8:43 p.m. - 2003-10-26
nothin' but a fool to live like this
you know.....
***
another song that time forgot, this one our first from the sprawling Paul McCartney memorial collection....
Song: Temporary Secretary
Artist: Paul McCartney
Album: McCartney II
Sample Lyric: "She can be a neurosurgeon / if she's doing nothing urgent."
Ampresands (out of 5): & & & & &
Without a doubt, "Temporary Secretary" has to be the single most maligned piece of songcraft in all of McCartney's solo output. Just do a Deja.com search on "worst Mccartney secretary" and you'll see. AllMusic.com's ubiquitous Stephen Thomas Erlewine perhaps sums up the discourse on this song when he remarks of McCartney II that:�
"...In retrospect, the record is muddled and confused, nowhere more so than on the frazzled sequencing of "Temporary Secretary," where McCartney spits out ridiculous lyrics with a self-consciously atonal melody over gurgling synths. Things rarely get worse than that..."
�While certainly McCartney II was a self-conscious, muddled, and confused attempt to get caught up with the times* by throwing all manner of trendy things (mostly, drum machines and synthesizers) into the mix, this hardly discredits "Temporary Secretary." It almost feels like McCartney was very deliberately trying to be avant-garde, failed, and ended up being avant-garde anyway by complete accident. The dissonant guitar crashings, the deliriously twittering and repetitive synth line, the bizarre attempt by McCartney to take the lyrical perspective of a sleazy, sexually harassing boss.... it all adds up to something that I can't help but feel would have been welcomed by artsy New York hipsters as jarringly brilliant if it came from anyone other than Mister Bloated Rock Excess himself. Sometimes, the road to musical heaven is paved with bad ideas, and such is the case here.
�* For Pete's sake, just look at the cover art. The man can't even bring himself to not look utterly bewildered for the album jacket. I can only assume he was in the midst of a long detox process from all the drugs he'd been loading his system with for roughly the previous fifteen years, uninterrupted.
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