“Like A Second Needs An Hour" - Paul McCartney & His 1980 New Wave Masterpiece :: “McCartney 2”
Withered beyond a sun that perfectly captures the resting darkness and its rare reach into space’s wickedly cold continuum, this second chance coexists at resurrecting the challenge of immunity in existence. Species with explosive intellect are tangled in the outstanding ecosystem of collective consciousness, while a light of severed imagery pushes through the world’s womb of woven death like that of some terror tank through time. Resembling both shadows and the orbital familiarity of youth, a soft moment in history relies on the injustices of man to calculate its philosophy over and over until a perpetual perfection takes place.
During the dawn of a new decade and in the wake of infamous death, global change and historical madness, a most familiar face reemerged from the cosmic city smog to deliver a sonic message like nothing he had ever achieved, or expressed in past works. With the Beatles now a decade behind him, McCartney sought musical justice in the 80s with the release of the highly, yet sophisticatedly different, follow up to the 1970s “McCartney”, “McCartney II”. A brief portrait of the now aging musician’s ideology of contemporary music, McCartney returned to his isolated roots in the confines of his home in Scotland to write and record the more cerebral and experimental twin to the timeless classic of its decade past, during the summer of 1979. With some critics stating that this was his “acceptance of new wave”, it could be further expressed that this was still a time when the introduction and influence of electronic and synthesizer music was still in its adolescence and that McCartney was eagerly experimenting just as he had done in the mid to late 60s. With its romantic nature, yet metallic atmosphere seeping through with numbers like “Front Parlor” and “Frozen Jap”, “McCartney II” isn’t just an overlooked piece in the musician’s monumental archive, but a masterpiece in that it faithfully sets the tone for a decade of political isolation, pop culture renaissance and extremely progressive art.
Pulling inspiration from contemporaries of the decade such as David Byrne of Talking Heads and the timeless legend that is John Cage, McCartney brings an always enduring and wondering youth to the atmosphere of the album. With numbers like “Nobody Knows” and “Waterfalls” expressing that classic ‘McCartneyism’ that we’re all so familiar with and absolutely adore, there’s no doubt that the album has its clever characteristics. With well polished numbers throughout it’s 11 tracks of genre bending and pop-polluted practice, the undeniable dynamics and dissonant structures of “McCartney II” are weightless in that the dawn of new wave would be pulling from him just as many had when the Beatles still roamed the earth in a previous life.
