Bonus Content: Paul McCartney & Bruce Springsteen Live

I don't really have much to say about this, and I don't really have to. Sometimes when I look up videos for the site YouTube serves me things that don't really go anywhere, but I would like to give the thumbs up to anyway, so this video of Paul McCartney onstage with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is gonna sit here anyway just radiating awesomeness.

Paul McCartney: New

This doesn't exactly sound like a veteran's album, although there aren't many who have been around the pop game longer than McCartney so I guess he's setting the pace about how good you can be 50 years into your career. You expect sappy old man music, but this isn't it by a long shot. The litmus test I have applied to New is, "What if this were the debut album from some other artist?" Discounting the defensive-reflective "Early Days," you could almost buy into it. And this hypothetical artist would be onto something. He would be lauded for getting to a Paul McCartney-like sound while also adding something new into the mix: as someone with an advanced knowledge of pop songcraft and the way things used to be/ought to be, but with their own spin and atmosphere. That's what gets me. There is a safe way to "do Paul McCartney," a certain way we expect our rock vets to comport themselves. And maybe there's some of that here: a good-natured safeness creeps in at times...but by and large it's almost daring how nakedly poppy it is. We're talking full-bodied, all-rhythm, hooky wall-of-sound classic pop. Not in a cloying way, either, but a real brassy one.

Paul McCartney has not reinvented himself by any stretch. When you've been around this long, and have done that much that is so varied, it's really just a question of which aspects of your style are you going to present at any given time? What you don't really expect, at least not right out of the gate, is an opening track like "Save Us," a buzzy, bracing, breakneck rocker that reminds us that yeah, "Cut Me Some Slack" happened. He's well aware of his toolkit, and he's not afraid to mix and match that kind of growling guitar with his quirky self-harmonizing on "Alligator." There are tracks like the Brian Wilson-like title track or "Early Days" that celebrate and acknowledge the past, and then there are ones like "Queenie Eye," which are just fun. There's an abundance of songs that sound like a way forward, like the thumping electronic "Appreciate," the grooving "I Can Bet" or "Road," which sounds lightly Arcade Fiery. Whether your enjoy this album or not, you can't accuse it of trying too hard to rehash past successes. It wins or loses on its own merits, here and now. The win column, though, for me goes on and on. "Everybody Out There," sounds like a mid-era Beatles tune covered by a modern band. "Looking At Her" is just nuts.

It announces right up front that Paul McCartney is not just interested in putting us through the paces of "being Paul McCartney." He wants you to remember that he is Paul fucking McCartney, and he has forgotten more about writing awesome music than most people ever learn. Every single type of song conceivable, he's already done. Even amidst today's diverse and experimental crop of indie popsters, one of the biggest compliments you could level is still "Hey, that sounds like something Paul McCartney did." So presented here, to take or leave, is what Paul McCartney is doing. Writing Paul McCartney music for 2013. He manages to avoid being stuck in his ways, while showing the virtues of the first principles. There are flaws if you look hard enough for them, and sometimes it feels like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, for the most part it works within his strengths, and it's nothing I wouldn't forgive when I'm having a good time. Believe me, I'm no blind devotee: I wasn't going to like this album just because it existed and applaud Paul for just getting up in the morning. I had no intention of even checking it out until I started reading the reviews.

Albums like these are fascinating cases to write about. It's won't win new fans, and it's not designed to appeal to old ones per se, just to wake them up, to test them and see if there's room in their hearts to grow along with him. Maybe, in fact, it's for me, the 26-year-old avowed lifelong Beatlemaniac and music nerd, who wants to see what the old fella has left in him. I return to my original premise. As a Paul McCartney album in his overall discography, it's somewhere in the middle, sure. As a Paul McCartney album in 2013, it's great. If it were the same album by a new 26-year-old artist, you'd think he was a damn genius. So there's that.

Who is Paul McCartney?: How The Beatles Still Matter

When all was said and done after the Grammy awards last night, there was one question looming large over the ceremony. It wasn't "What Killed Whitney Houston?" It wasn't "Why do people still pay attention to Chris Brown?" And it wasn't "What's a Bon Iver?"

The question was: "Who is Paul McCartney?"


Pictured: ???

The always-insightful Twitterverse provided a massive bank of tweets questioning exactly who this elderly British gentleman on their TVs was. And I, being the resperctable (sp?) online music journalist I am, or claim to be, was shocked -- shocked! -- that there was anyone out there who did not immediately know the founding bassist for Wings.

Admittedly, it's easy to have missed "Sir" Paul, who has flown under the radar for several decades in obscure bands. Every so often he collaborates with a more established artist, like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, or Youth, but mainly it's considered a tax dodge for those superstars. Charity. Cunningly, he's remained underground, cultivating a rabid, vocal, but decidedly minute fanbase, over the past five decades.

Okay. Most people know. If you're reading this blog, it's likely you know me directly and I don't think I would associate myself with you if you couldn't at least pick out three of the four Beatles (George is a bit easy to miss.) However, playing Devil's advocate for a minute, let's acknowledge the audience for the Grammys. For starters, as I mentioned, a disproportionate number of the audience is in favour of abuse. We're not always dealing with the smartest, most aware section of the audience here. It's easy to understand exactly how a musician whose glory days were thirty years before their birth escaped their notice. There's a lot of people, not wrongly, focused on the here-and-now, on the Rihannas and Lady Gagas and LMFAO. This is their world, and the Beatles, that's something old and irrelevant. And honestly, if you're not someone who already knows who Paul McCartney is, you'll probably be perfectly fine continuing to not know. It's not necessary for you.

But even making allowances for how it happens and why it's okay, there's something gnawing at me, sparked by this tweet:



And there's just something not quite right about that. Because although the numbers add up, that seems like a false piece of logic. That seems to preclude any 15-year-olds from caring about Sir Paul, that it's silly to consider they might. But they do. Somehow, the music has survived. I get parents in my store beaming that they're picking up a copy of Abbey Road for their 12-year-old kids, that they asked for The Beatles Rock Band when it came out, that they love Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd too. I don't think a subset modern 30-year-olds, fifteen years ago, would be caught in a new wave of Comomania.

I'm not here to talk about why Paul McCartney still matters: why his accomplishments deserve recognition, why his legacy should stand. I'm here to acknowledge that it does. That the Beatles fans of the world are constantly being replenished, at least partially, by new discovery, in a way that throwaway pop of bygone days doesn't usually.

On the Internet, nothing dies. Everything lingers, waiting to be reborn. The Beatles, conveniently, form the beginning of the narrative of pop music. Although I love earlier music, if you go back further than 1964, it becomes a bit estranged. But they were there at the time, and were largely the catalyst, popular music took a very solid form. Any fan of the Foo Fighters or Arcade Fire or Bon Iver or some band I haven't heard of yet can trace its lineage back to that time, and now that we have the Internet, we can let that continue to be a well-traveled route, for anyone interested in visiting. You don't even have to be 15 to start; I wasn't. Part of that is due to advocates constantly building the narrative of the Beatles as the greatest, myself included. But it wouldn't have taken hold if there weren't enough evidence to support it.

There may come a day, although I doubt I'll be around, when the Beatles legend finally collapses and nobody thinks about them anymore, when the history of music has moved on to where their moment can no longer be marked as the beginning of anything relevant. Where Abbey Road and A Hard Day's Night are as alien as the old-time crooners or depression-era ditties. But I doubt that their significance will dampen soon, because what they started will probably remain part of the narrative for as long as I'm talking about music. The Beatles will be in that same classification as Socrates or Galileo: Their work was before our time, and much has come since, but they will always be known to the anyone who follows them in their field.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Cover: Foo Fighters, "Band on the Run"

Pretty much a perfect cover: it highlights what's so awesome about the original while also making it comfortably a product of the cover band. A great workout for the Foos' style. Not much more can be said. Well done.