McCartney Compares West To Lennon, Starts An Outcry

I didn’t want to write about this because, you know, it’s about Kanye West once again, and who needs to hear more about him? But weekends are slow news day and it is controversial enough, or at least amusing…

So Paul McCartney has spoken with the Sun about his recent collaboration with Kanye West and his propos almost flirted with blasphemy, or so you would think if you are a die-hard Beatles-fan: he dared to compare West to Lennon:

‘When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song,’ said McCartney said. ‘[Working with West] was like that.’

Then he came up with this too-good-to-be-true story, about ‘Let it Be’ and ‘Only One’, and this is where the real blasphemy stands because there’s no way the new song can compare to the legendary Beatles’ anthem.

‘One of the stories I told him was about how I happened to have written ‘Let It Be.’’ Macca said. ‘My mum came to me in a dream when she’d died years previously. I was in a bit of a state – it was the Sixties and I was overdoing it. In the dream she said, ‘Don’t worry it’s all going to be fine, just let it be.’ And I woke up and thought, ‘Woah’ and wrote the song.’

And this moving story really inspired Kanye, who said, ‘I’m going to write a song with my mum.’ Macca sat at the piano and they wrote ‘Only One’.

Too nice to be true? I am not saying this is totally untrue – Rolling Stone says that a representative for McCartney confirmed the story – but may be, may be, there’s a bit of embellishment?

So what do we do with all this? First fall, old people like me are going to be all-arms-in-the-air because of the West-Lennon comparison, whereas young kids will wonder who is that John mentioned by McCartney. But wait, wait, Paul is just saying that working in the studio with Kanye reminded him working with John, he is not comparing their personalities, their lives…

In the story, it is McCartney who looks the most ridiculous, desperately trying to stay relevant for the youngsters, and recording with West and Rihanna, then bringing back the past into the middle of all this. However he always does that, when he was asked about his collaboration with Elvis Costello years ago, he also brought John up! Elvis Costello, Kanye West, what’s the difference? I bet everyone reminds him about John as long as they sit at a piano with him. Just listen: