Today is the 80th birthday of Paul McCartney, the greatest living rock ’n’ roll star. Indeed, McCartney is arguably the greatest rock star of them all, when you combine the colossal musical and cultural footprint of the Beatles, McCartney’s pivotal role in the band, and his epic five-decade post-Beatles career.
It’s hard to think of anything cooler than being the world’s biggest rock star. His voice, his face, and his songs are universally known. Teenage girls literally swooned over him. Generations of other rock stars revere him. He’s been the center of attention in every room he has entered for six decades, and everywhere he goes, people have fun. Since his teens, he has only worked at what he loved doing and has never needed to hold a real job. Merely mention the decade of the 1960s, and Paul McCartney is among the first sights and sounds that come to mind. What’s cooler than all that?
And yet, here’s the thing: McCartney has done it all these years without ever being cool himself. He has been, relentlessly, the opposite of cool. John Lennon practically defined cool: He had the sneer and the posture and the don’t-care attitude. He enjoyed offending people to get a rise out of them. John was the edgy boy the girls would bring home to their parents only to shock them.
That was never McCartney. He was, and remains, a compulsive people-pleaser. If John was the cool Beatle, Paul was dubbed the “cute” one, and there remains an improbable air of smooth-cheeked boyishness about him even as an octogenarian. To watch the recent Get Back documentary is to see a man who cared intensely about the music but also really wanted to get along with his friends in the band, and was pained when grown-up concerns divided them. He never had one of those rock-star crises over hitting it big: You make popular music to have it be popular; what else is there? What sent him into bouts of depression in the early ’70s was the band breaking up: the acrimony of people not liking him, not staying together. He is still touring and making new music after all these years not because he needs fame or money or respect — he has more of all three than anyone could possibly make use of — but because he just loves entertaining people and seeing them entertained.
McCartney has never been one for standoffish, ironic distance. One of Paul’s gifts as a songwriter and vocalist has been his willingness to write and sing with earnestness and vulnerability. “Yesterday” is a song of deceptive simplicity in its words and music, hitting a universal theme of regret and heartache; part of what makes it work is that McCartney plays it completely straight, lays it all on the line for everyone to hear. When John wanted to bare his heartache to the world in song, he wrote “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a song about not baring your heartache to the world. Paul just did it.
Even as a young man at the peak of Beatlemania, Paul wrote songs about lonely old ladies and the joys of small towns and growing old together and enjoying songs that were hits before your mother was born. “Silly Love Songs” is self-aware about his reputation, but also a defense of uncoolness: “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs/What’s wrong with that?/I’d like to know/So here we go . . . again!” He could decide that an infectious line of harmony should be written up as the sound of “simply having a wonderful Christmastime.” Stevie Wonder is cool; Stevie and Paul together gave us that syrupy ode to racial harmony, “Ebony and Ivory.” Even McCartney’s politics have been try-hard liberal do-goodism rather than the frisson of revolution or the high judgmentalism of wokeness. He accepted a knighthood the same way he accepts all his successes: with gratitude and no sense of irony.
Many a laugh has been had at the expense of some of Paul’s more cringeworthy moments, but he has always had the last laugh because of his talent, his work ethic, and — in the end — the fact that an uncool guy could say things we all felt but were maybe too reserved or too concerned with our image to proclaim in public.
Lots of Beatles fans aspired to be John but secretly knew that even if they had his gifts, they could never be John Lennon. They just weren’t cool enough. Nobody is a better example of this than Billy Joel, who grew up wanting to be John but ultimately embraced his entirely respectable role as the next-best thing to Paul. But it always seemed as if any one of us could be Paul, if only we had his abilities. Of course, most of us will never have Paul McCartney’s musical talent; hardly anybody ever had Paul McCartney’s musical talent. But if you grew up never being one of the cool kids, you could always look up to the uncool guy who still managed to be as big a rock ’n’ roll star as any cool guy who ever lived.