With a little help from Paul McCartney
Long before AI-generated music started sneaking onto Spotify playlists, McCartney was combining this immense talent and energy with hard work and discipline to create an important chunk of the music on which the technology was trained
At the age of 83, Paul McCartney has produced his 18th solo LP. Is this what human striving looks like in the age of the algorithm? No doubt McCartney’s creative energy has always been close to superhuman: It is evident in the sheer depth, volume and imaginative leaps of the Lennon-McCartney songbook as well as the prodigiousness of the musician’s post-Beatles output. But long before AI-generated music started sneaking onto Spotify playlists, McCartney was combining this immense talent with hard work to create an important chunk of the music on which the technology was trained.
The lesson here is twofold. The first applies specifically to this moment in history when it seems like the machine is poised to take over every creative bastion — witness the fear whipped up by the allegations that a Commonwealth Prize recipient this year used AI. The anxiety is understandable: Technology can now “write” books, “compose” music, “paint” pictures and “make” films. As it gets more sophisticated, what was once passable may even become genuinely interesting. Yet, McCartney’s persistence in doing what he has always done reminds us that creativity is not so much about the outcome as it is about the process itself.
The second lesson is that perseverance matters as much as ability. In Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which covers the making of Let It Be, the Fab Four’s final studio album, the viewer watches the band almost break up. In the end, it’s not just alchemy that keeps them together; it’s also McCartney’s stubborn belief in the work itself, in the insistence that they show up, regardless of personal and creative differences to “go through the bad bit and get to the good bit”.
