8518/21437
Hey look, there's some bad stuff going on in the world and humanity is hanging by a thread and the thread is swinging back and forth and humanity seems determined to hold a flame up to that thread just to see how strong the thread might be, even though it knows the thread isn't strong, but feels it would be weakness not to keep burning it anyway.
BUT we live in an amazing time. We are so lucky to be here now as opposed to pretty much any other time or place in the history of the Universe. Presuming you're one of the people on earth living in a relatively safe place, with a roof over your head and food in your fridge and internet access (which I am guessing you have, unless someone had printed this up and posted it to you).
We live in a time of incredible scientific advancement and creativity. We live at the same time as Paul McCartney. And we live in a time when Paul McCartney has released an album at the age of 83. It wouldn't matter if it wasn't good, even if it was just him plonking randomly at a piano and howling at the moon. We get a whole life time of his usually extraordinary, occasionally a bit less extraordinary work. We get to hear him as man in his 20s, full of sexual energy, fizzing with ideas, as a man in his 30s being amazed that he had found love, a man in his forties (maybe)
enjoying the work of Alfred Bestall via the medium of frogs.
Well you get the idea.
So many rock stars fuck it up and live fast and die young, but like with comedians - I don't think you'll get to the really good stuff until they're over 70, with a functioning brain and the perspective of what has gone by and what's to come. The music may not be as exciting or charged, but the spirit beneath it, even if broken, is something else.
Stupid old John Lennon, getting all shot at 40. Though I fear he'd have moved into podcasting if he was still here and that's a fate that I wouldn't want for my worst enemy.
Stupid old all those other idiots who were actually the architects of their own demise, seeing some kind of romance in burning themselves, not knowing they hung by the thinnest of threads.
David Quantick, who knows significantly more about music than me rightly says "Paul McCartney's best recentish songs are about the long past while acknowledging the remaining future."
He also picked out this song, which I agree is fucking awesome
C'mon this is good
"On the day that I die I'd like bells to be rung
And songs that were sung to be hung out like blankets
That lovers have played on
And laid on while listening to songs that were sung"
It will be an extraordinary day when he does die, but I hope he gets the bells and the songs and the jokes and the laughter that he requests in this song. What an insane life he has led, seemingly casually shooting music from his fingertips like lasers.
I hope there will be a future and if there is no doubt there will be other amazing people that I won't have the fortune to live at the same time as. But ignore the people dedicating to blowing things up and setting fire to threads and wallow in the incredible of array of creative geniuses that we have lived alongside. Admire their strength. Admire their weakness. Admire the strength in their weakness and the weakness in their strength. Expressing that humanity is where we get great art.
Maybe it's not weakness. Maybe it's vulnerability. Letting others in. So we can admit our own vulberabilities and share them.
Shame the world is run by a man unable to admit he has any, when he is entirely constructed of weakness. On the day he dies there will also be bells and laughter at least.
Anyway, I'm not that into music. I like ramshackle improvised comedy involving very old puppets and possible mental breakdown and consider myself the Paul McCartney of that art form. You are lucky to be living at the same time as me.
