This is one thing if you're 62-old Pavarotti singing "Pagliacci," or even 62-year-old Noel Coward singing "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." But 62-year-old Paul McCartney singing "Baby, you can drive my car" is something else again. Jingle-catchy though the song may be, there was something more than a little pathetic about "Car/star/car/cuz baby I love you" 40 years down the pike; ditto for "Get Back," with its once ... Shocking? Unsavory? Dangerous? Reference to "California grass." Today, of course, soaked in the tepid wash of a toxic mainstream, we consider it decent.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the hollowness of the McCartney music was a little surprising. That hollowness was probably accentuated by the music's place very much at center stage, and by its distance from the psychodrama of the 1960s. Long ago, The Beatles sang the songs that accompanied the upending of a civilization -- the anti-war movement, the sacking of the universities, the explosion of illegal drug use, sexual experimentation, four-letter-language; the cultural and stylistic works. Theirs was a songbook redolent of the revolution that has permanently eliminated the barriers and boundaries that once regulated the mainstream. That revolution, of course, is how we got to Janet Jackson's MTV moment last year in the first place.
It's also how we got to Paul McCartney's performance-to-the-rescue. Having rejected flesh, primetime has turned to "innocuous," a move that reveals just how grossly limited the spectrum of popular entertainment has become. It also shows how the injection of rage and revolution and smut and self-pity into the cultural mainstream seems to have pretty much dried the whole thing up. Certainly, the life has leached out. This isn't to say Paul McCartney was "offensive." He was indeed quite "innocuous."
And he didn't seem to mind a bit his role as "atonement" for past Super Bowl excess. Which, I guess, is about as good as it gets these days in the muddy old mainstream. But frankly, I think 1965 would say we told you so.