Taking sides: John Lennon vs Paul McCartney

Sexy Sadie

Serve Yourself is a great late-period one

Best passive-aggressive George Harrison song would also be a good poll.

I look at you all. Try to see beyond yourself. I'll make you maybe next time around.

So you folks actually like it when he sings about wanting to kill women if they take other lovers than him?

i think the world had enough talk about the beatles in 1967, since then we are just incurring debts we will never be able to pay

Frederik B., that is a 4th class internet argument move there you just did. Try harder or take it to Yahoo News.

hey, change it to 68, then it rhymes. like a father john misty song or something.

So you folks actually like it when Robert Johnson sings about wanting to kill women if they take other lovers than him?

I just don't get why people rag on McCartney for his corny sentiments, while ignoring Lennon's violent misogyni. Judge the music, if the lyrics bother you, but the hypocrisy is stupid.

^^ too many reachin' for a piece of cake

who are the "people," Frederick? Name them.

http://www.theonion.com/article/blues-singers-woman-permitted-to-tell-her-side-472

See, problem is McCartney got corny at the exact point Lennon realized his own bad issues and tried, I believe, to deal with them... I don't love Lennon's me me me songwriting period of the late 60s/early 70s either. & I don't think McCartney is "corny" until pretty late in the Beatles, he wrote some very realistic and hard-nosed lyrics before that.

misogyni

when one misogyn isn't enough

"Run For Your Life" is such an inconsequential song imo that its woman beating lyric escaped me the first 12 times, but that's my problem. I'm with Vic: on JLPOB and Imagine, even despite the bad production choices and hack writing on albums like Mind Games, Lennon was struggling to reconcile his anger and lust with the scary prospect of loving a woman enough to spend your life with her. I don't listen to much solo Lennon these days but there's an arc through Milk and Honey.

@amateurist: 'misogyni' is my Danish spellcheck kicking in. Could you please stop making fun of me for being a foreigner? All over this site, you rag me and talk down to me for not being born in the same country as you, and not speaking your language as well as an English speaker. It pisses me off. So shut the fuck up, you xenophobic asshole. How well do you write in your second language? I write fucking brilliant English for a Dane, I've had pieces published on English-language websites, and I'm not going to take your patronizing bullshit anymore. Go to hell.

Seriously, when did constantly shitting on people due to their personal lives become okay on this site?

maybe paul should be equally culpable for not challenging lennon's misogyny

george martin, too, obviously

this has the makings of a very valuable thinkpiece

He murdered Stu Sutcliffe and a sailor in Hamburg too though no songs ensued.

All over this site

you mean: once on ILX, and again here (which wasn't intentional!)

btw if i "rag" on you it's because your persona on ILX appears to be that of a humorless dolt

not b/c you're a "foreigner"

http://thefall.org/discography/pics/touch%20sensitive%20big.jpg

I always interpreted You Can't Do That and Run For Your Life more as chest-thumping/posturing than actual violent threats (probably since most of Lennon's other songs from this period are more woe-is-me I'm A Loser, Nowhere Man, Help type stuff). Also, the lyrics of Run For Your Life were directly lifted from an Elvis song, so there's that too.

the problem w/ run for your life is it's one of the clunkiest melodies from a beatles song of that period (...that wasn't written by george)

. Also, the lyrics of Run For Your Life were directly lifted from an Elvis song, so there's that too.

are you talking about "i'd rather see you dead, little girl..."? they may have taken it from the elvis version of "baby, let's play house" but as a floating blues lyric it predates elvis by a decade or more.

blues lyrics do tend to be repeatedly cut-and-pasted like that, obvi, but it's equally obvi that lennon's particular cut came directly from elvis.

yeah--elvis is definitely the most proximate source

but my point is that it's in a long, long time of arguably misogynistic lyrics to popular songs

man, this convo is so boring. maybe if a few more people were to call me a xenophobe...

(xp) but anyway, it's a throwaway as beatles songs go, but a rather catchy throwaway imo. i'm sure it says something about lennon that he chose that particular blues lyric to write a song around. not sure what exactly it says, though.

he's just jealous guy IIRC

That's something he has in common with McCartney, except McCartney is jealous of a dead guy.

lennons 50's covers are cornier than anything paul did ever.

i like that the fourth post on this thread started in 2003 is a set of links to three earlier threads on the subject

but none of them are named "beatle battle", so there's clearly room for at least one more

You're such a sad little piece of shit, amateurist. Oh, so you're trolling me because of my humourlessness. Yeah, that's why your post was about me spelling something wrong, what a hilariously lack of humour. How well do you write in your second language? What about your third or fourth? Are you too chickenshit to answer?

I'm still kinda new to this place, does shitting on people due to where they're born qualify for temp bans? Or would that only work with sexism, racism, anti-semitism, etc. Because I don't want to be reminded constantly on this site that I'm not a real English speaker a moment more than I have to. I get that enough on my pretty internationally oriented job. It's not fun for me, it's not something I like, it's not something that doesn't kinda hurt me financially in my everyday life. I don't get why I should have to laugh at it.

dude.

this thread has become

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQx9-GXAic

silly stoner gobbledygook vs overly literal vitriol

i prefer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrXfK9Osmvs

"literal vitriol" would be a good name for a sparks album

Dubba dubba dubba cha (xp)

guys let's stop fighting and sing yellow submarine, you're all upsetting Ringo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE3zJgO-0S4

live together in perfect harmony / Side by side on my pyahno keyboard

https://courtneyssoundworld.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/paul_mccartney_ram_john_lennon_imagine_pig.jpg

Paul and the ram look better imo

Amusing stuff from Lennon though

who are the "people," Frederick? Name them.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

People criticize McCartney for corniness on here all the time.

I mean like it hasn't happened in the last HOUR maybe, but "stoner gobbledygook" is probably in the ballpark.

I recall a certain dialogue about "The Long and Winding Road" of recent vintage...