Are there any figures in this world with less hip-hop cred than\u00a0Paul McCartney?<\/p>\n
He was the safe one out of The Beatles. A band who might have been one of the most forward-thinking and boundary-pushing of their time, but it is not their time any more. Today, they have all the counter-culture credibility of Wonderbread, not to mention being somehow even more white. Being the first of all of them to be knighted says a lot about how McCartney is as establishment as they come these days.<\/p>\n
Yet, how true is that? On the one hand, this is wacky ol\u2019 thumbs aloft we\u2019re talking about. The guy behind The Frog Chorus and \u2018Silly Love Songs\u2019 and \u2018Maxwell\u2019s Silver Hammer\u2019. The guy they wheel out at the end of big important events to lead a stadium-wide sing-song of \u2018Hey Jude\u2019. Expecting anything out of him beyond parroting the most establishment brand of establishment talking points is naive at best and outright stupid at worst.<\/p>\n
Look a little closer, though, and you\u2019ll find someone who has a decent amount of counter-culture cred to their name. In The Beatles, he was as onboard with their experimentation as a ship captain, and was the Fab in charge of the tape loops added to \u2018Tomorrow Never Knows\u2019. He wrote \u2018Helter Skelter\u2019 and \u2018Why Don\u2019t We Do It in the Road?\u2019. Outside of The Beatles, his solo career may have had its fair share of kids\u2019 stuff, but he\u2019s also had\u00a0moments of daring\u00a0like his trip-hop duo with Youth, The Fireman.<\/p>\n
So what happens when the guy who wrote \u2018Yellow Submarine\u2019 is confronted by the artist who, in the early 2000s, was the single most notorious man debated in pop music?<\/p>\n
There was a time when Eminem felt like a genuinely corrupting influence on the world\u2019s youth. That\u2019s probably hilarious for a young person to read now. Marshall Mathers III seems more known for writing music to inspire weightlifters to do one more set than anything genuinely edgy, but it\u2019s true. Eminem was a terrifying figure to parents of the late 1990s and early 2000s in a way that we can\u2019t really imagine today. Imagine the outrage if a UK drill artist suddenly became the biggest pop star on the planet, and you\u2019ll imagine some of the sheer panic Eminem induced in his prime.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d think that McCartney would be one of those adults scolding him for corrupting innocent minds with his violent and disturbing music and wailing about how much better things were back in his day. Fortunately, the opposite is true. In an interview conducted with\u00a0Mojo<\/em>\u00a0in 2003, Macca discussed hearing Eminem\u2019s work for the first time and being impressed, even comparing him to one of his most frequently mentioned forebears.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d heard Eminem on the radio and I thought, \u2018Clever. Good lyrics, good ideas\u2019,\u201d McCartney said, \u201cso I just went to see\u00a08 Mile\u00a0<\/a><\/em>and it\u2019s a great little rock \u2019n\u2019 roll film, like an Elvis film. I enjoyed it and I came out like when I was a kid, that feel-good thing coming out of a movie like you\u2019re walking a bit taller.\u201d That comparison shows something very special. Because it\u2019s one thing to appreciate the music, but what McCartney did was something else entirely.<\/p>\n Paul McCartney, of all people, did what few people of his generation did when confronted with music that was genuinely new, genuinely edgy and genuinely resonating with the youth. He understood it just as he\u2019s always done and not ever been given quite enough credit for.<\/p>\n