IPaul McCartney completed his trilogy n very big steps and took fifty years to complete it. What, nothing more? Basically everything went very quickly and without any help. He already had “McCartney”, still uncounted, when he officially announced the end of the Beatles in April 1970. In private, the sky was full of Höfner violin basses for him, as the self-satisfied singalong “The Lovely Linda” signaled at the beginning, for which he then got a good beating. He was accused of lack of taste not only for this album, but for the entire early work, until “Band on the Run” silenced everyone. The criticism went grotesquely wrong: It is not just from today’s point of view that the one who became solo should be considered the godfather of power pop.
With “McCartney II” in 1980 he gave the Wings the run-off. The many synthesizers irritated a little, but also betrayed his sense of contemporaneity, which could be groundbreaking. He got his claws out on the single “Coming Up”, a flawless piece of pop like Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” at the time or his later duets with peers like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson.
Gospel of gratitude and pain
And now he’s putting “McCartney III” (Capitol Records) under the Christmas tree. The gift is accepted gratefully, if only because of the good mood that some of his stupidities spread: “Yankee toes and Eskimos can turn to frozen ice” – did you know that? Or that with this “Lavatory Lil”, who is so nice, but be careful: “You think that she’s a winner when she’s cooking you dinner / But she’s really moving in for the kill … You think she’s being friendly, but she’s looking for a Bentley. ”The boogie pounds along as if Little Richard was still alive. Then “Slidin ‘” rocks powerfully to psychedelic verses.
The main piece, “Deep Deep Feeling”, is an eight and a half minute, thoroughly composed gospel of gratitude and pain, which – what else – causes violent love, unfortunately lyrically unimaginative. Perhaps that is intentional, and one can attest to the almost eighty-year-old either senility or sovereignty. Now it can be assumed anyway that someone, to whom every impulse of life turns to music, doesn’t give a damn what people think of him, as he did in “Seize the Day”, because of the Ray Charles memory intro on the Wurlitzer organ most convincing piece on the record, admits: “I don’t care to be bad / I prefer to think twice / All I know is it’s quite a show / But it’s still alright to be nice.”
Fifty years solo
Paul McCartney was always characterized by this shrugging friendliness and also shaped this late work, which only to a limited extent offers the notorious catchiness that his Fireman works refused to offer. At the same time, this is not an ambient record now, the guitaristic element, including the acoustic, is too strong, from which miniatures feed again, whose melodiousness, as if shaken out of their sleeves, is still puzzling.
Fifty years solo: Nobody would want to say that the Beatles’ decade doesn’t count for much in comparison. None of the four could hope to interest humanity only as an individual. Paul McCartney, however, made it the furthest. The hateful sport of playing him off against the supposedly more ingenious John Lennon has gone out of fashion. “I bless the day when you came into my life,” he sings in between. That will be for a woman. But with someone like that, you can’t do without narcissism, he probably thinks a little of himself. And if he is already happy that he is there, then gratitude is probably the least that he can expect from us.
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