The recent Kanye West and Paul McCartney collaborations have come as a shock to many. The seemingly opposite performers and human beings have put out tracks that are surprisingly pretty good.
Listen to ‘FourFiveSeconds’ Featuring Kanye West, Paul McCartney, and Rihanna
In a new interview with NME, McCartney explains what first attracted him to the rapper. It was when Kanye and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne tour came to the O2 Arena in London, and he finally “got rap.”
“I was expecting it to be, ‘Oh it’s great, it’s hip-hop, it’s loud…,” he said. “But I hadn’t until then got the urban poetry aspect. Like, Bob Dylan is a poet. And so is Jay Z and Kanye.”
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He goes on to explain how what he saw in the music, a lack of formula, is the same thing that’s driven him all his life.
“People used to say to The Beatles in America, ‘Who writes the words and who writes the music?’ And we’d say, ‘…Both of us!’ ‘So what’s your formula?’ We’d go, ‘Well if we had one, we’d bottle it but then probably break the bottle and lose the formula.’ You know, you don’t want a formula. I don’t ever wanna find out what I’m doing.”
As for why someone at his age would go to a Kanye/Jay-Z show in the first place?
“If I’m gonna do a tour I like to go and see what other people are doing. I didn’t wanna bring my tour out and be amazingly old-fashioned. So people if are going, ‘Oh man, Beyonce, she was killer!’ I like to go there and go, ‘Yeah, we can do better than this.’”
Stay forever young, Macca.
[Via NME]