80-year-old Paul McCartney: The late win over John Lennon

40 years after John Lennon's death, Paul McCartney still feels his heavy shadow, but at 80 he can announce a surprising and unexpected victory in the eternal derby between them

Doron Cohen, Maariv

19/06/2022

Sunday, 19 June 2022, 11:00 Updated: 11:03

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Paul McCartney (Photo: GettyImages)

Even when he reaches the age of 80 and accumulates twice as many years of life as his partner John Lennon, who was murdered at the age of 40, still haunts Sir Paul McCartney the inevitable and incessant comparison between them, as well as the long and heavy shadow of his dead friend, who remained young and did not feel the Botox touch On his forehead.

The close competition and covert rivalry between the two, which created the most tumultuous and fruitful derby of the merry 1960s, went nowhere and has remained the same to this day.

Luckily for them they played in the same team and thus breathed new life into the immortal statement attributed to their fellow city, the legendary manager Bill Shankly, according to which the two best teams in England are Liverpool and its reserve team.

And that question - who understands Lennon and McCartney were Liverpool's senior team and who is the reserve team - will probably remain open forever.

By all statistics theory the chance that the two most talented songwriters in history will grow in the same dial-up area, more or less in the same neighborhood and also in exactly the same years is nil.

So is the possibility that we will reset the ego at home and learn to unite and cooperate under shared credit.

One, Lennon, is the most powerful, precise and sheer distiller of words and emotion composer ever since.

The other, McCartney, a composer and melodist of supreme grace, the like of which has not been heard since Mozart.

Lennon loved humanity far more than he loved people, and this is certainly evident in the anthems he wrote, as opposed to his personal poems, each of which is an artistic Everest summit in its own right.

McCartney was the complete opposite of him: he did not pretend to lead revolutions, to rise in barricades, to preach morality, or to read radical manifestos.

He also later stated and defied one of his hits in the Wings band that he was proud to have written silly love songs all his life and even mocked Lennon's Peace and Love songs (defined them as "Peace of Cake" in one of his songs after the Beatles' breakup).

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Lennon and McCartney (Photo: Disney Plus)

50 years after this unforgivable sting, which drove Lennon mad and sent him on a brutal revenge campaign, the fiercest battle between the living McCartney and the dead Lennon focuses on just this point.

If there is no longer an argument that Lennon would have written songs, composed and also been a better singer, but McCartney is an incomparably great musician (the concept albums "Sergeant Pepper" and "Abby Road" inspired by him and his management leave no doubt as well as a career The solo in which he demonstrated absolute control over every possible instrument (aka Cumming Up), then a new and surprising question mark emerged on the surface: which of them was really the revolutionary and which of them was actually the conservative.

If in real time and certainly after his assassination Lennon defeated McCartney for this prominence in a crushing knockout, then from a broad historical perspective it may be possible to point to an unexpected upheaval.

The angry Lennon with the round glasses was admittedly anti-establishment among them and considered a symbol of non-conformism, while the baby-faced McCartney is considered a conformist and square who insists on poppy and light-hearted nonsense songs like "Obaldi Obalda" while Paris burns (riots 68 ')

But given that in the musical, artistic and media bronze in England and around the world - they were all non-conformists and radical thinkers, on further thought Lennon can be voted as the conformist of the two - the one who perfectly aligned with the right and vocal views of non-elitist mental fashion and junta. They used to be hypocritical and fake and there was nothing behind them in his private life).

McCartney, on the other hand, went his own way, against the tide, not hesitating to repeatedly release melodic, catchy, sometimes even sweet and sentimental songs that made him a punching bag of critics and opinion leaders, but galloped down the highway to the hearts of the masses and settled there forever.

It seems that here too McCartney has chosen the long and winding path, which only at the age of 80 turns out to be a winner in the end.

Or maybe it's actually pop history's historic victory over rock and music's over politics.

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