Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Ooh. I think maybe Venus and Mars, I really like. I’m trying to think which ones are underrated. A lot of them are underrated. Give me your answer. I would say Red Rose Speedway. Then, I know this is not an album, but YouTube cuts of Wings playing live with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar, I think are generally better than Wings Over America, which is quite good for a live album. But to see Jimmy and Paul on YouTube — those are just phenomenal performances. Songs like “Magneto and Titanium Man” quite come to life on YouTube live, whereas it’s only pretty good on Venus and Mars, I think. Or “Letting Go” or “Call Me Back Again” — they just become phenomenal blues cuts on YouTube. Yes. I think the very underrated ones — because very obscure ones — are the Fireman albums, including Rushes, which is this almost totally instrumental album that he records in the wake of Linda’s death. It is very poignant, and the few words and fragments of recordings from life that you do hear are very moving when you know the context. It’s typically Paul in that. I think it’s one of his most personal and raw albums, and he says very little in it. It’s kind of hidden away, and in fact it’s under another name altogether. I think that’s the fascinating thing about Paul as an artist. If we’re thinking about him in comparison to John, it’s particularly fascinating that Paul is emotionally complex, but with a complexity hidden inside brilliantly simple, powerful pop songs a lot of the time. I’m not talking about the Fireman, now; that is a more avant-garde example. Just something like “Penny Lane.” It seems like this bright breezy pop song, but then you go to “Strawberry Fields,” and it’s obviously radical and weird and odd. There are layers of complexity to Paul’s songs that are not obvious to the naked eye. They reward a kind of, as you would put it, Straussian reading. A song like “Oh! Darling,” which appears to be a love song — I think it’s partly about him splitting up with John as I write about that in the book, but he overloads it with emotion. This is something he does in a song now and again. He’ll write a simple pop song, and then he’ll turn up the emotion somehow, the way he sings in a way that distorts the song and puts it on and takes it into this strange place, so there is this screaming vocal in “Oh! Darling.” I hear in it a lot of anger. I don’t just hear love and sadness and loss. I hear anger in it or a subcurrent of violence, actually. I think a feminist reading of that song would be that Paul is exposing the possessiveness, and sometimes the violent possessiveness, that underlies some of these male rock-and-roll songs about “don’t you leave me, baby.”…

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