7 ms·
I enjoyed reading this, but what a strange article that's projecting a lot onto McCartney. Every anecdote has some plausible, other reason for these situations,
by madrox 4y ago
I enjoyed reading this, but what a strange article that's projecting a lot onto McCartney. Every anecdote has some plausible, other reason for these situations, but the article seems insistent on putting McCartney's memory on a pedestal. Paul himself never acknowledges these anecdotes are due to memory, and he's never mentioned his memory is particularly noteworthy. If I got anything out of this article, it's the mystique of celebrity when they don't answer your every question.
- meowface 4y agoYes, I found this one of the oddest articles I've read in a while. It's just the author projecting all of these things onto McCartney, without ever having any clear evidence of what really happened in any of these cases or evidence that he has a particularly good memory.
- seneca 4y agoYeah, exactly this. This is an unwitting article about how people are desperate to deify celebrities. I've always been a bit bewildered by the phenomenon. It almost seems like internalized marketing.
- vallanceroad 4y agoIn fact, he alludes to just the opposite with the title of his 14th solo album, "Memory Almost Full", which itself is an anagram of "for my soulmate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney). Paul insists this was not intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full
- 72deluxe 4y agoI had the first version of that album and it's mastered and mixed horrendously. One of the worse albums I have ever heard - I emailed the mastering engineer and he said "McCartney wanted it like that..." and that he think he had learned from it because he rereleased it some years later with a much less brickwall compression.
- vallanceroad 4y agoI agree with you. I have a four-year degree in audio engineering technology and I think my college years (2004 - 2008) were some of the most hostile for audio recording. Listening back to Memory Almost Full, Paul's songs are fully there but there's that Strokes flat-as-a-pancake pastiche layered on top that's hard to hear through. There are moments where he breaks through (the middle bars of "Gratitude") but you can tell it's a fight for the dynamics from top to bottom.
- 72deluxe 4y agoI don't have a degree but my ears are pretty good at detecting the complete flatness of bass dynamics and destruction of all peaks as soon as the bass is played. Horrendous. Was the degree interesting?
- vallanceroad 4y agoThe degree was very interesting! It was a good mix of acoustics + electronic engineering. The first two years' base courses were a lot of math and physics mixed with more general biology/anatomy with a focus on how the entirety of the human body perceives sound. Then the latter upper-level courses were more hands on electrical engineering mixed with artistic theory. One one occasion, an actual graded exam consisted of our professor playing obscure recordings where we had to guess what month/year in which it was recorded based on the aesthetic and recording techniques, as well as technically describe as best as possible _how_ it was recorded. Cycling '74 was big at the time, and I first got into all of the audio engineering by messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter as a teen, which eventually led to a more stable programming career in Javascript, but I still enjoy audio engineering as a hobby. "A Bigger Bang" by the Rolling Stones is another great example from that era of an album with great songs that was horribly recorded. It was remastered in 2009 but the original 2005 recording was intense. (The fact that it was remastered four years after release says a lot!) I recall record reviews at the time describing the mix as "rough and ready" but really it sounded half-finished to me. I think we can now look back on these records as artistic decisions associated with the era, which is interesting in itself.
- saalweachter 4y agoI've also heard so many more impressive and concrete memory anecdotes. John Mulaney had a great one about Bill Clinton remembering his mother's name decades after meeting her once in college. So I was expecting a lot more out of this article.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago> John Mulaney had a great one about Bill Clinton remembering his mother's name decades after meeting her once in college. I just want you to know it took me several minutes to parse this correctly.
- xpe 4y agoHearing a particular story about a person’s memory may well be survivorship bias. (Many people will have some impressive memory recollections. A famous person interacts with lots of people —- who are likely to remember those stories —- so certain stories ‘survive’ to be retold.)