The generally unkind reaction on Twitter to Sir Paul
McCartney’s appearance at the Olympic opening ceremony is further evidence that
familiarity breeds contempt. McCartney’s dyed hair is reaching a Ronnie Reagan
level of ridiculousness and his unrepentantly ‘sixties peace-and-love, man,
persona is out of time in the edgy decade of the 21st Century. But,
as Paul Gambaccini once remarked, every time Paul McCartney leaves a room the
correct reaction is to think “there goes Mozart.” That can never be taken from
him.
A post-revolutionary world finds it difficult to imagine life
in a pre-revolutionary one. John Lennon said that before Elvis, there was
nothing, but he could say that because he was John Lennon. It was like Sinatra
saying Tony Bennett was the best crooner in the world. We all know they’re only
saying it to be nice.
The Beatles revolutionized music to such a degree that the
revolution is now the establishment. Classical music had disappeared up a blind
atonal alley by the 1950s and 60s, from which its never fully returned – The
Beatles reminded the world that harmony and melody still have a place and,
although the classicists themselves would be loathe to admit it, may yet play a
play in the return of that high art. Check out Howard Goodall’s excellent discussion of this on You Tube. It’s superb.
Without The Beatles, rock music would have been limited to
three chord tricks and twelve bar blues. The Beatles opened it up to a whole
new world of depth. Without The Beatles, there could never have been a Bohemian
Rhapsody. The Beatles blazed a trail for all to follow.
The Beatles were many bands rolled into one. Magpies who, to
borrow a phrase from Mike Scott, heard the Big Music. They looked on all
imposters just the same, and drew no distinction between Franz Joseph Hayden
and John Lee Hooker, Ravi Shankar and Sir Arthur Sullivan. It all went into the
pot.
In five years, The Beatles went on a learning curve from
Rubber Soul to Let It Be that is unprecedented in popular music, and will never
be matched because that’s not now the music industry works any more. Now, music
is made like sausages, in factories.
The rock’n’roll ethos that rejected Tin Pin Alley has itself
been consumed by Stargate and Xenomania. Pop has eaten itself. Hit records are
made the same way as toasters and tricycles, with ISO 9000s and nothing left to
chance. The commercialism is so successful that within six months it’s safe to
use the songs in TV ads. The only thing missing is the humanity.
McCartney has never been forgiven for writing anything as
good as Yesterday in the past quarter-century. Westlife’s Flying Without Wings
isn’t as a good as Yesterday either, but it sold over 200,000 copies in the UK
alone. Nobody’s calling for Mark Chapman to shoot them, even though the case can certainly be made.
There’s a movement to intellectualise pop music, not least
because the exponents of pop’s golden era, the ‘sixties, are in the autumn of
their days and everybody likes to look back on a life and see footprints.
There’s a strange deification of the Beatles that exists
outside of the music too, that’s part of the continuing narcissism of that ‘sixties
generation. But chances are Freddie Mercury was right when he said that pop
songs were like disposable razors – you use them for three minutes, and then
you throw them away.
McCartney is still big. It’s the music that got small. Modern
music is something that plays in the background while you’re hoovering, and that
can be used again to tell you about a great deal on life insurance. But in the
centuries to come, when people look back to see peaks of musical achievement in
the west, they will see men after whom music was never the same again. Beethoven
at the start of the 19th Century, Richard Wagner at the end of it
and McCartney in the middle of the 20th. That’s who that hoarse old
guy with the funny hair was at Olympic opening ceremony on Friday night.
