McCartney and the Record Reviewers

Today Paul’s new album, Memory Almost Full, was released. We are know for sure the title is an anagram that really means “my soulmate LLM;” of course we do. News outlets of all sorts have been interviewing Paul, featuring imaginative profiles, and of course, reviewing the new album. To boil it down it is simply the best/worst McCartney has ever done; his voice is amazingly good with richer low notes/he’s too old to sing and he should have realized it; the songs are sophisticated and mature/purile and vacuous. You get the picture I’m sure. Hey, we just went through this a couple months (at least it seems like only a couple months) with Ecce Cor Meum that was either intensely great or overwhelmingly boring. Over and over I found myself muttering, “What the hell is he (virtually all music reviewers seem to be male) listening to? It certainly is NOT Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full!”

We should be used to this sort of thing. The only time Paul doesn’t get mixed reviews; he gets unanimously bad ones. What is harder to deal with is not understanding why. (I’m going to limit this posting to reviews of his music. I’ll get into the grimy question about why he is the person a lot of people love to hate some other time.) I did mention one problem a day or two ago when I did a post on righteous listening. If I’d written a review of MAF after the first time I heard it, I’d probably have compared it to Flowers in the Dirt, as one professional reviewer did. “A good album but nothing particularly special.” It wasn’t till the third time that I started REALLY hearing all that was going on. It was probably the 5th time through that I realized that I was going to love House of Wax best of all. Paul seems to do simple music but it’s not as simple as it seems. I notice that most of the reports on one of my McCartney lists have mentioned something about the second time or the third time. Of course, people who are paid to do reviews have deadlines to meet and, as someone who has gotten herself into reviewing books a time or two, I know it’s difficult to make yourself read at least half a book before you try to write about it. Reviewing is a responsibility that too few take as seriously as they should.

There’s another, much better, reason that Paul’s reviews are contradictory and sometimes a little strange. That’s because in a sense there isn’t any “pop” music any more – thanks to a famous band of the 1960s that we all know quite well. There are rock music writers and there are classical music writers. Rock music has become something that resembles only one Beatles song, (and doesn’t resemble it very closely) Revolution. I personally decided many years ago that I wasn’t going to pay somebody for yelling at me accompanied by painful noises. To my ears, if there is anything pleasant about the sound, some reviewer will say, “it’s not rock.” By that rule, Paul McCartney doesn’t play or write much, if any, any rock. So the reviewer for Rolling Stone, Mojo and so on may very well not see much to like. The rest of the critics really like Beethoven and Schubert and so on and although they are stuck reviewing all sorts of music they don’t really “get” it. They can usually find a ballad they can like but anything faintly gets a knee-jerk reaction of distaste. When Paul writes something classical it’s actually worse. The rock reviewers REALLY don’t get it and the classical buffs each have their favorite styles and a “brotherhood” that doesn’t look kindly on interlopers from the common herd of pop/rock composers.

Obviously there are reviewers whose minds are made up long before the album comes out. Some were/are John fans or George fans. Some really think that if Paul hadn’t “broken up the Beatles” they’d still be touring to the screams of … um …. 55 year-old girls. Some love the Rolling Stones and have never been convinced that the “war” was all in the heads of the newspapers. Or they are so fond of one particular type of current music that they can’t see any other.

A third factor affects McCartney fans as well as reviewers. Almost everyone comes to a new release with expectations or merely wishes of what they want to hear. Like me wanting McCartney II to be a direct continuation of McCartney I and Ram, everyone has favorties among the 20 (or 21) prior album releases. And for the most part, Paul disappoints us by doing something that we not only didn’t anticipate but is so different that we couldn’t have anticipated. Memory Almost Full is definitely such an album. It is not a continuation of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and, outside of the single reference to Flowers in the Dirt, of any other album. Completely in line with Paul’s tradition, it’s new and different and you can tell it caught a lot of reviewers off guard. Some were disappointed and others were shocked. More then one seems resentful that an “old man” could produce anything new and different. As a contempory of the “old man” I have to say that ageism is alive and well in the Western World.

Back in the Dark Ages when the Beatles were starting out, there wasn’t a division between rock and pop music. John and Paul wrote pop music. Their pop music included both rocking songs and ballads and whatever. Paul’s still do. John’s still did. A lot of current soloists and groups still do. Some people who live in trailers are great folks and some pop singers rock better then almost anybody. People don’t have to come in isolated little boxes if they don’t want to. But if you don’t play the box game, you can expect the box types to misunderstand.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The noisiest fights in my childhood home were about my father’s high fidelity sound system (stereo wasn’t pioneered until I was in my teens). The Hi-fi was a collection of speakers, from woofer to tweeter, Pa placed in one of the kitchen cupboards built into the interior wall between the kitchen and the living room. The cupboard drawer hid them from the kitchen side and the square grand piano was in front and above so whatever he did there was invisible. The amplifiers and pre-amplifiers were in the bookshelves behind the door between the kitchen and study and the turntable and radio receiver were located in the study. The majority of these components Pa had built himself using Heathkits.

The arguments were not about what was being played or even that it was being played; they were about what Pa called “room volume.” He said, and it was true, that the quality of the reproduction of the original instruments was better at a higher volume. (I suspect that the loss of cupboard space in the kitchen had been included in the arguments in the early days.)

As little as 15 years ago most stereos didn’t do as good a job on the sound at low volumes, I know because I don’t like to listen to music at a high volume and it was almost impossible to find one I could afford that performed adequately for me. (Because of Pa’s great interest in the best possible sound, I’m pretty unforgiving about poor sound with truncated highs and buzzing lows.

This morning someone on one of the Beatles mail-lists I subscribe to posted the URL to an article about tricks to increase the loudness of popular music by messing with it during the process of recording an mixing and the fact that listening to them isn’t good for people.  http://tinyurl.com/26kvz5 I have always disliked loud sounds, as well as heavy odors even if they are pretty ones and it was nice to find out that perhaps I’m not really a complete nervous-Nellie.

Paul McCartney’s new CD has not, I’m sure, been subjected to this process, and the sound quality over my computer with my speakers that are a lot better then the ones usually shipped with a computer, is as expected very good. Even the extreme low notes at the opening of House of Wax (it really sounds like a didgeridoo but may of course be electronically generated) may be distinctly heard and the high harmonics of the electric guitar in the same song are pure and undistorted. It is quite an accomplishment to  have a wild and emphatic guitar solo without either feedback or distortion and I am deeply grateful to whoever is responsible for it.