women besides the fact that he, well, *y’know*…. looks a bit girly, doesn’t he? Unusually and notably so, in fact.
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It’s a fair point to make re: how he was talked about in the 70’s, but I don’t know if there’s evidence this is something that gave him some sort of special insight to the female experience or even that it affected him this way at all. I do tend to wonder sometimes if he faced homophobic bullying from a young age due to his effeminate aura (it’s not just his looks; it’s his body language). John also was, from various sources, a highly effeminate child, but he constructed an aggressive, masculine facade for himself around the age boys start to get bullied for that kinda thing (in his own words: the Marlon Brando front, and the velvet Oscar Wilde inner self). Paul seems to have gone in the opposite direction, and leant into the female-coded social tools of diplomacy and appeasement (likely due to growing up in a two-parent household where the mother was the bread-earner; Paul’s relationship with his father is complicated, vs his relationship with his mother being aspirational).
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Despite this, however, there is something deeply masculine about him – not in his surface presentation, as you suggest here, but in his attitude. For a very long time (up until his 60’s, honestly) Paul was a pretty straightforward 1950’s style guy wrt gender relations, and had very parochial expectations of his women. This is a fairly benign form of sexism, and he was to his credit a devoted husband and father, but there is nothing exceptional about his perspective on women (in fact, I find his songs about women…. well, they raise my blood pressure, lmfao; if I were Jane I would have dumped him after the songs he put on Rubber Soul. He was nearly 40 when he released Temporary Secretary, yeesh)(I love Temporary Secretary don’t get me wrong). In fact, I think his ideas about gender were significantly behind his contemporaries in the 60’s and 70’s (society slid back to meet him in the 80’s), but he gets a lot of credit for engaging in less abominable behaviour than your average rock star of the time, and for actually seeming to LIKE his wife. I wonder sometimes if people’s marveling these days at the McCartney’s marriage as something “ahead of its time” or “gender breaking” is just bc of how Paul enforced “working class values” on his family, and we haven’t seen many “normal” marriages in celebrity culture (and certainly won’t commonly in the near future either, now that music is largely the providence of rich heirs and heiresses buying vanity careers).
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I guess what it is that makes me uncomfortable is when the valid observation of how celebrity press treats Pretty Boy idols (often due to resentment of their teen girl fans) crosses the line into saying that Paul himself faced “misogyny”, in the sense that a woman would, if that makes sense? It’s possible he has hang ups about this, re: his on record complaint about the band being treated as pretty boy idols by female fans who were always “looking at their legs” (vs having the ~~respect~~ of male fans), but that seems to be more about him being hit in the masculine pride rather than developing any sense of what it is that “women go through”.
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Adjacent to this, however, I don’t think that the “toxic masculine John” construct should be taken as some cosmic benefit to John either, esp since the Rough Lad image from the Beatlemania days was something he was desperate to shed (people who were close to John described him as being rather soft and feminine when at peace). John and Paul were both kinda weird, effeminate dorks who struggled with insecurity and embracing/rejecting this aspect of themselves. I should note that there’s actually been some nice analysis in the last few years suggesting this is one of the core frissons of what made their music so unique (Rob Sheffield elucidates on this in his comments re:, I believe, ‘I Call Your Name’? It’s been a while since I’ve read this book; I think the ‘Something About The Beatles’ podcast discussed this as well in the first episode they did focusing specifically on the Lennon/McCartney partnership; off the top of my head). The sort of easy, unconscious gender play in art is something I find really fascinating (the idea that in a love song, the singer is addressing an imaginary girl/boy, but aren’t they also the girl/boy? They’re singing to someone else by singing to themselves, or singing to themselves by singing to someone else. This is one of the reasons I love ‘Thunder Road’: Mary is the eternal Girl, dress swaying, who the singer is always trying to get into his car, but isn’t she also Bruce Springsteen? Isn’t HE the one who was desperate to hitch a ride out of town?). On this matter, the insecurities and obsessions of male rock journalists who hate anything with the stink of femininity can be soundly dismissed imo.
Thanks Tactical Orange, you’ve made me realise how much I left unsaid.
I definitely don’t want to portray Paul as some kind of Feminist Icon (lol). I love Temporary Secretary too, but I cringe when I read fans claiming he wrote it as an indictment of the patriarchy. That’s not how he talks about it. He thought it was funny, and doesn’t think he’d get away with it now.
To be honest I’m a little disappointed that you thought I was suggesting his masculinity is “surface presentation”. I suppose I gave more space to my main point, and I find it difficult to express, but he reads as *extremely* masculine to me, and very confident in that masculinity. Easily the most masculine of the four of them, in my opinion. But I do have a really hard time unpicking my feelings about gender-essentialism and patriarchy-imposed stereotypes.
With respect to his empathy songs: I’m not suggesting he has very enlightened attitudes about relations between men and women (and certainly didn’t when he was controlling Dot Rhone or cheating on Jane Asher). But many men don’t really think of women as people. The lyrics of Another Day are a great example. Paul had imagined a lonely, high-functioning-depressive _woman_ to the point where he could write “she finds it hard to stay alive”. He wasn’t interested in her as an object of desire or scorn, he was interested in what she felt. It was dismissed as “light”, “inane”, “meaningless”, but I reckon that’s because blokes heard enough to know it wasn’t about how hot she is and switched off.
Then again he wrote
“If when she tries to run away
And he calls her back, she comes
If there’s a next time, well, he’s okay
Cause she’s under both his thumbs
She limp along to his side
Singing a song of ruin, I’d
Now I guess he says nothin’ doin’
I’d call it, call it, I’d call it suicide”
at the age of 14, so maybe he’s actually got some ghost feeding him lyrics 🙂
“I don’t think that the “toxic masculine John” construct should be taken as some cosmic benefit to John either”
I *totally* agree. Patriarchy hurts everyone. It puts us in these stupid little boxes, and normalises unhealthy respsonses. Paul has said that John was the softest guy he ever met, and I’m so sad for little sensitive John, building armour that he spent his adult life dismantling. In fact I’d say John came out of the whole deal much worse, though everyone who loved him had a lot of fallout to deal with too.
Nicely written meaigs.
I like your observation as to how Paul, in Get Back, arrived on the set and got to work. His compartment bespoke a deep competence and confidence. I don’t mean a “smartest guy in the room” confidence, but one that was borne of being a master at his craft combined with the mental and physical expression of creation.
Great piece @meaigs. I think the topic of patriarchy is especially relevant today. Isn’t that what overturning Roe v Wade is about? And gun control? White males are desperately trying to hold on to power.
Anyway, with regards to Paul, personally I have never gotten a feminine vibe from him. I always have thought he was very attractive, but also he seems nice. Like a guy you could trust to take you home, and not be worried he’d try and do something against your will.
Maybe being respectful, kind, friendly and open are considered by some to be more female characteristics. Add to that good manners.
Definitely not macho.
I agree that the rock press of the 70’s (especially Jann Wenner) were the ones who put it out there that Paul was “soft”. And definitely his having Linda and the kids with him on tour was not cool at that time.
Paul just doesn’t really fit the “rock star” personna. He always said he wanted to be like Fred Astaire, so maybe that’s another reason he seems more feminine to some.
I think the rock star persona is so self-limiting as to be a straitjacket. There’s only a few things you can do (strut and preen onstage, make noise, trash hotel rooms, be judgmental about every other musical form that isn’t rock) because if you try to do anything beyond that you risk becoming … Uncool. And that’s a fate worse than death to your typical rock star as well as most white male rock fans.
I think Paul wanted to be like Fred Astaire because Fred could do everything. Sing, dance, act (comedy and drama) and just about anything else. An all-around entertainer. Paul appreciated this, which is why I believe he’ll look less ridiculous to future generations than all the pompous rock stars who took themselves way too seriously.
I so agree Sam. (Baboomska). 🙂
Paul is a born entertainer, and no matter what era he’d have been born into, he would have found an outlet. I could see him being like Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller if he lived in those times. A big band leader who wrote popular music, led his band, played piano and drums.
“I believe he’ll look less ridiculous to future generations than all the pompous rock stars who took themselves way too seriously.”
I agree, and even though after Johns death Paul has worried about being seen as “less than”, he will live on by his longevity and productivity. Plus being a genius. 😉
Lennon pushed back against the rock star persona as well. Writing a book of cartoons and stories, acting in a movie (without the other Beatles) and then later his non-rock collaborations with Yoko.
What a wonderfully written piece. Just a few thoughts.
Paul’s softer features, (I mean just look at that button nose!) to my eye, are well, pretty and appealing.
Also, with all due respect, making a declarative statement that ‘Paul is the most masculine’ is an utterly subjective POV.
George’s prominent cheekbones, strong nose, and sharp jawline will forever make him the most masculine, Beatle or otherwise.
It is worth noting that on the first day of filming, for whatever reason, Paul was forty minutes late. This would account for ‘getting right to work’ since rest of the band was already working.
I agree, to me it’s a tossup between George and John for most masculine.
To add: I just don’t get how someone as cherubic looking as Paul would be pronounced “clearly the most masculine.” Yes, some of his behaviors are manly like fixing a table at his farm. I wonder if John and George have anything that is uniquely theirs anymore, or has Paul taken over all their characteristics and traits? He’s even the toughest Beatle now, not Ringo. I think Ringo is the confident one of the band. And to say that someone as sexist as Paul is the victim of misogyny is rather offensive. That goes for all the Beatles.
What about poor Ringo? Because he is little? Can’t all of them be masculine? Or not masculine? Four men out of billions of men on the planet all to be sorted into various degrees of masculinity. The defensiveness of some of these comments clearly illustrate the point Meaigs was trying to make in her well-written post. That Paul must never ever be seen to be masculine; that people find him attractive only because he is “soft and pretty”, an insult to Paul and to his fans. Broad shoulders, a strong butt chin – to put it crudely – and a heavy five o’clock shadow. I’m not seeing femininity. A strong nose? That’s a new one on me. A nose is a nose. I’m with Meaigs on this.
“People find him attractive only because he is ‘soft and pretty’.
It’s true, though. They’re all masculine to some degree, but this is exactly the reason why Paul was everyone’s favorite. The teen idol, perfectly coiffed look. It’s silly to deny it. And he didn’t seem to complain until he got old, married and less attractive.
I did mention Ringo – noting he was tough, confident.
As uber-masculine “rock critic” Lester Bangs would say: boy howdy. Given that the concept of of “masculinity” is not stable, and perceptions of it are idiosyncratic, “which Beatle was the most masculine” is an absurd thing to debate. It’s not like anyone is going to be convinced of the error of their ways.
In this light, I’m struck by Michelle’s suggestion that if someone assigns a quality to Paul it’s being taken away from John or George. What? If one person, motivated by their individual experiences, perceptions, and preferences, assigns +5 masculinity points to Paul, are -5 points deducted from the Lennon account? There is no Lennon account. Michelle’s vision of Lennon belongs to her, and remains entirely intact. It’s not a besieged castle that may fall if enough people envision a different Lennon. In other words, de gustibus.
John was no slouch in the broad shoulder department. Again, I’d rank it John/George, Ringo, Paul.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wp3Jh-H4S5I/U_VzLKCzoRI/AAAAAAAAaOY/B3IcpecNRFc/s1600/64_02_Las_Vegas_balcony_B1080x600.jpg
“What about poor Ringo? Because he is little?”
You have no idea what I consider macho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBJOszaSn8k
Michael, you wrote:
“Paul McCartney, God bless ‘im, is never going to be seen as culturally significant as John Lennon. Paul McCartney is a genius songwriter; John Lennon is a genius songwriter PLUS a political and cultural icon.”
I wonder if this is changing. Meaning, I think Paul is seen also as a cultural icon. For different reasons of course. I’m wondering this because I read an article commemorating Paul’s upcoming 80th Birthday. It’s from the U.K.’s Evening Standard:
“Caustic Lennon appears to have been cancelled by the younger generation, mainly for admitting to domestic abuse. An article on news website Vice in 2015 began: “To celebrate the anniversary of the Beatle’s beloved album Imagine, we recount some of the terrible things the famous asshole did during his life.” I recently asked a large class of 17-year-old music students who their favourite Beatle was. No one said Lennon.”
This tracks with my nephew who is 26 and loves The Beatles. His favorite is George, and he thinks Paul and John were both assholes to George and Ringo.
I think John is an icon for the reasons you stated, but Paul is one for his productivity and longevity.
@Tasmin, perhaps, but I’ll believe it if Paul is still being debated 40+ years after his death. People dislike Lennon today because his actions didn’t always match up with his beliefs; Paul is an entirely different figure in our culture, more like Stephen Sondheim or George Gershwin or Cole Porter, a consummate craftsman–a genius–and judged on their work, not the person they were.
I think the fact that Lennon is discussed for who he was, not what he did, is indicative of the fact that his significance as a “political and cultural icon” has evaporated. His story unquestionably has an enduring triumph-and-tragedy (and maybe there would have been more triumph except …) appeal. But it’s an appeal that’s actually premised on his not being an “icon.” His willful (and arguably short-lived) attempt to become one, post-breakup, is part of the tragedy side of his life. The attempt of the Lennon Estate to refurbish the icon is just dumb, because icons are boring and no one’s buying granny’s icon.
“I think the fact that Lennon is discussed for who he was, not what he did, is indicative of the fact that his significance as a “political and cultural icon” has evaporated.”
That’s what I was wondering @Katya. Will Lennon still be considered an icon after the Boomers are gone? The younger fans certainly don’t see him the same way.
I think Michaels point is correct for NOW, but I guess we’ll have to see how he’s perceived in a decade or so.
@Michael,
Gotcha. That makes sense. He is like a Gershwin or Sondheim. Plus, like we’ve talked about here, John was cool, magnetic, a cultural force: the leader.
Hope you are feeling better after your bout with Covid. 🙂
So, there are three Beatles then. Nice development. He admitted to domestic abuse. How many of their idols were abusers and never admitted it, if anyone even knew about it. Some of them probably love the music of Lindsey Buckingham, I’m sure. How much does Paul actually have to do with John being cancelled? I mean, as an artist.
The younger generation doesn’t like Elvis either.
https://www.history.com/news/why-elvis-presley-isnt-the-king-to-millennials
I guess we would all have to agree on a definition of masculinity (and femininity). Are we just talking about appearance–facial features, clothes, etc.? Or is it appearance and actions? When I watched Get Back, I was struck by how none of them lined up with the current-day definition of masculine. Flowing fanciful clothes, soft movements, kind of swishy, indirect conversations. Yet somehow they were all very masculine or that’s how I see it anyway. Certainly, they were all very appealing to women.
Well @maia, this demonstrates how difficult it is to interpret things like gender and sexual mores as practiced in the past. The safest way is to listen to people’s own contemporaneous statements and recent memories. Anything else is loaded with bias.
With John, it was his voice (for starters). Thoroughly masculine.
Interesting discussion, but one that makes me uncomfortable because of *just how much* it involves projecteing our attitudes as (mainly) Americans living in 2022 onto young men living in Britain in the Sixties. In the Sixties, weren’t *all* the Beatles considered androgynous? Between the hair and the clothes? That was one of the reasons they made older generation (and younger, conservative people) so uncomfortable, right? Then, the rock culture they helped create *did* frame John as being more masculine and Paul more feminine, which also is inaccurate — not for nothing was John referred to as “Paul’s princess” around Apple.
As for John being the protagonist, I don’t think that’s just sexism. There’s currently a “correction” from the deification of John and minimalization of Paul that also corresponds with the cultural reckoning with abusive, violent men. BUT–the Beatles were John’s idea. We talk about when “John met Paul” because John already had a band and already seems to have had some vague idea of becoming **John Lennon**, Bigger Than Elvis. Meeting and inviting Paul McCartney to join him was crucial to that idea becoming what it was, but the Beatles as phenomenon came first from Lennon’s drive, brokenness, vision, and ability to connect. That’s why we talk about those years in John’s terms–just as no one talks about Sgt. Pepper in terms of “when John first heard about the idea.”
According to Michael McCartney, Paul became obsessed with music and the guitar after the death of their mother. He started writing and composing songs at 14 at the expense of his school work. This was all before he met John. In Paul’s own words in 1967, music, money and girls were a way to get out of the sticks. Much is made of the stars and planets alignment of the day John met Paul, and if missed the moment would have been forever gone. No Beatles. But the music scene in suburban Merseyside in 1957/58 made up of a handful of teenage boys in bands would really not have been that large. They would have met. In an alternative universe Paul could well have formed his own band at 16. We know George was in a band with his brother and Arthur Kelly and that both boys knew each other already. It’s not improbable that they could have joined forces. Then there would be John with his band of not particularly talented members competing against Paul and George’s greater skills at the time. All three boys could have seen those magic qualities in each other, formed a separate band of their own, and the rest would still have proceeded as history. Without Paul, John wouldn’t even got as far as Gene Vincent. Art school for him and teachers college for Paul would have been the trajectory. After that, who knows? John without Paul or Paul without John is pointless speculation.
It happened the way it happened and I’m glad. John and Paul in the immediacy of their meeting recognized a kindred spirit in each other that others around them did not possess. A real and profound love of music and what it could do for them.That was what made their musical collaboration and relationship so unique and so widely and endlessly analyzed and discussed.
@Lara, the point is that neither Paul nor George were broken in a way that made them determined to become THE BEATLES. John was. Musical talent was required to get there, yes, but there’s a weird type of revisionism going on if we’re now looking at this as though John had no musical talent — Paul’s facility for melody or no, John was the most prolific and, measured by A-sides and major album tracks, successful Beatles songwriter through 1965. John in 1957 was *determined* to do something other than go to art school. Paul and George were not. I think it’s far more probable that John would have assembled a gang around himself necessary to make it to London in 1962 with a recording contract than Paul or George, because Paul and George didn’t need to. But, to Michael’s point, which I agree with completely, it’s far more likely that John’s non-McCartney career combusts in 1963 or 1964, possibly because he beats the shit out of someone or something else to do with alcohol and speed, leaving us with some version of “Please Please Me” and questions about where pop music might have gone.
@Michael Bleicher. It is not weird revisionism – bearing in mind revisionism has become a dirty word in itself where the Beatles are concerned. I did not say or imply that John did not have musical talent, rather that the original members of the Quarrymen did not serve him well. I dislike the word facility. Paul has no more facility for melodies than John does for words. It harks back to the dismissive attitude held towards McCartney during the 1970s. His little tunes just pop out of his head, y’know. George was not broken, obviously. He came from a stable family. Paul had the trauma of his mother’s death and nobody has the knowledge or the insight to determine from his outward behaviour what psychological state he was in at the time and what motivated him. Only Paul knows that. His stoicism is legendary but above all he has shown great loyalty towards his parents. You won’t get any what they did to me stories from Paul. No amount of reading Lennon’s diaries and journals, or the copious amount of articles and books written about him AFTER his death will
change what we know or don’t know about Paul. Yet. I have no argument in John being the most determined for the band to be THE BEATLES. But that was after he met Paul and George not before. The whole reasoning behind Alfred Pobjoy’s encouraging John to go to art school was because his great energies were so scattered, so directionless. That was his desperation. Not to find a band of boys to play music with. He didn’t go out and find Paul. Paul was introduced to him. So if they’d never met how likely was it John would go out and find someone else? And in 1957, John was almost two years older than Paul. As far as John being more prolific than Paul up to 1965, then that is statistically incorrect. Most of the early songs were cowritten and many of the songs on the first two albums were covers, several by George. Does that make George more prolific than Paul as well? It was marketing. Brian Epstein and George Martin decided the band was not yet strong enough for home grown material. Many of Paul’s songs were given to other artists, a good many of them superior to what was selected for WTB and PPM.
The only album John dominated was A Hard Day’s Night where he complained that Paul was not pulling his weight because he was mooning around with Jane Asher. Ironically, an odd reversal of John and Yoko during the Get Back sessions. And there has NEVER been a proper explanation of How Dreamers Do, a song written by Paul in 1957, became instrumental in securing the Beatles contract with EMI. The standard tale from both Epstein and Martin has sufficed for over 60 years.
“he has shown great loyalty towards his parents. You won’t get any what they did to me stories from Paul. “
Spot on, @Lara. And Mike is just the same, which is why we get such gems as this from his latest book:
“One of Dad’s hobbies at the time was gambling. Not that Dad was an insatiable gambler, he just didn’t know when to stop.”
So a fair amount of reading between the lines is necessary.
Paul at 21 is one thing. But in the ensuing 60 years he’s shown himself to be one of *the* most driven humans of his generation. And he still has hoarder impulses to this day.
Lara, everything about John Lennon forming and leading the Quarrymen suggests that, and his actions from 1955-1966 in general, suggest that yes, he did already have some vague idea of what the Beatles would become. Obviously, it took Paul, George, Stu, Astrid, Hamburg, Brian, and Ringo to make it happen. And no, it wouldn’t have been as successful or successful at all without all that. And no, John wasn’t recruiting people for a supergroup a la Jimmy Page with the New Yardbirds in 1968. But that’s not my point. My point is that John had some vision he pursued and honed in on that the others didn’t have before they met him. There is no primary source saying otherwise, as far as I’m aware.
As to songwriting, it’s well documented that the Beatles never recorded “mostly” covers, and the authorship of their 1963 and 1964 original material (about 30 songs) tilts heavily to John. Paul had some important songs, to be sure, but I’m surprised it’s even arguable that musically, Lennon drove the group’s first period. (I would argue that Lennon and McCartney were equally musically important in the middle period for different but complimentary reasons, and that in after India Paul becomes clearly the most important.)
Michael, as I said before, John without Paul and Paul without John is pointless speculation. But as far as your perception of John’s greater role from 1962 to 1966 I can only assume you’ve reached your conclusions from the American pressings of the Beatles recordings. John’s role was slightly greater but not significantly so. I grew up with the Beatles from the start of Beatlemania – and before the Ed Sullivan debut in the US – and I can assure you that the early songs were very strongly perceived as Lennon/McCartney. Eyeball to eyeball.
So from the Parlaphone/EMI pressings in the UK, Europe, and British Commonwealth countries: Please Please Me, released in March 1963, comprised of 14 tracks, 8 of which were Lennon McCartney, the rest were covers; With The Beatles also comprised 14 tracks, seven by Lennon/McCartney and one by Harrison, and six covers. Of the 15 tracks on Beatles for Sale, only seven were written by Lennon and McCartney. The rest were covers. Help, which included Yesterday, and Rubber Soul, which included In My Life, had roughly equal contributions from John and Paul, and two from George, with cover songs assigned to Ringo. Whether one considers certain album tracks to be stronger than others is subjective opinion. George Martin, Dick James, John and Paul decided on what what were to be singles or album tracks at all times, and I suspect during the early years the nod was given to John because of his natural leadership and personality. During this same time period, Paul wrote four songs for Peter and Gordon, three for Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and one for The Applejacks, all of which charted well. More importantly, they were still marketed as Lennon and McCartney and received extensive publicity.
Conversely, I do not think Paul became more important after 1967 either, irrespective of his assumed leadership. Both wrote excellent songs during this final period.
Regardless of what stage John and Paul were at during the Beatles, both were brilliant creative artists who displayed a natural ebb and flow in their output, dependent on their physical, social and mental state at any given time. This applies not only to them, but to all highly creative people. It’s the way it works and it would have likely continued that way had the band not broken up. Who was more musically important at any stage is meaningless.
@Lara, those assumptions aren’t correct. I grew up with the CD reissues of the Beatles’ music in the late 90s and early 2000s, all of which were the UK versions, and did not listen sequentially. My impressions about many things relating to John Lennon–his post-breakup narratives about his own life, his marriage to Yoko, his parenting of Sean, his drug use and recovery, and his death. One thing that has not changed is my impression that John led the group musically until 1965 and was generally looked to as the leader for quite a while after, although Paul developed at lightning speed and saved the Beatles from breaking up in 1966/67. That’s based on how much his voice, attitude, and songwriting dominates the Beatles’ first two-plus years of recorded output. Incidentally, Beatles for Sale has 14 songs, of which 6 are covers.
@Lara wrote: “I can assure you that the early songs were very strongly perceived as Lennon/McCartney. Eyeball to eyeball.”
Some of them were composed like that. Hold Your Hand, From Me to You… what else? All My Loving? Can’t Buy Me Love?
Actually, it was Paul who was referred to as “John’s princess”…
Not for nothing did John play Thisbe to Paul’s Pyramus, however. For comic effect more than anything.
“the Beatles as phenomenon came first from Lennon’s drive, brokenness, vision, and ability to connect”
Nothing I’ve read or posted here for 14 years has changed the veracity of this statement. Might it have been possible for Paul McCartney to have started his own band, had he never met John Lennon? Sure, it’s possible. But it’s just as possible, IMHO, that he’d have followed the family pattern of having a straight job and weekend musician. For lots of reasons we’ve discussed ad infinitum, John was DESPERATE in ways that Paul was not, and has never been, and you need that kind of “I will accept this and only this” type mindset to make something as unique and special as The Beatles happen.
And you need a type of discipline, dedication, and willingness to work inside a system for The Beatles, once constituted, to thrive. Paul had all that in abundance, and John did not. Without John, there would’ve been no Beatles; but without Paul, John Lennon’s story would’ve probably been a lot like Gene Vincent’s–a short-lived, influential “what if?”
Great points Michael G and B. I agree totally and wasn’t suggesting otherwise.
What I found interesting in the article I referenced, was that the younger generation is not as enamored of John as the Boomers. Yes, he started the band and was it’s leader. He became a legend because of his achievements but also because he was killed young. The younger Beatle fans are looking at him through eyes removed from that tragedy. He doesn’t mean as much to them as the Boomer generation.
I think Paul’s musical genius and his continuing to play concerts for 3 hours at the age of 80 is also to be revered. I do think he will be talked about in 40 years. Not in the same way as John, but as one half of a partnership that changed the world. In my mind, you can’t call John an icon, but not Paul. They needed each other to make the Beatles succeed, as Michael G said.
I have noticed that the drop-down menu is no longer on the main Hey Dullblog page. This had the option for recent comments.
Anyone else with this issue? It was definately the best way to not miss a comment.
@Neal, I’m still getting “Recent Comments” on the main page, but not as a drop-down.
In honor of Paul’s 80th Birthday, here’s a story and video of Sean playing “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Just found it today.
https://www.spin.com/2022/06/sean-ono-lennon-here-there-everywhere-beatles-paul-mccartney-80th-birthday/
Rock on Paul!
Sean is so sweet. Did you see John’s Instagram yesterday? Lots of pics of him and Paul, with the lyrics to “In My Life” – complete with hearts. It got the McLennon community in a tizzy.
I thought it was so sweet too! What he wrote to Paul was also very nice.
I’m not on Instagram, but I’ll try and check it out!
I bet the McLennons were going crazy!
It just makes me happy the Beatle family is all in harmony.
@Michael. Perhaps listening to the music non sequentially is part of the problem in how the Beatles today are perceived then. Again, nobody is denying John’s leadership up to 1966, but to imply Paul only developed musically and ‘caught up to John’ after 1965/66 is absurd. I think we are at cross purposes. There were two styles of leadership at play. Paul post 1967 was about getting things done. John 1963 to 1966 was in how he presented himself to others, privately and publicly. More caustic, outspoken, and aggressive in his stance on stage. The one reporters naturally gravitated towards in interviews. But neither style had anything to do with the actual songwriting, the music. It’s known that there were tensions within the band over Yesterday, possibly before. John did not have veto over what was to be included in Help and Rubber Soul. If he wanted to explore his Dylan side that was fine but he did not direct them musically because of it. If one thinks that, then is it because of…well, His Bobness? Both John and Paul by this stage displayed insecurities towards the capabilities of the other. Conversely, getting the other three into the recording studio to meet artistic and contractual obligations post touring is a different matter to Paul directing The White Album or Let it Be musically. He didn’t. Abbey Road only very marginally as John was more interested in his projects with Yoko.
If the 2022 internetty/emotional needs comment is aimed at me, then no. My distaste for the John/Paul polarization was established well before the internet. It seems to be very fashionable over last few years for aficionados to apportion John albums and Paul albums. They were not perceived that way at the time. The highly subjective critical evaluation during the immediate post Beatles years has distorted and skewed the creative history of both writers. It’s a disservice to both John and Paul. Leaving certain individual biographies aside, I think it is generally agreed that the Beatles literature up until now, including Mark Lewishon, has been biased towards John. I believe a full and balanced picture of the Beatles will not be achieved until Paul dies. Until then, I prefer to keep an open mind. Whatever you and I think, it’s a case of agreeing to disagree.
“I think it is generally agreed that the Beatles literature up until now, including Mark Lewisohn, has been biased towards John. I believe a full and balanced picture of the Beatles will not be achieved until Paul dies.”
There are many fans today who feel this, though I look at Paul’s career in toto and find it difficult to see much bias, apart from a few years in the early 70s. The historian in me says that we will not have a full and balanced picture of the Beatles until 100 or 500 years after the last Beatle is dead. I think that full and balanced picture will go somewhat like this:
“John Lennon and Paul McCartney, two members of the music group The Beatles, were childhood friends who became the most successful English composing team since Gilbert & Sullivan. After The Beatles achieved worldwide stardom, Lennon became increasingly interested in politics and his own personal experience, while McCartney wrote tuneful, romantic pop. Both became masters of their respective styles, but the tonal difference inevitably pulled Lennon and McCartney apart, leaving Beatles fans thinking “What might have been?” Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan in 1980.”
@Michael. I guess it’s easy to group us all into John defenders and Paul defenders, which can be tiresome,
I agree. But why are people defending either John or Paul though? How did it eventuate? Have we all missed something? I’m completely aware of the hierarchical structure of the band and as far as I’m concerned I’ve also been critical of all of them. In the end it IS the songs however much you want to emphasize the cultural/historical/sociological aspect here. But it’s your blog and I respect that. However, if we talk about little bias against Paul, then to me you are not seeing what I and many others are seeing.
Looking back through your site, I’m aware that the Revolver/Sgt Pepper divide has been brought up a few times and met with criticism amongst contributors. None of us are so tone deaf we can’t recognize the recognize the differences between the two but even so….don’t we all like to believe we are resolutely right?
As for how John and Paul will be viewed in 100 or 500 years time – assuming that Western culture will be still dominant which it well may not be – then I could be very cynical and ask what is the point of an historical record anyway, except for those overly invested in the band or in any particular member. Let’s face the uncomfortable truth – there is not a great appetite for the Beatles out in the big wide world even today. Even more so, we know interest in the Beatles received a huge shot in the arm after Lennon’s murder. A sad and tragic twist of fate. So here we have it: one man dead and unable to speak for himself or even refute what has been written about him; the other an old man accused of rewriting history for opening his mouth about his own life and career. A no win situation for both. As a selection and cataloguing librarian for public libraries for most of my life, I can vouch that any new publication on Lennon met with increasing lack of interest amongst my colleagues for inclusion in the collections from the late 90s into the 21st century, and reflected in borrowing statistics. Thanks Beatles historians and authors. Perhaps we should have just listened to the music after all. We reap what we sew it seems.
“However, if we talk about little bias against Paul, then to me you are not seeing what I and many others are seeing.”
I have said many times that what I see on this site is
1) female fans identifying with Paul;
2) female fans claiming there is a single dominant story (“the Standard Narrative”) which glorifies an angry abuser, and quite understandably seeing this story as a product of, buttress of, and a stand-in for, patriarchy;
3) fighting against that “Standard Narrative” as a way of living under patriarchy without going insane;
4) fearing that, unless it is resisted, this oppressive “Standard Narrative” will be used to silence/injure/belittle their stand-in Paul, and by extension, them.
None of this is meant to be a criticism, AT ALL. I cannot imagine what torment it must be to live as a woman in our society, I just know I couldn’t do it, and if having Paul-centric fights on silly Beatles blogs makes that even a tiny bit better, I’m happy to provide that service. Truly.
But I really do believe that in society as a whole, and certainly among Beatles fans, Paul is utterly revered. He is commonly considered one of the most successful living persons in the history of showbiz, and is met with universal respect bordering on reverence. His many successes are praised, and his few failures are forgotten.
On the internet, some ignorant people say shitty things about Paul, in the same way that some ignorant people say shitty things about John. But that’s a tiny minority even of Beatles fans.
The idea that Paul has been injured in some meaningful way, and must be defended–when he is an 80-year-old billionaire who enjoys a kind of respect that no other creative person I know receives–that’s not reality. That’s something happening inside the hearts and minds of Paul fans, which is not something for me to judge. It exists. But it’s also not something that can be soothed by blog posts or comments.
This is my opinion, but it’s one worth paying attention to, because I’ve read all the posts and comments here for 14 years. Dullblog is truly a one-of-a-kind core sample of intelligent Beatle fandom. When I ask “Where has Paul been injured?” it’s usually something shitty someone said in 1972, or (tellingly) the application of female-coded insults on the Steve Hoffman message boards. Internet idiots or reviewers in 1987 can call Paul “bitchy” or “a diva” all they want; he’s fabulously rich, fabulously well-respected, and will die having achieved his dreams in a way 99.99999% of people have not.
Who those insults hurt are his female fans, who remember all the times some mediocre male authority has used those terms and strategies to diminish and dismiss them. That makes perfect sense; the problem is, as long as we’re talking about Paul McCartney, we’re not talking about what’s really causing pain, and can’t soothe it. Maybe it cannot be soothed.
@Michael. With due respect, I find your response and interpretation of Paul-centric female fans funny more than anything. A good old wind-up here and there never hurt anyone. What is it about the sensitivity over the ‘standard’ narrative being challenged anyway and why should it matter? Why is it so reactionary? That’s the nature of debate, isn’t it? Seriously, reading some of the posts and comments on this blog by intelligent erudite women, I don’t think any of them are losing sleep and sobbing into their pillows each night over supposed ‘injuries’ to Paul, real or imagined. The supposed sex divide is strange to me: much of discerning insight into McCartney, both musically and culturally, (YouTube and its ilk excepted) have come from men. I dislike the reverence of McCartney as much as I do Lennon and Harrison. It is simplistic and unrealistic. I believe the comments I’ve contributed have supported John AND Paul but if they’ve been interpreted negatively, then I’m not sure what I can do about that.
@Lara, I don’t think anybody’s interpreting your comments negatively. I am certainly not. I like them.
My “sensitivity” about the Standard Narrative debate on this site is
1) It’s a straw man. What is it? Hunter Davies? Philip Norman? Wenner/Rolling Stone/The Lennon Estate? The Anthology? Each of these narratives are slightly different, products of different times and pressures; but they are glommed together as “wrong ideas.” The Standard Narrative is constantly referenced by a certain type of fan, as something that needs revision, and it gets blurrier and blurrier as time goes on. Is Vivek Tiwary’s comic about Brian Epstein part of “The Standard Narrative”? Who knows?
2) It privileges current discourse over the discourse of the past, and when dealing with an historical phenomenon, discourse closer to the time of occurrence should be given more weight, not less.
3) It plays into the internetty paranoia that “they don’t want you to know the truth!” They–journalists, editors, publishers, even The Beatles themselves–are manipulating the narrative in a coordinated and nefarious way. This is simply not true, and I’m speaking as a guy who really disagrees with the MSM take on lots of things. This attitude is great for getting views of videos and listens to podcasts, but it’s not a balanced, nuanced, or accurate model of how journalism or publishing or celebrity works.
4) It is an example of “fan as customer,” where the mass of raw data (footage, outtakes, interviews) now available can be cobbled together to support really anything that makes a fan tingle. And that’s fine–truly–but it’s not history. History is created by a mass of data winnowed by criticism to create judgment; there’s something fundamentally undemocratic and uncommercial about history, and ideas that become popular suddenly (like McLennon or PID) with no obvious external cause–a verified love letter, unimpeachable testimony of Paul’s death in 1966–should be viewed not as alt-history, but a type of fanfic.
I guess what this all boils down to is, the history of The Beatles shouldn’t be determined by what any one era’s fans like and will pay for. And sequestering everything pre-2010 as “The Standard Narrative” and starting fresh, confident that you as a fan have the reading, judgment and training to remake an established and vetted story in some fundamental way, is an attack on the very idea of History. It’s a drag that everything didn’t happen; many’s the time I wished I could rewrite History. But accepting that one cannot is the starting point to any kind of wisdom, and I see less and less of that kind of humility in online Beatles fandom. I see more and more people treating these real people and real events–a real TIME–as the Beatles Cinematic Universe.
So that’s why I’m “sensitive” about it. It’s fine, of course, but it does work me a bit.
As to the gender breakdown of Paul fans, I can only tell you what I’ve observed. I have no opinion about it. The people who are incensed about Paul’s treatment have been predominantly women; I told you my working theory as to why, but the preponderance is a fact. And as I said, I’m happy to provide a release valve.
Michael, I agree with much of what you’ve said in this thread about the “Standard Narrative” of the Beatles (and more specifically, of Lennon’s and McCartney’s contributions to the band). However, I may be defining this narrative differently than you do, at least in terms of when it held sway. And I definitely think it had real power for decades — less so now. I’m going to use my own experience to explain what I mean.
As someone on the leading edge of Gen X, I got my information about the Beatles from books and magazines. And in the 1970s-1990s, those books and magazines had a cultural power that’s hard to imagine now. I read The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide, The Trouser Press Record Guide, and Rolling Stone and Creem. And those sources spoke with a pretty united voice: McCartney was a lightweight not really worth mentioning beside Lennon. The apotheosis of this view was Philip Norman’s original version of Shout! and the Rolling Stone 1982 book The Ballad of John and Yoko.
In the 1980s grief for Lennon was raw, and McCartney was also putting out what I consider to be his weakest work (ahem, Give My Regards to Broad Street and “Ebony and Ivory.”) In my experience it wasn’t until the later 1990s — and Anthology — that the view of McCartney in the media started to shift. And with the advent of the internet and fan-created content, as well as with McCartney doing better work and performing regularly, it’s shifted still further now. But I look back and there’s a reason my first post for HD (way back in 2010!) was about the reassessment of Ram that was underway then.
I want to stress this because I think it’s important to keep in mind both that: 1) the “Standard Narrative” was a real thing for a time, pushed by men with media megaphones who wielded a kind of cultural power that now I can only compare with people like Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson; AND 2) that it’s not nearly as powerful or widespread as it once was. McCartney is getting his due now, in my opinion.
@Nancy, that’s a good point; it also highlights my confusion about what “standard narrative” we’re discussing here. There’s certainly the Rolling Stone/Philip Norman-80s through 2000s view that John was The Genius and Paul was the romantic lightweight who for some reason was John’s best friend and closest collaborator. I think that’s been amply deflated in the last twenty years or so.
However, there are other arguments that I see online, here and elsewhere, that are taking issue with elements of the Beatles’ story for which there’s way less or no evidence of that kind of severe, biased, editorial whitewashing by Boomer rock critics. An example of that is whether or not John Lennon was the band’s leader up until about 1966. John being the leader doesn’t mean Paul was unimportant, or a lightweight, or anything else. It means that the band, including Paul, considered John to be its leader. As Michael G. notes, virtually every primary source agrees on this. The new information from the last twenty years is that, from early on, Paul took a leadership role in the studio. Unsurprising, and crucial. But if you’re discussing who the Beatles thought of as their leader in those years, they apparently didn’t think it was Paul. John being the leader in Hamburg, Liverpool, on the road, on stage, and in press conferences mattered more *to the Beatles*, and those around them. That’s not failing to give McCartney his due, any more than it’s failing to give Lennon his due in recognizing that after touring ended, things flipped, and Paul was the one who was saying “this is who the Beatles are, and this is how we will do it.”
Yes, I see the current arguments you’re describing as distinct from the “standard narrative” I was talking about. To be clear, I don’t think giving McCartney his due entails seeing him as the band’s leader before “Pepper.” It seems clear that the Beatles saw Lennon as the leader before then, and that includes McCartney’s own view, which he’s expressed in interviews.
But I also think it’s folly to underplay the power wielded by the 70s-90s narrative of McCartney as a second-rate talent at best. Norman spent the intro of his recent bio of McCartney apologizing for his role in pushing that narrative.
@Nancy, that’s a great comment, but at the risk of beating this dead horse into a paste, I would like to offer my own experience of the same time, and a little data.
I think it’s really easy to overstate the influence of “men with media megaphones.” I never, not once, allowed the opinion of any rock critic to tell me what to think about Paul McCartney or his music, and I don’t think I was an outlier; Paul was MASSIVELY popular throughout the 70s, when the slagging was at its heaviest. You’d hear the single, or some songs from the LP on the radio, and buy or not buy based on that, not what Robert Christgau thought, because the act of preferring Paul over newer acts forced you out of step with the rock world. Paul sold out huge tours in America in 1976; had the fastest-selling UK single of all time in 1978 (“Mull of Kintyre”); and Wings, however reviled by people like Lester Bangs (fuck Lester Bangs), was a commercial force as big as all but the biggest acts of the decade. Paul’s biggest sin in the 70s was his refusal to become a nostalgia act, as the other three had by 1980. The reason that tracks like “Ebony and Ivory” and “Say Say Say” were such targets for critics was that people were buying them. “Ebony and Ivory” spent seven weeks at #1 in the US, was a UK #1 as well, and was the fourth-biggest single of 1982. “Say Say Say” was also a US #1, a UK #2, and a million-selling single. At Paul’s supposed nadir, 1983’s “Pipes of Peace”–an LP which I bought–he was still going platinum.
When I was skulking around the mildewy basement of the O’Hare Hilton for Beatlefest ’84, there was no perception of Paul being unloved, unappreciated, or lesser than John. Different from John, sure; a musician, whereas John was something more, something more like…a world figure? This is not the same as undervaluing Paul, and as Lennon’s feet of clay have come to the fore, there’s a sense that this status is all fake, or he didn’t deserve it. But that’s like saying people shouldn’t make a big deal about Princess Diana–they did, and do, and that intensity of connection is simply an historical fact. Will it continue? I suspect it will burn out, but who knows?
In the early and mid-80s there was a TON of grief for John, a TON of sadness that the group was now ended, but people were happily reading Norman and then Goldman without their opinion of Paul being permanently lessened, and I think it’s because people recognized the degree to which all this was grief for Lennon and the passage of his era. Yes, John was considered a genius, but Paul was still there giving us what we all craved: tuneful pop music. If Paul was considered lesser, that was as much because rock had ceased being the world-shaping force it had been. If Paul was considered less interesting than the latest thing, it was because he’d been in the public eye since 1962. And there was a sense then that Paul’s story was far from over, whereas John’s (and George and Ringo’s, really) was over.
Lennon epitomized the Sixties in a way that Paul did and does not, and so a lot of people’s feelings about John are really feelings about the Sixties–and slagging Paul, the supposed square, is a way to lionize the counterculture that was lost. That loss was felt especially keenly in the Age of Reagan. But the impact of such talk on Paul even among Beatles fans is vastly, vastly overrated, if any external measure is to be believed. Paul didn’t stop recording; he got massive distribution; he was massively popular; he was even releasing movies! Yes, Rolling Stone was working hard to deify John Lennon, and tended to undervalue Paul McCartney–but so what? Yoko was saying shitty things, too. It didn’t matter, plenty of people liked Paul and bought his records. Plenty of them happily went to see that awful Broadstreet and read every interview and cried when his wife Linda died. Dead icons and living rockstars are treated differently. This perception of Paul as injured and needing protection is, I submit, a sweet heartache of Paul fans. Sometimes he was treated unfairly by the critics; sometimes he’s been treated too generously; but it hasn’t mattered much, and it’s probably evened out.
Paul’s sales during the time of his supposed suffering leads to one of two conclusions: either those critics/the rock establishment had vastly less power than we think they did, or record buyers weren’t paying attention to them, which amounts to the same thing. People have always loved Paul, they’ve always loved his music, and they always will. They haven’t always thought he was cool, but that’s entirely different. People thought Sid Vicious was cool. Dead guys are always cool. I’d take that trade any day, and I suspect Paul would, too.
I think this is a case of YMMV. I at least was influenced by what I read, and was surprised when I finally dug into McCartney’s catalog. Did the “men with megaphones” that I’m talking about control perceptions entirely? Of course not. But I think it’s implausible to argue that what they said didn’t matter.
It’s also worth pointing out that popularity and critical recognition are very different things — Thomas Kinkeade sells a lot of paintings, but no serious critic would praise his work. And for the critics I was talking about, McCartney’s very popularity was proof he’d sold out (see the 1976 Creem cover featuring McCartney in a McDonald’s uniform).
I don’t see the need to take up cudgels for McCartney at this point: as I said, I see him as getting his due now.
I think I was influenced by the “men with megaphones”, even though I’d never heard of any of them before this year. I absorbed the dismissal of McCartney without ever noticing, or thinking very hard about it.
I’m reminded of a discussion I heard on some podcast. One guy (let’s call him Dude) was recounting a conversation with someone doing a Masters on the way Paul McCartney was mistreated by the rock press in the early 70s. Dude laughed at the idea of this Masters, saying “of course Paul McCartney was mistreated by the rock press in the early 70s, everyone knows that” (or words to that effect). But there are loads of experiences of Beatles fandom that don’t include
1) was of reading age in the early 70s
2) was reading the Rock Press
3) was reading critically.
I don’t mean to imply that you’re being as dismissive as Dude, Michael, but I do think you’re homogenizing a bit. It’s great that you were able see past the bullshit, and it’s great that Paul still had commercial success. I think it’s almost miraculous how successful Paul’s life has been in so many important ways. But I’m firmly of the opinion that the narrative propounded by Men With Megaphones has ongoing negative effects in the real world.
meaigs, I wasn’t intending to suggest my experiences were universal or to say that those who grew up later weren’t influenced by the critical views of the men I mentioned. Rather, I was attempting to ground my explication in my own experience and be specific about the sources I encountered.
Sorry for the confusion Nancy! I was really replying to Michael.
WMeaigs, thank you for not lumping me in with Dude! 🙂
I’m not holding myself up as some sort of paragon of independence–quite the opposite. I’m simply telling you how I–and most of the other music fans I knew–found and consumed music back then, and the role Paul played for us. I was firmly a John Guy, but Paul was great. If you liked Beatles music, Paul was the closest thing you could get to that. He wasn’t as good as when he was a Beatle, but none of them were, and since there were no new Beatle LPs, I was content to buy and listen to Wings Greatest until the grooves wore out. I don’t think I was unique or special in this AT ALL. Paul–by far of all the ex-Beatles–was a musical force in the 70s; Lennon was a cultural force, not a musical one, and it was only in the year after his assassination that John attained anything like Paul’s omnipresence. In the 70s and 80s, you’d hear Paul in the grocery store, the dentist’s office, everywhere. Not so Lennon, Harrison or Starr.
I’m sincerely trying to figure out what irks contemporary Paul fans so much, and apart from the gender issues I’ve mentioned, the only thing I can think of is that many contemporary fans are vastly overstating the power of criticism in the Seventies. They are taking the empowered-fan media ecology that they know and have grown up with–an environment where a single tweet can be shared 500,000 times and reach an aggregate audience of many, many millions; where a handful of male fans pissed off at an all-female Ghostbusters can raise such a stink that the movie is really injured; a digital, immediate, meme-driven culture–contemporary fans are quite naturally projecting that experience back onto the very, very different media environment of, say, 1980.
It wasn’t like that. Criticism was simply not that important for an established, major artist, because you’d actually hear the music and decide for yourself. I loved the single “Coming Up.” I bought it and played it to death. How did I hear it? FM radio. Paul McCartney never had any trouble getting airplay–not in 1971 with RAM (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” was a HUGE hit, as he was being slagged by Wenner/Christgau/Lennon), not in 1976 with “Silly Love Songs” (another HUGE hit, particularly reviled by critics), not in 1978 with “With a Little Luck,” and not in 1980 with “Coming Up.” The critics–no part of the rock press–had anything to do with my hearing his music, liking it, and buying it–and I think that was a pretty common experience. And yes, I read Rolling Stone regularly. Lots of people did; but people like Christgau and Greil Marcus were constantly trying to shove Bruce Springsteen down your throat, because he serviced some weird idea of authenticity. Whatever, dude. “Coming Up” is better.
Remember, no critics liked disco, either, and disco absolutely dominated popular music for the back half of the Seventies.Their opinion of the music, and the culture, simply didn’t matter.
Paul was treated unfairly, to some degree, by some critics and outlets–but by 1976, when he was doing the Wings Over America tour, this had simmered down to the same kind of mistreatment all public figures receive on late-night shows. He was lampooned as a square, as easy-listening, as a pothead (after his bust), with a vegetarian wife–while at the same time being freakin’ omnipresent. Yes, people made fun of “Wonderful Christmastime”–which you heard all Christmas long, and still do. I bought it because I heard it and liked it.
Paul was as popular as any other major artist–for example, Stevie Wonder or ELO. Barry Manilow, for example, was lambasted much more viciously than Paul ever was. I’m not saying that people on the internet don’t dismiss Paul, say shitty things about him, devalue him with regard to Lennon…but that’s people on the internet. I have been interacting with Beatle people since the mid-70s, and running this blog for 14 years, and it’s simply been very rare in my experience that anyone with a lick of sense dismisses Paul McCartney. They might prefer John; they might think Paul’s lyrics can be a little undercooked, or that he’s a bit too prolific for strict quality control, but…Paul’s great, and everybody I know thinks he’s great, even if they prefer other Beatles, or other music entirely. And since I don’t see the Paul-hate, I naturally think, “It must be about something else.” And nothing I’ve read on this site makes me think otherwise. I don’t mind talking about it, or reading others talking about it, but I do wish that we’d get to the “something else” that’s driving this perception of anti-Paul conspiracy, because I think it is more interesting territory.
This is really interesting to me. I don’t know if this is more to do with geography, or proximity to the Beatles fandom, but I’ve only learned this year how well-respected Paul McCartney is as an artist.
An early draft of this article had the following line:
“I had also bought that weird lie about Paul McCartney, the one that says he’s soppy and uninteresting with a few sentimental classics to his name, but otherwise not worth bothering about.”
Maybe that lie is less common in the US? The cultural position of the Beatles seems to have taken wildly different paths in the US versus the UK/Ireland, especially through the 70s.
Or maybe it’s less obvious if you’re in constant conversation about the Beatles and their solo careers.
In December of last year I *literally* only knew of Wings as a punchline to “how terrible were the 70s?” jokes. Now I love most of their output. I feel almost like I was robbed of decades of being a hardcore fan of McCartney by my experience of his cultural position.
So while I think your interpretation has merit, I also want to defend Paul’s reputation because he has so much good music that many people aren’t listening to.
@meaigs, I’m reminded of the old Steve Coogan/Alan Partridge joke, “Wings was the band The Beatles could’ve been.”
Paul’s cultural position is absolutely unassailable; that’s why he’s a punchline. He stands in for a lot of stuff because he’s an institution.
I can’t speak to the difference between the US and UK. People interested in the identity politics of rock music–a small but vocal group–decided Paul wasn’t cool in 1972, and have played variations on that theme ever since. But these are the same people who thought T. Rex was changing the face of pop music; or Brian Eno; or the Pistols; or Bauhaus; or The Smiths (and here I lose the thread because I got a life). Those are all fine bands, but…they’re just bands. It’s not 1964 anymore. The culture isn’t determined by musicians…and that’s what they’re really mad about. They want THEIR thing, who/whatever it is, to change the culture like The Beatles did. Paul stands in for the group.
Paul is Rock’s Grandad, and for people looking for something to rebel against–but not really rebel against–he’s a great stand-in. It’s precisely BECAUSE Paul is an unassailable genius that people can still make fun. I don’t pay them any mind and don’t think anyone else should, either.
@Michael. I would like to get a few things straight here, if I may. Firstly, I did not refer to any sensitivity regarding the Standard Narrative as ‘your’ sensitivity. I referred to sensitivity in general whether it is found on YouTube, forums, in books and articles, and, yes, even on blogs such as this one. I apologize if you think that was the case. Secondly, in my case I don’t follow McLennon or PID; or What Happened in India; I am not seeking for the TRUTH to be unearthed. What I meant by a full and balanced picture of the Beatles emerging after Paul’s death is the possibility that people may come forward with other information that is not known to us at the present time. It could be in the form of letters, memoirs, or personal experiences. Information that MAY become available – or it MAY NOT. It may not even exist. We just don’t know. Whatever, it has little to do whether McCartney is revered as a cultural icon post 2010 or not, although one could ask why it took so long. It’s more than obvious that mega billionaire, hyper successful McCartney still has issues that eat at him. Whether he doesn’t deserve to have any issues because of his success is not for any of us to decide.
I don’t treat the Beatles as in real time: I grew up with them in real TIME, and post 1970, had access to literature, perceptions and opinions of them in real TIME. To point out that Paul was not a purveyor of simple tuneful love songs and other things leveled at him does not validate me a passionate defender of the faith. It is reflecting what Paul himself said: that he also wrote rockers, screamers, experimental songs, psychedelic songs, baroque songs, story songs, AND love songs. And in his own way so did John, who also expressed irritation at being typecast. That was THEIR reality, not ours, as evidenced and heard in their catalogue, in real time or not, from 1960 to 1970. Neither of them were lying. And if they verbally stated at the beginning about joint decision-making regarding songs – straight from the horse’s mouth – then that is what THEY said, not us, however much we want it not to be so, or whatever side of the fence we choose to sit on because of notions of leadership.
Why go to all the trouble you might well ask. But that could be said of anybody famous (or infamous) and successful. If facts about them are incorrect – well correct them. What has that got to do with gender? What I dislike is your observation, dispassionate or not, that to supposedly ‘defend’ Paul is a) because I’m female, b) I have emotional issues that I need to vent. I can’t speak for other women but personally I find that obnoxious.
@Meaigs. Lennon’s Beatles and post Beatles output was widely accessible immediately upon his death and the years following; the wide variety of McCartney’s output wasn’t. That it skewed and colored not only the perceptions of both by Beatles fans, but also the wider public perception, was the reality of the times. It is something that can’t really be undone. If it had been Paul who had died it may have been the other way round. But it didn’t happen that way.
@Lara,
“What I dislike is your observation, dispassionate or not, that to supposedly ‘defend’ Paul is a) because I’m female, b) I have emotional issues that I need to vent. I can’t speak for other women but personally I find that obnoxious.”
…and if I’d written, “Lara, you’re only defending Paul because you’re female, and have emotional issues you need to vent,” that would indeed be obnoxious. But I did not write that. You recharacterized what I said in a narrow, chauvinistic, belittling way, then got mad at ME for supposedly saying it! I don’t think any of that, about your comments or anybody else’s.
Commenters aggrieved at Paul’s supposed mistreatment at the hands of the (white, straight, male) rock critical establishment have been overwhelmingly female. Commenters determined to push back against the perception of Paul’s being in any way subservient to John pre-Pepper–and have insisted upon a co-leadership structure as a more accurate reading, as you have–have been mostly female, too. This is simply how the blog has gone.
Conversely, commenters who tout the “Lennon as sole genius” line, or see the Beatles as a hierarchy with John on top until Pepper, and Paul on top after that, are usually male. Gender doesn’t usually make itself felt so clearly in our comments, but in these cases, it really does. Why is anybody’s guess. For example: could it be that the extremely hierarchical way males are socialized makes them more apt to see The Beatles (a group of men) as a hierarchy with SOMEONE at the top? Seems reasonable, but who knows? Why are Paul’s defenders on this site overwhelmingly female? Who knows? I am happy to provide a forum for all reasonable, well-expressed opinions.
My observing the gender breakdown of certain opinions–and it’s not 60/40, but more like 80/20 or 90/10–is not designed to invalidate one opinion or the other but, occasionally, in a tentative surmising way, try to figure out why this breaks the way it does.
I really try to stop replying once someone gets pissed off. Apologies for any part I’ve played in that; it was not intentional. I’ve heard your opinions and think they are interesting, well-reasoned, and well worth hosting. Thank you for them.
@Michael – To be fair, it wasn’t just that Paul was mistreated by the white, straight, male rock critical establishment. I can’t really speak for public opinion in America, but I also grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and I remember very well what people in the UK thought about Paul. In the 1970s, people’s perceptions were that he had broken up the Beatles to form his own band. He had his fans, of course, but he was also disliked in a way that I have never known any other musician to be disliked either before or since. When John was killed, people’s perceptions were that John was not replaceable, whereas Paul was. In other words, if Paul had been killed, the Beatles could have found someone to replace him and carried on where they left off. He was resented and pretty much hated then, and I don’t think Give My Regards to Broad Street had anything to do with that – it just reinforced the perception that Paul was the lesser talent and “John was the Beatles” (which I remember hearing all the time).
To compound things, everyone who worked with Paul shit all over him – John, George, everyone who walked away from Wings (despite how they now try to spin it), and especially Denny Laine, who was bought up by the Mail or the Mirror (or one of the tabloids) to sell Paul out and who only managed to reinforce what most people already believed. Which is completely understandable as no one had a good word to say about Paul, apart from Linda, and she didn’t count.
My point is it wasn’t just the rock critical establishment who hated Paul in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a significant proportion of the UK public as well, and I don’t think he has ever really managed to turn that round, though he does get a lot more respect these days (from other musicians at least). It will be interesting to see what sort of reception he gets at Glastonbury, which usually attracts a virtuous, open-minded and progressive type of person who hates any white, working class northern man who isn’t George Harrison. I hope it goes well for him, but I think he’s very brave to even contemplate it.
Fair enough, @Elizabeth, but then who was making “Mull of Kintyre” the biggest UK single to that date? I’m not disagreeing with you, but if “a significant proportion of the UK public hated Paul,” who was buying all the records, going to the concerts, et cetera?
The Guardian ran a piece (on 6-18 of course!) on Paul’s critical and popular reassessment. It covers a lot of what you guys are debating, and notes that he played Gastonbury back in 2004.
The thing is @Michael, when someone is as famous as the Queen, everyone has an opinion about them. Yes, Mull of Kintyre was the biggest UK single to that date. It sold something like 2.5 million copies. But it was an anthem for Scotland, so a lot of those copies were likely sold in Scotland, where 5 million people lived in 1977. The population of the UK as a whole was 56 million in 1977, so even if 2.5 million of them did buy Mull of Kintyre, that still leaves 53.5 million people who didn’t – all of whom had an opinion about Paul McCartney.
Maybe you have to be British, or maybe you had to have been there to really get it. For all his mistreatment by the rock music press in the US, Paul seems to be publicly revered there in a way that he just isn’t in the UK, where he is still largely considered, well, embarrassing. I personally don’t think it has anything to do with the ‘standard narrative’ that was invented by the likes of Philip Norman. I just think that’s what happens when all someone’s mates turn on them – everyone assumes that it must be their fault, especially when it happens over and over again.
@Nancy, I’m in full agreement with you here, having also read the books and magazines you mentioned. And yes, Give My Regards to Broad Street was a misguided and badly timed clunker and difficult even for Paul’s most ardent fans to give him a pass on that one. I also believe the term ‘standard narrative’ is an awkward one. Perhaps popular or populist narratives may be more suitable and less loaded semantically.
There appears to be a big disconnect in how Americans and non Americans view Paul. Irrespective of how many albums Paul sold, or how many people cheered him during his appearances on British chat shows, during the 80s and the 90s and beyond, it was almost embarrassing for anyone to admit they liked McCartney. Partly it was his own fault of course, but I’m not alone in observing this. Sure there were those who bought and listened to his music on the sly, including the cool musos of the day who outwardly cold-shouldered Paul’s uncoolness but nevertheless nicked his ideas at the same time. Mud sticks; it damages long term, and it still lingers. True, this has lessened considerably into the 21st century, largely due to the huge respect Paul receives NOW from other songwriters and musicians past and present, but that wasn’t always the case.
The media does control how artists are perceived after their deaths. When Elvis died in 1977, did we see images of young rock and roll Hound Dog Elvis with his quiff and sexy on-stage gyrations, everything that actually made him famous in the first place? The very Elvis who so impressed the young teenaged Beatles? No, it was fat Elvis in his white sequined jumpsuit, a figure of fun, and that portrayal has lasted for years. Despite being the biggest selling solo artist to date in 1977. It’s easy to say people are big enough and important enough to be made fun of but it doesn’t always translate well.
How about John? When he was killed, we didn’t see househusband John on our screens and in our newspapers. No, that would have been too boring. Instead we got political John in his Che Guevara getup, or peace and love John at the Amsterdam Hilton, despite the fact that John had already rejected his earlier political beliefs.
Paul? Probably old bloke with dyed hair. And Ringo too.
@ Michael. “Commenters determined to push back against the perception of Paul’s being in any way subservient to John pre-Pepper–and have insisted upon a co-leadership structure as a more accurate reading, as you have–have been mostly female, too. This is simply how the blog has gone.”
But I’ve never said that. The other Beatles, including Paul, regarded John as their leader. They still did in 1969, even Paul. John led the band to succeed; Paul led the band to keep going. I have never said anything to the contrary.
But unless anyone can produce documented written evidence that in 1963, John said to Paul and in 1967, Paul said to John: these are the sort of songs I now want you to write and how I want you to write them, now go off and write them, then the notion of any MUSICAL leadership or direction is meaningless. As in directing or deciding melodies, lyrics, riffs, solos, orchestral arrangements, guitars, drums, whatever – in the studio, at Kenwood, at Cavendish, in India, on holiday… . Where is this evidence? I’d like to see it. And evidence, not interpretation.
First, @Lara, love your comments! And btw, all your points apply to the US. I don’t think there is much difference between the US & UK experiences. Certainly, my experience was the same.
Second, why is this group so obsessed with the “leadership” of the Beatles? And what does this mean? Was John the CEO of the Beatles? What exactly are the duties of a “leader” of the band? Selecting members? Choosing musical direction? Venues? Creative direction? If so, how many of these duties was John responsible for without equal input from Paul?
Regarding member selection. John chose Paul. He said this in ’80. Paul was the only member he chose. Paul chose George. George chose Ringo.
Then there is musical direction. This was equally shared by Lennon and McCartney. The same goes for creative direction. Their look, their sound, their attitude. This was all created together. Also with George.
Their vision and ambition? This was also between the two main architects, John and Paul. No one is more ambitious than McCartney or Lennon. They dreamed this dream together.
From the day Paul joined John’s group, the two of them made all creative decisions together.
Also, there was no leader in the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership. No one has ever disputed this.
Did John have the ability to rally the troops, yes! But that’s mostly bc Paul was keen to do everything.
And yes, there were many people who thought John was the “leader” in Germany, but there were also many people who thought Paul was the leader, especially on stage. Even Astrid said this. The same goes for Liverpool when they returned. There are many comments from people who said that the leadership of the Beatles seemed shared and interchangeable, especially on stage. So this “leadership” idea is quite elusive to me. I think it was always shared, from the start to the end.
@Lily
I agree completely!
@ Micheal
I think Lara made some good points. Following from her thoughts…
The notion of leadership as it is commonly understood is outdated, organizations don’t function as simple hierarchies. There are many forms of leadership/systems of shared responsibilities.
And in terms of the Beatles, it’s important to define what we mean by leadership. What decisions were made that required leadership? Musically speaking, McCartney expanded the repetoire of songs since the days of the Quarrymen. He pushed for better get up on stage during that time too. Quarrymen members noted how in sync Lennon and McCartney were. Both he and Lennon wanted success so making it to Hamburg, booking gigs, and writing songs were goals and tasks shared by both of them because they both went all in with a shared dream. So… What do we mean by leadership when we talk about the Beatles?
Given the type of ‘leadership’ the Beatles as a band seems to have required, the idea that Lennon and McCartney were (perhaps sometimes volatile) co-leaders does not seem so preposterous to me. The badge of leadership may have been given to Lennon in the beginning, but in practice the role seems to have fallen to both of them.
@Kari
As I noted on another recent thread, I am intrigued by this idea of leadership within the Beatles and how it was both assumed and practiced.
I would submit that it is not necessarily leadership that is no longer hierarchical, but rather management. A rather good example from the 90s was Nucor Steel’s extremely flat vertical structure.
I know this sounds as if I am splitting a hair, but I suggest it only because I am wrestling with the question of where leadership, management, and collaboration started, ended, and overlapped within the Four.
In some of the examples that others have provided, I see them as being a management issue and something that could be parceled out to anyone within the group competent enough to carry out the task.
On the other hand they were certainly master collaborators and freely exchanged ideas. What I wonder about is how the leadership role shifted around within that collaboration. This is where I accept your last sentence about both John and Paul wearing the leadership badge. I wish we could have sat in on everything pre Get Back to watch the fluidity of that leadership.
“I do wish that we’d get to the “something else” that’s driving this perception of anti-Paul conspiracy, because I think it is more interesting territory.” There is no conspiracy, Michael, and I’m sorry to be harsh, but to me, that charge is one way of shutting down voices. The reason you have not encountered any anti-Paul hate is surely because you have associated with like-minded diehard Beatles fans at Beatlefests, etc? I wouldn’t expect to come across any anti-Paul attitudes either. Paul was heard everywhere, in grocery stores and dentists – which is why his songs were dismissed as elevator music, wasn’t it? Paul has been around since 1962. Sure, so have Dylan and the Stones. Why ‘supposed’ grievances? It is critical praise and recognition that artists crave, and you can reel off as many million sellers of Paul’s as you like (the run of which ended in the mid 80s) but that doesn’t change a thing. Long after Jann Wenner et al in America and Charles Shaar Murray in the UK, and long before the advent of the internet, McCartney was subjected to a constant stream of poor reviews, snide remarks and insults in the press, and unfavorable comparisons to Lennon. I agree with @Elizabeth. Nobody is inventing this stuff to satisfy some misplaced umbrance on Paul’s behalf. If Lennon can feel wounded and van Gogh and Beethoven and countless other artists can feel wounded, there is no reason why McCartney shouldn’t feel wounded either. But he’s a popular lad so it doesn’t matter.