450. Paul and Linda McCartney, "Ram"


Man, what a wild album.  This sounds like Paul McCartney went "Let me take EVERY SINGLE MUSICAL IDEA I've had since John and I had our last fight and put them all in a hat and then draw them out and make songs out of whatever I draw."  So we've got "Ram On," a ukulele jingle that's a play on Paul Ramon, the fake name Paul used; we've got the fairly straight-ahead Buddy Holly-esque rocker "Eat at Home," a celebration of staying in that seems REALLY FITTING for 2020 (and also might be one extended dirty joke); and the strangled scream of "Monkberry Moon Delight," surely one of the weirdest things to come out of McCartney's head and mouth.

The real centerpiece, of course, is "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," a mashup of two songs into a deliriously catchy whole.  I'm extremely familiar with this song because the first album I ever bought with my own money was "Wings Over America," a triple live album by McCartney's Wings project and it's on there.

So critics fucking HATED this album.   Jon Landau said "Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can't even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate."  Meow!  But guess what?  Everyone was wrong!  I know it's such a cliche to say "this album was just way ahead of its time" but it's true.  This album was just too advanced for 1971.  What if you put The Sopranos on TV in 1971?  People would say "What the fuck is this?  This is nowhere near as good as Gunsmoke!"

Now Pitchfork gives it a retrospective 9.2 and says "What 2012's ears can find on Ram is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop."  That seems true.  It sounds like art-rock decades before Of Montreal existed.  How many albums invented a genre?

Ram is having a moment again right now because of Harry Styles, who we last saw at #491.  In an interview in Rolling Stone in September, he said he “did a lot of mushrooms” at Rick Rubin’s studio in Malibu, after which he would “lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine."  That sounds pretty good, actually.

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