1/2/2024 0 Comments Ebonyivory![]() Maybe that general overall cluelessness is why “Ebony And Ivory” is so blasé and tossed-off, why it’s utterly lacking in anything resembling urgency. Without working particularly hard on it, McCartney stretched his analogy to encompass conflicts between black and white people - a problem that, he thought, had maybe been solved. When McCartney first wrote “Ebony And Ivory,” he’d just gotten into a fight with his wife Linda, and he was thinking that they should be getting along better. There’s some possibility that “Ebony And Ivory” is McCartney, long considered the glibbest of the Beatles, doing his best to inject some level of profundity into his solo work. He was also, at least in some sense, playing catchup. And of course, McCartney was also mourning the death of his former bandmate John Lennon. His band Wings had officially broken up in 1981, when Denny Laine, the only longtime member of the band who did not have the word “McCartney” in his name, quit the group. McCartney had just been through a few personal upheavals. The central metaphor of McCartney’s song “Ebony And Ivory” is so basic that it doesn’t really bear explaining, though McCartney still explains it all over again anytime anyone asks him about the song. Maybe it should’ve been written in the ’60s, this song.’ But I after I’d written it and recorded it, you look around, and, you know, there’s still tension.” That’s a very astute decades-old observation from Sir Paul McCartney, the man who attempted to heal racial tensions in the most trite, simplistic manner imaginable. Maybe the problem is solved… Maybe I’ve missed the boat. ![]() “When I wrote the song, I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to keep talking about black and white. ![]() In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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