"Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'"
About this Quote
McCartney punctures the saintly halo that often gets airbrushed onto the Beatles: four mop-tops as pure, anti-capitalist avatars accidentally dragged into wealth. His line is funny because it’s bluntly transactional. “Let’s write a swimming pool” is a punchy unit of measurement - not “a hit,” not “a great song,” but a luxury object you can swim laps in. It turns creativity into a shopping list, and the audacity is the point.
The intent isn’t to confess greed so much as to correct the record. Post-1960s nostalgia likes its geniuses morally uncomplicated: artists either sell out or stay pure. McCartney refuses the binary. The subtext is that wanting money doesn’t negate artistry; it can sit right next to ambition, craft, even idealism. That’s also a quiet defense of pop itself. The Beatles were working musicians who understood the marketplace and learned to play it better than anyone. Romanticizing them as anti-materialistic is just another way of denying how hard they worked - and how strategic they were.
Context matters: this is McCartney, long cast as the “commercial” Beatle, reclaiming the honesty of wanting success. He’s also highlighting a broader cultural myth-making machine that turns messy humans into symbols. The joke lands because it collapses the distance between legend and ledger, reminding you that the greatest songs in history were still made by people who liked nice things and knew exactly what a chorus could buy.
The intent isn’t to confess greed so much as to correct the record. Post-1960s nostalgia likes its geniuses morally uncomplicated: artists either sell out or stay pure. McCartney refuses the binary. The subtext is that wanting money doesn’t negate artistry; it can sit right next to ambition, craft, even idealism. That’s also a quiet defense of pop itself. The Beatles were working musicians who understood the marketplace and learned to play it better than anyone. Romanticizing them as anti-materialistic is just another way of denying how hard they worked - and how strategic they were.
Context matters: this is McCartney, long cast as the “commercial” Beatle, reclaiming the honesty of wanting success. He’s also highlighting a broader cultural myth-making machine that turns messy humans into symbols. The joke lands because it collapses the distance between legend and ledger, reminding you that the greatest songs in history were still made by people who liked nice things and knew exactly what a chorus could buy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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