"McCartney's New Album Deemed Best in Years"

Insert old fart of choice

uhhhh............what!?

sometimes i think the people at AP might be the laziest writers outside of a 10th grade english clasroom.

this is almost as bad as making non-news news. (why not "paul McCarney is not dead" ... well, the again, that was news once)

xpost - man, that totally ruined it.

no, his voice sounds pretty old on most of it. it sounds better than it did on some of Driving Rain, but he still slips into "grandma mccartney" voice on a lot of the slow songs.

I don't know. I'll have to hear the album. In a way, the charge is a serious one. It implies that there was some contrivance in the songwriting process.

I know how easy it is to do, because I've done it myself. I thought of my 1997 album "Ping Pong" as a "return to core Momus values", and it was partly influenced by the fact that some younger artists in London at the time seemed to be influenced by my work. I tried to hear my own work through their ears, hear what they were specifically attracted to, and focus on making more work in that vein. Instead of trying to become someone else, expand, I tried to become myself, or rather, my earlier self, as curated by these young whippersnappers (people like Anthony of Jack, Dickon of Orlando). The result was a sort of self-parody, in the form of songs like "My Pervert Doppelganger". So I can hear when another artist is doing this consolidation, self-curation thing. I don't think it's criminal, but I do think it qualifies as pandering to the audience. That's what I feel about Bowie now; he's stopped trying to be other people, and is just trying to be himself, pandering to the people who love his old work by making more of the same. But of course the old work contained this divergent movement, this desire to be a new person, and the new work contains a convergent movement, the desire to be who you "are", so the attempt always fails.

momus is probably right, bu he's also completely beside the point. nobody's expecting paul mccartney to break any sound barriers. he's never been a self-reinventor, why should he start now? and if anyone's allowed to sound like the beatles, he is.

i think mick jagger just can't be bothered getting a new haircut. he's worth 300 million, he doesn't give a shit. no hackneyed secondhand pomo theorizing necessary to explain it.

That piece on your blog is ironic. You champion a solo Moog composition Jagger did for a Kenneth Anger film and John and Yoko's Erection film as alternatives to the McCartney and Bowie approaches. Why? Because these things are examples of radical modernism? What does this have to do with art today?

If the production on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is veering more toward a postmodern approach, that's good. (I don't know how successful it is yet. Haven't heard the album yet.) Driving Rain could have benefited a lot from more postmodern ideas for arrangements and production.

I don't know if i would call the new records production postmodern but it certainly sounds good. I love some of the unusual intrumentation and it adds a lot to something like Jenny Wren for example.

Honestly, how ridiculous! Disagree with my arguments if you like, but don't post silly lies intended to smear my motives. The last time I worked with a producer was 1987. I produce all my own work. I have never had any contact whatsoever with Nigel Godrich. I couldn't afford him, and I wouldn't choose him even if I could. If I wanted a producer I'd probably choose Rusty Santos.

I'm amazed to discover that McCartney thinks anything he's ever done was actually crap

I wanted to make the point that marketing tends to pressurize artists to be either divergent (exciting, new, different) or convergent (an old, trusted, established brand). Often an artist breaks into the market as a diverger and, if he's still around 40 years later, ends it as a converger. This is more a marketing requirement than a necessary or natural artistic trajectory. (Left to their own devices, divergers don't necessarily become convergers as they age.) And it contains a paradox: how do you consolidate your established brand if your brand image, established when you were young, is disorientation, constant change, experimentation? It's this paradox which makes any artist who established a radical image in the 60s and early 70s look, now, like an impersonator of themselves. I linked to the radical side projects by Lennon and Jagger to show a parallel paradox: that for these artists, discontinuity would be the best guarantor of continuity with their young selves.

The Wire is a good example of the marketing trope I mention above; they tend to cover you either when you're a divergent young Turk promising to save the avant garde, or when you're a chuffing old whitebeard wearing a beaded African hat and living in a converted windmill. The February 2035 Wire cover is mine!

"Kisses on the Bottom" from a 69 year old man.

take it to redtube

"____________'s New Album Deemed Best in Years"
Insert old fart of choice

― Raymond Douglas Dadaismus (Dada), Tuesday, 13 September 2005 12:03 (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We need a 'Rolling Old Fart's New Album Deemed Best in Years' thread

Old Fart!!!'s New Album Deemed Best in Years

Doesn't Dylan own that sentence?

Bowie used to , but..

Yeah, Dylan's the king of this really; McCartney is a leading practitioner too; everyone's given up on Van Morrison ever putting out an album that doesn't sound like his 200 previous albums; after having put out a few albums that actually lived up to the the hype Neil Young is getting there; Leonard Cohen doesn't put out enough albums; Lou Reed actually tries different things but he's usually the worst thing about them.... any others?

I'm sure Dylan got a lot of this for a long while, but from Time Out Of Mind to Love & Theft to Modern Times it was more "still going!" than "a comeback!" and i'm pretty sure nobody said "best in years" for Together Through For Life

I dunno, Wiki has "generally favourable", and it made number 1 over here...

I didn't say people hated it, I said people didn't say "best in years." Reviews were relatively muted compared to the five-star action the last decade's haul got.

bowie seems like a better example of someone where every album was a "comeback" album

Every Rolling Stones album starting with Steel Wheels was "their best since Some Girls!"

yeah bowie and stones are probably the most consistent examples of "y'know how i said the last one the best in years? ok, so i might've jumped the gun on that one but THIS ONE..."

ha xpost

I would say Springsteen but The Rising seems to have kept its esteem, not that i can imagine wanting to hear it.

the problem with figuring this out is knowing Rolling Stone likes to do this for every damn boomer

The Beastie Boys may have entered this pantheon

oh and eminem

yeah Beasties may be the new school kings

but yeah Bruce, Elvis Costello, a lot of others have kind of hit a plateau where that narrative doesn't regenerate itself as persistently anymore

In dylan's case it was true, and croup is right, reception of together through life was muted in comparison to the last few

If you count his book, the radio show, the studio records, and the bootleg series stuff that came out, you could argue dylan did his greatest volume of good work since the 60s

haha if you count releases of old archival recordings then lots of boomer artists have been doing their best work since the '60s in recent years

Neil Young also in the "yeah yeah we know you're BACK" category.

haha if you count releases of old archival recordings then lots of boomer artists Van Halen have been doing their best work since the '60s- '80s.

Of course, every 'other' Fall album.

when REM reached this category it was a sad triumph as a longtime fan

Come on, people - PRINCE is the answer you're looking for here.

oh and eminem

I hate to break it to you but eminem is never going to make any more good music ever

some dude: like who? I can't think of many ppl that have out as much significant unreleased or live stuff as the bootleg series

Neil's the only one that comes close

And either way dylan put out three amazing studio albums in a row

Aye, sure he did

Sonic Youth fell into this camp circa, I dunno, Washing Machine, A Thousand Leaves, or at latest Murray Street.

Depeche and the Cure are very much in this cycle.

Murray street rules, I would listen to that right now over daydream nation

some dude: like who? I can't think of many ppl that have out as much significant unreleased or live stuff as the bootleg series

― dave coolier (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, February 10, 2012 10:20 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure not AS MUCH as Dylan in terms of volume, but i mean you might as well call The Promise or The Smile Sessions a 'comeback record'

Depeche and the Cure are very much in this cycle.

"First album for ages" is not the same thing.

Yes, Kate Bush is excluded for that reason too

Is four years between albums too much, then?

Madonna?

Scanning all the suggestions for this category in the last 25 posts, I don't see any that strike me as egregious. Pretty much anybody I've ever cared about crosses this line eventually, from Neil Young to the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo. They still make great music, but for me it happens a track at a time, and the most realistic expectation is two or three an album. If you're lucky--it might be more like one every two or three albums.

well anyone no-one is going to say this about the new mccartney album, which is pretty good, for what it is, but not his best in years by any measure.

Yeah, Dylan's the king of this really... any others?

― Charles Kennedy Jumped Up, He Called 'Oh No'. (Tom D.), Friday, February 10, 2012

Best Album Since Blood On The Tracks

I think he's got an album of original songs coming out later this year?

http://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/news/27656-new-album-artwork-reveal

high hopes

(for the album, not the artwork)

Talk about hedging your bets with Paul Epworth and Mark Ronson and George Martin's son.

Anyway, I heard it's his best album in years.

I am assuming he did old songs last night in Hollywood on the Jimmy Kimmel show

http://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/tour-blog