Altho I love / hate Macca for years of musical joy and heartbreak that ad is hideous.
Macca: Will this ad work? I feel such a prat.
Director: It'll all be in black and white
Macca: So you won't see me blushing in abject shame?
Director: No.
Macca: but will black and white hide my cringing?
IMO, the Frog Chorus is better than every song on one of his most critically acclaimed albums 'flowers in the Cac' which was untreated sewage with upbeat backing, and don't forget Ebony and Ivory. Or the Michael Jackson collaborations. Or the ... The list goes on.
His total output is phenomenal, although patchy, (but this is for a reson I'll mention later) but what a back catalogue. People would kill to have written "Maybe I'm Amazed", "Hey Jude", "Yesterday" and dare I say even "Mull of Kintyre" (purely from the sales perspective). Michael Jackson proved the truth of this statement when he effectively bought the publishing rights to most of the Beatles output.
However many artists would have been killed (career-wise and possibly physically) for writing the 'best' of Macca's worst.
Even after producing more dead turkeys than Bernard Matthew, the man is still undeniably one of the top ten composers of the modern age. He wrote the most covered song of all time, with many others in the top fifty covers. Holding the top FIVE places in the US top 10 at the same time. Inventors of the gatefold, the (pseudo) concept album, the music video. More pages of serious professional musical analysis devoted to him than any other person since the great composers. Writing a number one hit in a restuarant on a serviette as a challenge from Jack Nicholson.
But here's the crunch for Macca, he suffers from being a poor self-editor. And this is unfortunately what's muddying the issue. Many of the songs he's released would never have left another composer's bedroom, but Macca's poor sense of what is great and worthy of the public, and what is strictly for private use, isn't the gauge of whether the man is musical genius because if every song a band wrote was released then they would suffer Macca's fate.
Because of this inability to hold back the undeniable shite that ALL artists write, his musical reputation is judged more harshly than it deserves to be. Remove 50% of his weaker songs, or judge him on his best 100 songs, and he would muscle his way into the top 2 or 3 writers of all time.
So please help poor little Macca from making poor commercial decisions by supporting this worthy cause and buying his albums, if only to prevent another tragedy like the iPod ad.
