Month: January 2022
*Red Rose Speedway*, or drinking the Paul McCartney Kool-Aid
Of all the early McCartney albums, this one has been the easiest to dislike. Band on the Run was recognized as high quality and classy from the beginning, whereas McCartney and Ram eventually developed a strong avant-garde pedigree. Wild Life wasn’t even trying.
But Red Rose Speedway doesn’t fit the picture, not even for the pro-McCartney revisionists. It doesn’t have strong avant-garde elements (“Loup” being the exception), nor did it have the perfection of Band on the Run, which almost could have been Beatles material. It is McCartney shoving his classic romantic McCartneyisms in your face. It is a Paul and Linda album. It has a closing medley as Abbey Road did. It is not afraid to be corny. There is something relentless about it. It does not in every regard reject the notion of monotony.
Robert Christgau decreed it was “quite possibly the worst album ever made by a rock and roller of the first rank.” Dave Marsh said it was “rife with weak and sentimental drivel.”
Unlike some of the Wings albums, Paul dominates every song, but along with Linda. “Man devotedly in love with his wife” was not the optimal 1973 message, but it has held up better than a lot of other ideas from that era.
Red Rose Speedway has many of Paul’s best vocal performances. Just try the end of “My Love” or the “ows!” in “Get on the Right Thing.” The bass playing is uniformly excellent (best on “Loup”?), and Paul cuts loose on piano, mellotron, and synthesizer more than he had done before, or was to do since.
Some drawbacks:
Many of the lyrics are mediocre. The love notes aside, Paul was not inspired in how he “set” his material. In this regard he is much the inferior of John Lennon.
“Big Barn Red” is a programmatic opening, promising you…something. Maybe it set the wrong tone for what was to follow. But in fact I am fully on board.
“Little Lamb Dragonfly” — A lot of blather in this one, maybe the weak point of the album? The melody is nice, but the song is overlong and lacking in energy.
Some pluses:
“My Love” — one of Paul’s best songs. And his best song to Linda. The Henry McCullough solo was done in one take, and yes it is better than what George would have come up with. No one will admit this, but “My Love” is better than “Yesterday” or “Michelle,” and it is also more real.
“Single Pigeon” — Everyone mocked them, but the Paul/Linda vocal duets are excellent. Don’t forget how much Paul loves the Everly Brothers. “When the Night” is very nice too.
“Loup (First Indian on the Moon)” — An early inspiration for what would later become Paul’s innovations in techno and electronica.
“Hold Me Tight” — There is an early Beatles song with the same name, so maybe Paul is reclaiming the legacy as his own or at least asserting some continuity? Are the melody and vocal here really worse than on the originally titled song? It’s debatable.
The closing medley — melodically and harmonically excellent. Maybe it’s pointless, but the Abbey Road medley is pretty improvised too and lacking in any real dramatic center until you get to the very end, when it becomes a good-bye to the Beatles.
Red Rose Speedway originally was to be a double album, with a lot of Wings representation, more rockers, and even some live material. Yes, I’ve heard all of those cuts, and they belong elsewhere. Macca kept the love songs, kept the Macca/Linda dominance, kept the love orientation, and caused the previous incarnation of Wings to dissolve in protest. He basically made the right decisions.
This album was recorded only a few years after the “Get Back” Paul you saw in the Peter Jackson movie — have some faith in him! It was surrounded by material such as “Hi Hi Hi” and “Live and Let Die,” and followed by Band on the Run, all of which are more critically acclaimed but I think this stuff is really good too.
Then again, I also like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Seaside Woman.“
Request for requests
So what would you like to hear about over the course of the next year?
I can promise at least that requests will not be counterproductive.
Sunday assorted links
1. Maureen Dowd has a Tyrone and he is not bad (NYT).
2. And South Korean men fight back against beneficial feminization (NYT). And more here.
3. Insights from Arnold Kling.
Solve for the Eastern equilibrium
Russia’s sabre-rattling in Ukraine has reignited the debate in Finland as to whether the Nordic country should join Nato, defying demands from Moscow that seek to limit expansion of the military alliance in Europe.
Both president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin used their new year addresses to underscore that Finland retained the option of seeking Nato membership at any time.
“Let it be stated once again: Finland’s room to manoeuvre and freedom of choice also include the possibility of military alignment and of applying for Nato membership, should we ourselves so decide,” Niinisto said.
Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT.
Dan Wang’s 2021 letter
Here it is, one of the better written pieces of this (or last) year. It is mostly about China, manufacturing, and economic policy, but here is the part I will quote:
But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”
And then on Mozart:
Among these three works, Figaro is the most perfect and Don Giovanni the greatest. But I believe that Cosi is the best. Cosi is Mozart’s most strange and subtle opera, as well as his most dreamlike. If the Magic Flute might be considered a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest—given their themes of darkness, enchantment, and salvation—then Cosi ought to be Mozart’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Donald Tovey called Cosi “a miracle of irresponsible beauty.” It needs to be qualified with “irresponsible” because its plot is, by consensus, idiotic. The premise is that two men try—on a dare—to seduce the other’s lover. A few fake poisonings and Albanian disguises later, each succeeds, to mutual distress. Every critic that professes to love the music of Cosi also discusses the story in anguished terms. Bernard Williams, for example, noted how puzzling it has been that Mozart chose to vest such great emotional power with his music into such a weak narrative structure. Joseph Kerman is more scathing, calling it “outrageous, immoral, and unworthy of Mozart.”
I readily concede that the music of Cosi so far exceeds its dramatic register.
Recommended! There is much more at the link, substantive throughout. Though I should note I am less bullish on both manufacturing and China than Dan is. I fully agree about Bleak House, however, and at times I think it is the greatest novel written…
New Year’s assorted links
1. Galbraith on Krugman and price controls, channeled through Kelton. Guess which side I agree with? And PK follow-up.
2. It is appropriable cereal gains that lead to the state.
3. I can’t review it without spoiling it, but The Lost Daughter (Netflix, based on Ferrante) is a very good movie.
5. MIE: “Mothers are memorializing their breastfeeding experiences with stones made from the liquid.” (NYT)
Fracking to Europe’s Rescue
Fracking has lowered energy prices and generated huge benefits to the US economy (e.g. here, here.) Western Europe in contrast has mostly banned fracking or put in place large regulatory barriers:
Bloomberg: Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria all effectively ban fracking. The only major activity is in Ukraine, which is weaning itself off of Russian gas, and in the U.K., where the government is promoting the technology to help replace plunging domestic output from the North Sea. In October, Cuadrilla Resources won permission to frack as many as four wells in the U.K., ending a two-and-a-half year battle with local authorities. In 2011, tremors caused by an exploratory Cuadrilla rig in northwestern England led to a one-year moratorium on fracking in the country. In 2013, hundreds of protesters camped in a tiny village south of London until the company abandoned its well there. People in Zurawlow, a town in eastern Poland, successfully blockaded a fracking site in 2012 and Greenpeace activists have occupied a shale gas rig in Denmark.
The differences may be due to US land policy which recognizes the landowner rather than the state as the owner of mineral rights (the resources under the land)–thus, despite huge campaigns against fracking in the US, the landowners were a natural balancing constituent.
The US fracking revolution has made the US energy independent while Europe uncomfortably relies on large imports from Russia. Yet, even though Western Europe has mostly banned fracking they have begun to import lots of US liquid natural gas. The first LNG exports in the lower United States date only to 2016 but since that time exports have increased dramatically to China and Europe and the US will be the world’s largest exporter of LNG by the end of 2022.
European Commission: The European Union imports more and more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States to diversify and render its energy supply more secure. LNG imports from the U.S. have increased substantially since the first shipment in April 2016. Data show that at the end of 2019 LNG exports to the EU recorded the highest volume ever. In November 2019 imports reached 3 billion cubic meters and their value was estimated at €0.5 billion. In December 2019 LNG imports from the US reached a new monthly record: 3.2 billion cubic meters, with an estimated value of €0.5 billion.
European imports have only increased since that time as Europe has shut down nuclear reactors and the price of European energy has soared. A Russian invasion of Ukraine could increase US demand even more.
All hail the fracking revolution.
How animals decide
Almost all animals must make decisions on the move. Here, employing an approach that integrates theory and high-throughput experiments (using state-of-the-art virtual reality), we reveal that there exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space. Specifically, we find that animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions, a response that facilitates effective decision-making and is robust both to the number of options available and to context, such as whether options are static (e.g., refuges) or mobile (e.g., other animals). We present evidence that these same principles, hitherto overlooked, apply across scales of biological organization, from individual to collective decision-making.
That is recent work by Vivek H. Sridhar, et.al. And for the pointer I thank Clara.
The new consensus of economists is further to the left
Based on an extensive survey of the members of the American Economic Association this paper compares consensus among economists on a number of economic propositions over four decades. The main result is an increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not obvious in previous surveys and are largely supportive of government policies that mitigate income inequality. Another area of consensus is concern with climate change and the use of appropriate policy tools to address climate change.
That is from a new paper by Doris Geide-Stevenson and Alvaro La Parra Perez. While I believe left-wing economists are more likely to answer such surveys (and maybe this gap is growing over time?), still I do not doubt the essential correctness of this result. Note also that immigration and floating exchange rates remain popular, tariffs remain unpopular.
Via Jeremy Horpedahl.