Cattle Beware of Snipers

Wrestling with the maddening conundrum of Paul McCartney's "Getting Closer"

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

Several folks have asked me for my take on Pitchfork’s recent demise, so let me get that out of the way before we get into today’s groove.

On the one hand, I never wrote for Pitchfork and rarely ever read it, and thus had no real emotional or intellectual attachment to it. And as someone who has been writing professionally for over 30 years (and who was avidly consuming music journalism for over a decade before that), my initial reaction was that this is the same story I’ve seen over and over again since Trouser Press bit the dust in 1984: great publications and websites go under, and talented writers and editors are forced to scramble for work elsewhere. I mean, I can’t even begin to count the number of outlets I used to write for that either no longer exist or now bear little resemblance to their glory days.

But make no mistake, this is not business as usual: As what appears to be the impending disintegration of the once-great Sports Illustrated further illustrates, this is an enormously bleak and difficult time for writers and editors, a time when not even the most respected and longest-running outlets in the game have any real guarantee of sticking around.

In 1996, when the L.A. Reader — where I’d just been promoted to Music Editor — was bought and shut down by a rival paper, it pushed me into a career as a full-time freelance writer; sure, making the leap was scary, but there were so many music-related print outlets (and burgeoning internet ones) around back then that anyone with talent, knowledge, drive and a few connections could make a decent living as a freelancer.

Of course, the journalism and publishing landscapes have changed drastically since those somewhat halcyon days, slowly at first and then with frightening speed. I still love writing about music (and used to love writing about baseball), but I have increasingly felt like a blacksmith in the age of the Model T… and now with Artificial Intelligence and venture capitalism aggressively hammering nails into mainstream journalism’s coffin — and book publishers paying but a fraction of the sort of advances they used to regularly dole out — us writers have once again been forced to find new ways to adapt.

Which is why so many ink-stained wretches like myself have launched Substacks and similar blogs/newsletters over the past few years, and why it’s so important to support the writers whose work you really enjoy. Yes, it sucks for us to have to rattle the tip jar in your general direction, but in a lot of ways that’s actually preferable to begging an editor to please look into whatever happened to that check you were supposed to receive two months ago for a piece you busted your ass to turn in over a month before that — or, say, being snottily informed by someone in Accounts Payable that you’ve already been paid, when in fact they’re just confusing you with another writer who also has a Jewish last name. And at least this way, I’m not just a cog in someone else’s machine, just another worker at the Shanghai Noodle Factory…

So if you dig reading a writer’s work, please support it any way you can, whether by paying for a subscription, dropping a few bucks in their jar via PayPal or Venmo, sharing their work with someone else who might dig it, or even just sharing a few words of encouragement with the writer’s themselves. AI or tech bros will never completely shut us down (or up), but starvation and the lack of positive reinforcement just might. I’m so, so very thankful to all of you kind folks who have kept Jagged Time Lapse going with your financial and moral support over the last year and a half, because I honestly don’t know where I’d be without y’all…

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Okay, then — let’s get back to the good stuff!

“Are you a music person or a lyrics person?” is one of those chicken-and-egg propositions that I’ve never been able to come up with a definitive answer for. My childhood interest in novelty songs (“Monster Mash,” “Werewolves of London” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” were among the first singles I ever owned) was certainly lyrics-driven, and in high school I tended to gravitate towards songwriters — Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Davies, Elvis Costello, Paul Weller of The Jam, Paul Westerberg of The Replacements — who painted particularly evocative pictures with their wordplay and lyrical imagery.

At the same time, I’ve always been a sucker for a great riff, a funky groove or an indelible melodic hook, lyrics be damned. Long before I ever started buying records or even actively listening to the radio, I would get my musical fix from the instrumental opening themes of TV shows like Hawaii Five-0, S.W.A.T., Barnaby Jones, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Odd Couple. And, of course, I’ve heard all manner of songs and music throughout my life that have inspired me, transported me or otherwise enhanced my existence despite having completely idiotic or incomprehensible lyrics.

I suppose the best-case scenario is when brilliant words and evocative music work together to produce something even greater than the sum of their already-impressive parts; but I also have favorite tracks from all manner of genres where the music or performance carries more weight than the words, or vice versa. I mean, whatever works, right?

Still, there are times when the chasm between the quality of a song’s music and the quality of its lyrics is so shockingly, frustratingly wide that it’s all I can do to keep from pounding my forehead repeatedly against my desk or whatever other hard surface is currently presenting itself. And yes, I’m looking at YOU, Paul McCartney…

Now, I’m no Macca hater — his contributions to The Beatles were undeniably massive and often supremely magical, and I do love a great many of his Wings-era tracks, even the oft-derided “Wonderful Christmastime”. Paul’s lyrics to, say, “Silly Love Songs,” “Let ‘Em In,” “With a Little Luck” and “Goodnight Tonight” may indeed be pretty flimsy, but in each of those cases there’s something about the sound, arrangement, melodies and/or delivery that genuinely warms my heart and tickles my ears to the point where I don’t mind (or even notice) the lyrical shortcomings.

But then there’s “Getting Closer,” a song which makes me wonder how I’m not bald, considering all the hair I’ve torn out since first hearing it in the summer of 1979.

Musically, “Getting Closer” is one of my favorite post-Beatles things McCartney has ever done. Its ringing power chords and propulsive chug put it on the same level for me as “Jet,” “Junior’s Farm” or “Letting Go” (to name three hard-rocking mid-seventies Wings faves), while also fitting squarely within the power pop zeitgeist of 1979. Even with the cheeky-chappy “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Di” jauntiness of its verses, the music of “Getting Closer” sounded as fresh and thrilling to me on the radio that year as contemporary hits by younger artists like Blondie, Cheap Trick, The Knack, The Records, Bram Tchaikovsky, The Cars and The Pretenders. And the last third of the song, where it suddenly opens up like a new wave cousin of "Live and Let Die,” is the proverbial cherry on the top; I could honestly still listen to a loop of just that section for an hour or more.

But gah, those fucking lyrics! I dig surreal wordplay — I’m a huge Syd Barrett fan, after all — but there’s still a pretty big line between dreamlike whimsy and not-giving-a-shit randomness, and “Getting Closer” makes it pretty clear which side of the line Paul was standing on circa 1979. Either he was completely convinced of his own infallible brilliance at this juncture, or completely stoned, or both; and as great as the music of “Getting Closer” is, it never seems to distract me from the cringe-inducing lyrics Paul saddled it with.

I’m sure it’s hard to maintain perspective on your own work when you’re famous and successful, and even more so when you’re a Beatle and every single person you meet wants to tell you how you changed their life. But surely there must have been better lyrical options for this song, right? Surely Paul could have spent a few more minutes coming up with something that came close to matching or accentuating the power of the backing track? Surely someone (like Chris Thomas, who co-produced this track and the rest of 1979’s Back to the Egg) could have taken Paul aside and quietly informed him that opening a banger of this magnitude — not to mention the first real song on the album — with the inane words “Say you don’t love him/My salamander/Why do you need him?/Oh no don’t answer” is kind of like plopping a turd into the punch bowl before the party has even begun? Or that rhyming “Watching my windscreen wipers” with “Cattle beware of snipers” is a long way down from “Eleanor Rigby”?

Or maybe not. Because according to Paul’s account of this song in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, the lyrics of “Getting Closer” had actually been gestating for years, and actually meant something — to Paul, at least:

“A song like this might be thought of as a collage. I put things together that I’d seen or heard, and it had been around for a few years before we recorded it. I seem to remember there being a sign along the road somewhere: ‘Beware Cattle’. And there might have been bullet holes in the signs, because guys sniped at them for target practice, so I thought, ‘Cattle beware… Gluing my fingers together/Radio play me a song with a point.’ You know, not everything needs to have a point. A song is kind of a construction job, so I’ve done my usual thing of just sort of assembling it all and taking it somewhere.”

Paul also admits that, “I was probably smoking a little too much wacky baccy at the time” (no shit, dude), and that he threw at least one nudge-nudge-wink-wink drug reference into the song:

“One of the things about Wings was this freedom to not make sense. Sometimes I just liked the words and I wasn’t bothered about making sense. ‘Say you don’t love him’ – that’s not from any real experience, it’s not like I was being jilted or cuckolded or anything; it was a device to get me into the song. ‘I’m getting closer to your heart.’ I’m also arriving, driving towards where you are. ‘Keeping ahead of the rain on the road/Watching my windscreen wipers/Radio playing me a danceable ode’. ‘Hitting the chisel and making a joint’… You knew your audience would be amused by those little references, because rolling joints was still a little bit underground at that time.”

Those were different times, of course; even Ray Davies mentioned “high-grade hash” in The Kinks’ 1979 song “A Gallon of Gas,” because there was no easier way to connect with a late-seventies arena audience — and to coax a hearty “WOOOOO!!!” from the assembled multitudes — than to bring up the subject of getting high. But pandering to potheads has rarely (with the possible exception of Cheech and Chong) produced anything like great art, which is probably why the lyrics to “Getting Closer” still make my eyes involuntarily roll as hard as if I’ve just seen someone in an “A Friend with Weed is a Friend Indeed” tie-dye t-shirt.

“Getting Closer” will turn 45 this year, and I probably should just let go of my beef about it at this point. But when everything else about the track, including Paul’s impassioned vocals, still sounds so vital and fantastic — and when my mental turntable still wakes me up with it in the middle of the night — I still can’t help resenting that its lyrics fall abysmally short.

How about you, then? What’s a song — by Paul McCartney or anyone else — that you hate to love and/or love to hate, simply because its lyrics completely miss the music’s mark? Feel free to sound off (and share some links) in the comments!

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