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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

I knew guy that could just listen to an engine running, and hear that it had a timing problem!

I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a foreign language! That is crazy.

I knew someone that could just look at the curve on a bridge and immediately write down the equation for the curve, right there in front of everybody!

* *

I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician?

I hate to be negative, bring on the downvotes, but this is nothing less than being fascination with the ordinary. I also have zero doubt there are dozens and dozens of HN readers that also are musicians and can do the same. Not everyone who begins to study and play music can do it, but they will be able to eventually 1) recognize notes just by hearing them and 2) recognize chord changes just by hearing them. Some people have perfect pitch, and that makes it all the easier, but perfect pitch is not necessary, and it isn't an amazing trick any more than understanding someone speaking French.

David Byrne is freakishly smart. Tom Scholz of Boston has an MME from MIT. Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have genius level IQs. Geniuses simply are not that novel. What sets Paul McCartney apart is not whether he has a good memory or can pick up a tune, but rather that he was a Beatle.

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I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear.

The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean.

So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.

Right? But in the history rock 'n roll, in the history of music, in the history of warm-blooded vertebrates, I don't know of hardly anyone that was ever a Beatle.

No more than a dozen or so. John, Paul, George, Ringo, Pete, George, Billy, Neil, Mal, Eric...

It's like wondering why anyone is even aware of St. Andrew. He was an Apostle. We need not look any further than that.

Bassist?

I get a fair amount of that kind of work too, on bass. Mostly jazz, where the repertoire of "standards" is finite. I also go to fiddle jams, where the fiddlers themselves often have no idea what the harmony should be, or how to express that information.

Of course a trick that a layperson might not notice, is that the notes are nowhere close to random.

But I love the challenge of that kind of work if it's with good players.

Yep! yeah man playing jazz is I think the ultimate challenge for a musician. I made the mistake of trying to lean on fake books for a long time, I think because I didn't believe that it was realistic to memorize enough of the tunes for it to make a difference. Eventually I wound up with a teacher who insisted I do exactly that. I think it should have been obvious to me, but as I'm sure you know, once you have memorized maybe a hundred tunes or so, you develop this mental model that the bulk of all standards fall into on the basis of form, changes, feel etc. Then, even when its an unusual tune, maybe you have to struggle through the first A and B, some kind soul might take pity on you and shout out the changes, and that little bit of extra information is enough combined with all that other stuff you know to get you through the tune.

I guess all that memorization is like the conditioning and training that an athlete might do to prepare for an event, and then at the event you're mostly responding conditions.

As an odd coincidence, I ditched the fake books, almost 2 decades ago. It was kind of by accident. I had been hoarding more and more books, and got to the point of hauling a huge pile of books to every gig. One time, I got a last minute call, and couldn't remember where I had stashed the books, so I rushed out of the house without them.

And it went OK! In addition to the mental model that you describe, I've also learned that most tunes are more forgiving of changes than one might guess by all of the chord symbols notated so precisely.

I've revived my fake books for another use: To practice treble clef sight reading, which I neglected when I was younger. Also, I think learning melodies helps a lot in terms of mentally organizing and navigating the standards.

There are players who are a lot better than me, and are still attached to the books.

And then every once in a while you get a song breaks all the assumptions and changes: https://youtu.be/ZnRxTW8GxT8 :)

Beato is a great teacher and has a wide if not complete comprehension of music. But he approaches this piece from his understanding of Jazz, and, cautiously, I would say the only rational way to fully map and chart this song is using the tools of Jazz, but I doubt it couldn't also be approached using Classical forms, it just makes more sense, is simpler, using Jazz. Because they are both individually comprehensive to notes and sounds and changes any instrument can produce, every musical piece in any musical genre can be understood and interpreted as either Jazz or Classical or both.

Yeah, I guess (from a very limited understanding of music) is that the main confusion comes from approaching (and hearing) this piece as a simple catchy pop song.

And then you're suddenly hit with all this complexity

I'm also a bassist that does a lot of improvisation on stage. I often play with a singer that knows literally thousands of songs, and he often pulls one on me that I've never heard.

What matters a lot is genre conventions. This particular singer mostly plays rock, blues, country and reggae. I know the basic mechanics of those four genres, and can often guess where the song is going, even if I've never heard it. Even if I hit a wrong note, it's usually in the chord that's being played (e.g. the 5), and sounds reasonable.

I do the same thing when I get a setlist and just listen to the songs multiple times in the days previous so that I can hear the songs in my head. If often say, "If I can sing the melody, I can play it."

Per the topic at hand, what's also interesting is that I can think that I don't remember a song, but often even years later, if someone starts playing it, I know immediately where to go. Once I find the key, which rarely takes me more than a note or two, I'm good.

But I've also got friends that play traditional Irish music. I can't sit in with them (I've tried) since the chord changes fall at places I don't expect them, and are often different chords than I'd guess. Having a feel for the style of music makes a ginormous difference.

Speaking of music and memory..

A guy named Hilly Kristal ran the famous nightclub CBGB's for something like 30 years. My band was lucky to play there a few times in the '80s.

It was said about Hilly that he remembered every single band that ever played at the club. Years later I ran into him on the street and he immediately recognized me. Not only that, he asked how every member of the band was doing by name. We were never famous or anything, he just had this love of music and musicians and a steel trap mind for these details.

There's a movie titles CBGB about him/the club, played by the late Alan Rickman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c

I'm guessing they play a little fast and loose with history, but its a good watch.

Humans are awesome. Some of them anyway.

Knowing one or two people in your life who could do such things is actually the opposite of being ordinary.

I think you are coming from a place of distrust for cults of personalities, and while I agree, we should not idolise them, we should not go the other extreme, that of the jaded teenager who "has already seen it all" and is therefore incapable of wonder.

That's not how we progress as a species, as a civilization.

I was hoping to avoid being accused of being a Paul McCartney basher. I was bashing the author's silly argument, not Paul McCartney.

There's levels to this. I once worked in a room full of graphic artists, but one of them had a skill level that was far above everyone else. His "demo" was to draw a detailed dwarf character in full battle armour and wielding a stone hammer... with one continuous line. Without picking up his pen, he could draw this character in minutes with better detail than the other artists could in hours or days.

Similarly, Mozart copied down Allegri's Miserere after hearing it just once in 1770. That's a sufficiently amazing achievement that it's still talked about, a quarter of a millennium later!

No preliminary rough, just pen to paper? Pretty impressive if so. Especially if he wasn’t sort of bashing in the overall shape first and going back in to add details.

And now that I think about it, trying to do this on a regular basis sounds like a pretty good way to boost one’s ability to hold a whole drawing in one’s head and “trace” it onto the paper, rather than doing a rough. I would not be surprised if this ability started as a game he played with himself when he was sitting in the back of his least favorite high school classes, doodling away.

(I am an artist; I can’t do this particular trick but I have definitely had moments when I was totally into a drawing and it felt like I was tracing it onto the paper from my mental image of it, with the hand of a dead artist I’d been studying guiding mine. I was also pretty high at the time; there’s some strains of weed that artists favor because it can give us a boost to this sort of ability.)

I'm pretty sure I have aphantisia, but for a few rare moments I could visualise a complete image against a blank surface and even start tracing it. I could never hold on to this for more than a few seconds.

My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.

> My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.

Check out Kim Jung Gi. He's basically doing that in real time, with impossible speed, accuracy and level of detail. He's making a living via performing live shows of his skills.

> He's making a living

Not any longer, sadly..

Some are blessed with talent, some more than others, but when inherent talent is encouraged and stimulated and disciplined and focused from a young age, and the historical tools of music and music literacy are mastered, when there is total support, removal of distractions and the leisure and time to accomplish all this, the result is seen as nothing less than miraculous. Not everyone could have been Mozart, but certainly there are some that could have been had they been given the same support, encouragement and education from a young age. But I don't think many would have wanted Mozart's father as a parent. I have never heard it argued, but it is possible Mozart's father's treatment of his son could be seen as narcissistic abuse, and that Mozart had obsessive and compulsive symptoms. While Mozart had incredible talent and discipline in music, he lacked discipline and restraint in other areas of his life, and it ultimately killed him at a relatively young age.

>I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician?

The first several minutes of reading are an anecdote about memory that has absolutely nothing to do with music.

While you're arguing a straw man, that portion was only exposition to support the subject and underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory. But in particular, that portion was not well-supported nor all that compelling. It was, as you say, "anecdote." The idea the PM "doesn't just take pictures with random people" is absurd on its face, neither provable nor unprovable. Surely there are hundreds or thousands of such pictures.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+mccartney+with+fans&tbm...

>underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory

frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about, secondly unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man? You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.

If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article; the article makes several arguments for things McCartney has remembered being out of the ordinary that were not musical, you dismissed his having a phenomenal memory by essentially saying all trained musicians remember music. Which has hardly any bearing on the arguments in the article.

I agree that the article's examples are not well supported, or from my viewpoint based on more supposition than someone should make when trying to establish something as freakish. But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!

> frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about

The title of the piece is "Paul McCartney's freakish memory." I don't believe anyone was confused about the author's argument.

> unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man. You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.

You are correct that I did not address it, so it is a straw man because it wasn't my argument. You attacked an argument that was not mine.

> If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article

I only argued against the essence of the piece, that McCartney's memory is not anything more than exhibiting ordinary abilities of someone who is literate (in the loser sense) in music in the same way it is ordinary that someone that is literate (in the narrow sense) can read. I ignored the irrelevant anecdote about his memory because it was only relayed to support the argument that Paul McCartney is a good musician because he has good memory, and because that portion was not well-supported nor even clear that is what occurred, that he remembered the woman and recognized those must have been her children. It was a ridiculous notion on its face and more easily explained by coincidence using Occam's Razor. The same is true of McCartney's composition of She's Leaving Home, that it is more easily explained by the author seeing connections after the fact rather than McCartney consciously contriving the piece for those outrageously specific reasons.

> But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!

It is not required to address every single point in order to defeat the author's fundamental argument.

I know a guy who subbed at a concert for the bass player on short notice.

Before the gig started he listened to the first song and learned its bass line. During the first song (while he was performing it) he was listening to the second song on his headphones and learning its bass line!

It's utterly mind blowing what the human mind is capable of.

He's listening to one song while playing another song? That is mind-blowing.

agree, having a memory for music is nothing at all like being able to remember like, the dictionary, or the phone book, the human brain has a huge affinity for music memorization. i remember tons of music, songs I heard just once 40 years ago, songs from bands I played in that only we heard 30 years ago, that's just how music is for songs that you've played, they stick in your head. just go to any wedding with a real band. Think those musicians are reading music and rehearsing all those songs? not really, people that play in wedding bands often just show up never having met each other and it's expected that they just know every song you'd ever play, or you can fake it convincingly and perfectly enough on the fly (I did such a gig myself once, and I didnt really do that great, but that was the expectation). this is commonplace and actually required to be a pro-level popular music musician (which I am not).

True. Music is relatively easy to perform and create (forgetting whether it is Eleanor Rigby or not). But even though there are many that can, let's not diminish the very often seemingly miraculous feat of those that can perfectly perform a piece they've never heard just by reading it, often while they perform it, even though perfectly reading English out loud is a similar exercise. As many people can't read music as can read literature, and I've never heard of music literacy ruining a musician's career. But it is a good thing music is so easy for the curious and determined, because though many have learned it in their later years, learning to read music gets more and more difficult the older one is, but music itself never gets more difficult. Now, Gold Records, OTOH, I seriously doubt are easy to do, even if it was very likely easy for the artist, they had no way of knowing beforehand even if they so claimed.

That is the wonderful thing about music. It is actually pretty easy/simple but quite often those simple things move our soul. When we attempt to intellectualize this we forget that part.

This is Jazz

> This is Jazz

Sure, but even though we consider Jazz anything that sounds jazzy, i.e. using Major 7ths or flat 5s, because Jazz and Classical are so individually encompassing, literally every other genre of music is also Jazz and Classical, any sound that can be made with an instrument fits in Jazz and Classical, i.e. it can be interpreted using the modes and forms of Jazz or Classical without changing how it sounds. It just isn't very useful to approach or interpret, say, a folk song from the perspective of Jazz, nor the sound a guitar makes when smashed to pieces, but technically, everything is either Jazz or Classical or both.

Why come from a perspective of x or y? It’s music. It isn’t jazz or classical. It’s music. Humans like to do 2 things: make stuff and categorize stuff.

My late daughter was able to memorize pi out to a hundred or so digits. She said she did it by making the numbers sound like a song.

May the best of the memories live with you always. I’m so sorry.

I am sorry for your loss.

My college gf had synesthesia. We played a game where I rattled off about 20 numbers from a phone book and randomly said several names. Without hesitation she recalled all their numbers, no mistakes.

Had a similar ability with music, upon hearing a melody or a chord, would rapid-fire off what the notes were. Detuned a string a few cents, could immediately tell is was out of tune. As a guitar player this was a bit annoying as she would always be telling me something was off when it was slightly out of tune, it was like a nails on chalkboard kind of experience for her.

I think ear training helps with that. I found listening to fusion helped because you were introduced to many scales you didn't hear in everyday music, so soon heard the differences.

There's nothing more grating than hearing people playing slightly out or doing half-bends on guitar. I've played with people who have played for decades and still can't hear that they're out, and it's terrible.

Ear training can help with relative pitch, but it's still super hard to tell for instance if your instrument is slightly sharp or flat due to changes in humidity unless you're playing against a piece of music or other instruments.

Guitarists can usually tell when one of their strings is slightly out of tune and can often tell when all their strings are out of tune yet in tune relatively to each other. Successful guitarists will have a guitar tech off-stage; swapping guitars isn't just for tonal purposes, it's to quickly swap out a slightly out of tune guitar for one that has just been tuned. But it seems unlikely that without perfect pitch that we can trust a non-musicians' assessment that a musician played a song perfectly faithful to the original. Even assuming that this occurred, this is not exactly all that unlikely nor that it rarely occurs, but, instead, it is academic for the experienced performer and trained musician. And for every hour of performance there are many hours of rehersal. The very best performances are built from muscle-memory which will obfuscate how much raw talent there actually is.

I've been a guitarist for 35 years who took an ear training course w/ vocal lessons about 10 years in.

I could probably do better than blind determining what is 432 vs. 440 because there are enough common reference examples out there that I have sense of feel for the difference, and I could tune an A4 cold +- 5 cents. But a third of that? A vanishingly small number of musicians would be able to do that with any reliability without a reference point.

She didn't know how on-point a pitch was because she was listening. It was innate and immediate. It was literally described as the intensity of a color that corresponded to a key.

We're kinda off in the weeds from the point I was making, which was refuting the notion that music could have any analog to reciting a phone book. There is a bit of a connection between memory and processing music in a way, at least for those with this condition, that probably is more subconscious for those without.

When I was in high school and was struggling with learning to recite a poem from memory, I'd compose a melody and record a song with that poem as lyrics. Suddenly, reciting it from memory was becoming incredibly easy.

If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band. I think it's absolutely justified to discuss a particularly talented musician's mind.

Of course there are many good musicians who can play a tune immediately after hearing in (if you want to see this in action, check out Rick Beato or Justin Hawkins on Youtube), but having heard it once decades ago, not knowing what the song is or who it's from, trying to find out and failing, and yet perfectly reproducing it including all the verses, decades later, that's absolutely an example of a really impressive memory.

> If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band.

For an argument, this is question-begging, but I'm not going to argue that The Beatles were ordinary, because provably they changed music, and this is both a criticism of them and a compliment. However, for all we know, if they hadn't been so prolific in performing and marketing themselves from their earlier career, we might have missed them entirely. The more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more they play, etc.

Though it should be noted that whomever is judging these kinds of achievements of covering a song from memory isn't exactly critically comparing the original side by side with the reproduction. "It sounded exactly the same," is likely embellishment by someone without a trained ear. Picking up a song is such a common notion that it has its own idiom, namely "picking up a song."

> If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual

I should add but can no longer edit my reply, that these two are distinctly contrasting and somehow complementary. Notable about McCartney is that with all the success, accomplishment and tragedy in is life, he is still able to be happy. He stands as a positive example of how to be, focusing on the bright side of things, an optimist. In contrast, Lennon wasn't satisfied with anything and always had something negative to say about everything. He never seemed happy unless he was causing conflict. He was a pessimist. They seem to be two sides of the same coin of humanity, a yang and a yin that make a complete and comprehensive picture.

Both sides are important if not essential. If Lennon was instead McCartney's yes-man, McCartney's music would have suffered. Lennon's criticism made McCartney's songs better than they would have been otherwise, and McCartney's positive support allowed Lennon's music to be developed rather than abandoned.

It's true. Lots of amateur musicians can do that to some degree. Of-course results vary, but it's common.

I'm probably "not even an amateur", whatever that means, and with popular music I can usually play a song (the chords) after hearing it once. Pop music is oftentimes 4-5 chords picked from a well known set of ~7 progressions, without any scale change. I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.

> I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.

Granted, but Queen didn't just show up at the studio unprepared. Given the same preparation Queen gave, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you could pick up any of their songs, making it look easy to someone that didn't observe your preparation.

"In 2003, comedian Billy Crystal was asked, on the field at Yankee Stadium before one of the league championship series games, for his first recollection of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. "I was sitting right up there [first-base side, upper deck],'' Crystal said. "In the second game of a doubleheader, Ted Williams strikes out against Bobby Shantz. Thirty years later, I meet Mr. Williams. I said, 'I have home movies of you striking out against Bobby Shantz in the second game of a doubleheader at the Stadium.' He looked at me and I swear, Tim, he says, 'Curveball, low and away.' He said, 'Ellie [Yankees catcher Elston Howard] dropped the ball and tagged me, right?' I said, 'Yes, that's it!'""

https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/6996357/seventy-years-...

I think the bizarre takeaway is that he recognized Fran and her boys. There are plenty of geniuses compared to the number of people that can recognize someone from an unimportant chance encounter from 15 or so years back. The fact that a lifelong musician can tell the difference between a mixolydian mode and a dorian mode, or a dominant from a diminished isn't shocking.

I don't think the author's argument was well-supported. I think it is more likely it was coincidence. In general, coincidences often seem contrived. There are countless photographs Paul McCartney has given to fans. If they were close enough for him to see, then it makes the occasion possible whether he recognized them or not. Hero-worship by a fan is a special thing, "wow, is there anything he can't do?" They're not exactly being objective, and everything the hero does becomes miraculous. Everyone has idiosyncrasies, and famous people are constantly observed, so every little thing they do becomes notable to the fanatic. "Look at the way he holds his fork!"

You raise a good point: it could have been a coincidence. I hadn't thought of that.

I have studied classical music, and a friend of mine applied to a master in conducting. In the entrance exam they had to listen to a 4-part piece and when it was down they had to write it down.

Genius level would however be the following: There is a rumour about a mass that the Catholic church held secret (I believe it was an Allegri mass). One day Mozart went to the service and when he got back he wrote it down.

It reminds me the chess memory experiment where more experienced chess players had much better recall of real chess positions than novices and the same recall for random positions (around 4 pieces).

If it is the same phenomena then we may expect that Paul as an experienced musician should have an excellent recall for real music and an ordinary one (no better than anyone) for cacophony (random sounds).

Did you read the article? Most of the examples given in it have nothing to do with music.

I ignored the irrelevant and unsupported anecdotal premises and focused on and defeated the underlying argument which is "Paul McCartney is a great musician because his memory is freakish." I think, instead, like anyone at the top of their field, McCartney is a great musician because he studied and practiced music.

There's plenty of people who studied and practiced music who didn't become great musicians. So, it's a necessary, but not sufficient component. I suspect great memory is absolutely a huge boost for any musician, probably even more so than in other fields (where it's also a huge boost).

Except Paul McCartney is considered as one of the best song writers of all time. There may be many musicians who can do the same on a technical level but even then he is a significant outlier.

But some of his lyrics are terrible: how many times can you say "in"? In this world in which we live in...

And "someone's knocking at the door, someone's ringing a bell, do me a favour, go to the door, open it and let them in"...

It's like he was trying to lyricise everyday activities. Very odd.

I say this as a penniless musician in contrast to the very successful Mr McCartney (who plays bass lines like he's playing the tuba, very clever)

I wish people would sing about the mundane rather than sex, drugs and crime all day.

I think A Day in the Life fits that requirement.

In my opinion this is like criticising Picasso's paintings for not being anything close to as realistic as photos.

Fine, it's a valid opinion to dislike either for those reasons, but for many people it was, and is, art that's exciting in part because of its perfect non-perfection.

I think with lyrics most people don't give them a second thought and don't realise what the person is singing about. Most people can't even tell you which instrument is being used in a part of a song.

This is different to visual art - most people can play spot the difference no problem, but with audio most people are deaf to the details, and the lyrics!

Eg. My Sharona - most people don't realise it includes the lyric "I always get it up for the younger kind"....

Why should lyrics have meaning?

> Except Paul McCartney is considered as one of the best song writers of all time.

This is a loaded observation, basically arguing "because all his songs sold well, he must be a significant outlier in songwriting." Similarly, Apple is considered one the best cell phone manufacturers of all time, or McDonald's is considered one of the best burger manufacturers of all time. Popularity does not equate to whether something is any good. And not all of McCartney's songs are the best songs of all time. Some of his notably terrible songs are still popular because he, himself, is famous (because he was a Beatle). One example is the Wing's song Jet, which is popular enough to still get radio play, yet when critically analyzed falls quite short of, say, Hey, Jude.

But my argument is not that Paul McCartney can't write good songs, only that it is ordinary that a musician can recall to perform music they have heard before in the same way most that read something impactful to them can more or less recall it verbatim.

It isn’t that he was a Beatle. It is that he is Paul McCartney.

Not really, no. I don't believe McCartney's best songs would have been as good as they are without Lennon's pessimistic criticism. Otherwise, McCartney may have become like Pygmalion falling in love with his sculpture, Galatea. Unfortunately in this metaphor, Lennon is Venus who solves Pygmalion's problem that the sculpture was not a real person. But I hope the point is made, which is that only through dissent does anything progress to excellence.

What?

McCartney didn't create in a vacuum, and if everyone always agreed, nothing would change for the better.

That is the beauty of all things.

I think that works both ways: what sets the Beatles apart is that they had Paul McCartney as a member during his (probably) best creative years.

And he was tremendously creative because of his relationships with other very creative people.

If you watch Get Back, it is kind of freakish how fluid Paul and John are. Telepathic communication, writing songs constantly for a decade.

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