Lennon or McCartney

[diesel]

all the ditsy pop stars picked McCartney

[mastaflatch]

If musicianship was the key to create good music, we'd all be listening to Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.
Also, I can understand that, given The Beatles history of hits, it can be tempting to judge their post-breakup output by their respective chart success and sales but...forget it, I'll go back to my Best of Eagles record

No kidding, a friend of mine (whose opinion I respect very much) told me that I really should listen to Wings at the Speed of Sound (since it was being re-released) because, he said, it's one of Wings/McCartney's best albums. I did. It sucks.

I prefer McCartney when he doesn't sound too self-conscious: McCartney, Ram, some of Wild Life, some of BOTR and V&M and some of his later solo output like Flaming Pie, C&CitB, the last Fireman album and a handful of mostly early singles.

[i got bugs]

Harrison is a joke. What did he do after "All Things Must Pass"? Nothing worth mentioning. Nothing that would have been popular if he wasn't a Beatle.

handle with care

and a good bit of end of the line

Exactly. You had to team him up with four other geniuses to get anything decent out of him.

It seems like he carries those songs tho

or do you mean just the others presence there made the group popular

[mastaflatch]

Harrison is a joke. What did he do after "All Things Must Pass"? Nothing worth mentioning. Nothing that would have been popular if he wasn't a Beatle.

handle with care

and a good bit of end of the line

Exactly. You had to team him up with four other geniuses to get anything decent out of him.

It seems like he carries those songs tho

or do you mean just the others presence there made the group popular

No, Harrison is a joke. A JOKE.

[Kevin Davis]

If musicianship was the key to create good music, we'd all be listening to Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.

What you're talking about here is virtuosity, i.e. unrestrained showmanship, which is not what people mean (I don't think) when they describe McCartney's technical abilities, so much as they mean a formal mastery over the discipline of composition, of bass playing, that he is able to harness and bend to suit his own instincts. I think Lennon -- as a composer anyway -- had more of that formal sophistication than he is getting credit for here, at least as a Beatle; songs from "I'll Be Back" to "Girl" to "Mr. Kite" to "Across the Universe" are all the kinds of musically smart, theoretically engaged songs that rarely feel stumbled upon by some type of savant-like accident, or even via the good examples of a bandmate. Lennon could write songs, and he knew music. But McCartney was always one level up, and over time Lennon seemed less and less interested in curating that side of his artistry, gradually falling back on relative simplicity in deference to what I can only surmise he felt was the deeper importance of his message. Granted, I am not an expert on Lennon's solo work by any means, having never been compelled to pursue it beyond the introductory anthologies -- it always seemed to be straining after a significance that was perpetually just beyond reach, and painted an uncomplicated picture of war and peace and human suffering that always felt more arrogant than compassionate. I ultimately find his "Imagine"/"Give Peace a Chance"/"Working Class Hero" stuff trite in a way that McCartney crooning about goats and doorbells could never be.


McCartney has stumbled through his post-Beatles career with a sort of blissful ignorance that I find appealing -- even through his many curious failures, there is a sense of freedom that belies the usual loss of checks and balances affiliated with being a rich legacy artist whose label will put out any old piece of crap he spits out, freedom in the sense of sincerely uninhibited creativity with only marginal interest in (or, at the very least, a naive understanding of) how the public at large will perceive it. Occasionally, he still comes up with stuff that makes you remember who he is. But long-term, he has carved out a career path for himself not all dissimilar to Bob Dylan's or Neil Young's -- in voluntary servitude to a wildly erratic muse, his missteps atypically compelling for their contribution to a story, an artistic life, that transcends any of their singular shortcomings, and the successes more abundant than they may first have appeared once you step back and take in the whole picture.

[mastaflatch]

I may have been a bit disingenuous with my Satriani comment but basically, you know what I mean and we all know that it's down to taste in the end. What I really meant is this: being a complete and technically fluent musician means next to nothing when it comes to composing great rock music. It's all about inspiration and the musicians you're with when you arrange and record. Roger Waters and Eddie Vedder are probably the least technically able musicians of their respective bands yet they knew (at some point) better than anybody else how to get the best out of them. I'm not trying to minimize McCartney's talent here; I admire him and he's one of my absolute heroes but so is Lennon. I can't wrap my head around some people's binairy way of thinking assuming that McCartney=absolute genius and Lennon=lazy talentless hypocrite who just got lucky. They both had their moments and when they stumbled, they both could release total crap. I'm not going to praise McCartney's little lambs, dragonflies and doorbells in order to justify anything here. Lennon could do the naive thing effortlessly, for better and for worse while McCartney's calculated soppiness ends up sounding lifeless bordering on the condescending as much as Lennon's most pedestrian "protest" songs.

[epilogue]

Well, whatever else, I'm firmly in camp Lennon, but I will say that McCartney had the best solo album (Ram). Even if Lennon had much more solo music that I enjoy, and McCartney never came close to that level again.

[Kevin Davis]

I don't think anyone would deny that a lot of great music has been composed by people with rudimentary technical knowledge, and I would agree that an academic understanding of music alone is a useless predictor of whether or not someone can produce quality work. However, I don't think that's reasonable cause to downplay its potential as a creative tool in the hands of the right composer. You ultimately insinuate with this line of thinking that someone like Paul McCartney ultimately has no further musical horizons open to him than someone like Sid Vicious, an idea that's romantic but inaccurate. The Beatles' music is what it is because of the way they were able to filter a deep understanding of theory -- of how complex chords play off each other, on how certain melodic ideas create harmonies and tensions against particular chord types -- through their own artistic vision and instinctual senses for why songs work. Four men coasting on "inspiration" alone could not have achieved what they achieved -- culturally, perhaps, but not artistically.

What sticks with me from Paul's solo work is melody, which is Paul's strength; what sticks with me from John's is preachiness, which is his weakness. Within the context of the Beatles I have no desire to separate the work of the two men. But as two different solo artists, my preference for McCartney is absolute.

[Iprefertheiroldstuff]

We need Stip to post in this thread, then video record McParadigm's reaction to reading said post.

[epilogue]

I'm not saying Lennon never came across preachy. He certainly did. But Lennon's solo career is way more colorful than that. And it's not like he was devoid of melody himself. Watching the Wheels or Starting Over or Oh Yoko are every bit as inspired melodically as most of McCartney's work. And none of those songs are preachy.

Lennon's songs also had guts, too. Blemishes. Bruises. Asked questions (albeit easy at time). Hurt a little. McCartney never affected me like that. But he never really tried either. That's not what his music was about. But that's another reason why I prefer Lennon.

[epilogue]

We need Stip to post in this thread, then video record McParadigm's reaction to reading said post.

Please and thank you.

[Farmer John]

I think Harrison wins best Beatles solo album with All Things Must Pass.

[PryTo]

I have to reverse engineer this. McCartney wrote the best baselines of all time, but he also wrote nearly every really awful Beatles song: Obladi Oblah Blah, Lady Madonna, When I'm 64, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Magical Mystery Tour, Your Mother Should Know, Hello Goodbye, Penny Lane, Martha My Dear, Rocky Raccoon, Fixing a Hole.

Bleech. That's a whole lot of suck. Lennon didn't come up with anything close to that in terms of quantity of shitty songs. McCartney's best songs are great and his work ethic was top notch. Lennon was lazy, but a musical genius, if there is such a thing. He also sang with infinitely more feeling. Check the demos of Strawberry Fields for evidence. Man, that guy had an incredible voice.

Of course, the very worst Beatles songs were nearly all sung by Ringo. You know when they threw a tune his way it was barrel scraping.

Harrison is ranked as he should be, a distant third, although there's some weird recent trend to call him the secret genius of the band. Ummmm, no. (Although I generally enjoy his contributions.)

[epilogue]

Lennon's vocal performances on Twist and Shout and (especially) Don't Let Me Down are two of the best rock vocals I've ever heard in my life. They just shatter me. Lennon's voice and vocal stylings were so far above McCartney's.

[Farmer John]

Lennon's voice and vocal stylings were so far above McCartney's.

Golden Slumbers disagrees.

[epilogue]

Lennon's voice and vocal stylings were so far above McCartney's.

Golden Slumbers disagrees.

If you dig that sort of thing. I'll take Lennon.

[Farmer John]

Lennon's voice and vocal stylings were so far above McCartney's.

Golden Slumbers disagrees.

If you dig that sort of thing. I'll take Lennon.

So would I if I had to choose. I'm just saying Lennon's not running away with it.

[epilogue]

Lennon's voice and vocal stylings were so far above McCartney's.

Golden Slumbers disagrees.

If you dig that sort of thing. I'll take Lennon.

So would I if I had to choose. I'm just saying Lennon's not running away with it.

Well, no. I mean McCartney has a beautiful voice. Obviously the dude can sing. But he doesn't have that kind of raw passion, that bare nakedness and vulnerability that Lennon had. Lennon cuts your soul in half when he sings Don't Let Me Down. He ripples flesh when he sings Across the Universe. He makes you feel drunk and exhausted when he sings I'm So Tired. I don't know. He just moves me deeply when he sings. McCartney hasn't ever really moved me like that with his vocal performance. I love his voice. But it doesn't move and twitch and bewitch the way Lennon's did.

[Wendy Carlos's Twin]

McCartney at his worst comes off as somewhat slight and fruity, whereas Lennon at his worst comes off as a complete twat, and I find that far more intolerable.

[epilogue]

What's an example you'd cite as completely twatty Lennon vocals?