Title: “Maxwell's silver hammer”
Format: Album track
Written by: Paul McCartney
Performed by: The Beatles
Genre: Pop/Psych
Taken from: Abbey Road
Year: 1969
Acclaim: n/a unless you count how many Beatles fans apparently hate it, also that just about any track on this album is considered gold.
I had never heard
Abbey Road at all before last week, when I came across it in my History of Prog Rock journal, and I instantly loved it. Every track. Even this, which a lot of people seem to hate. I like it possibly for the same reasons many people hate it: that cheerful, whistly, twenties-sounding style, the fact that it is such an upbeat song while being essentially about a serial killer. There's nothing dark about it on the surface – we're not talking Slayer here – and indeed, when Maxwell kills it's illustrated in the lyric by the words “Bang bang” and in the music by the hitting of an anvil. There's something innocent about it, and the very incongruity of a song about a killer being so cheerful and almost childlike (“granny music”, as John Lennon called it) appeals to me.
Things I like about this :
1. The oddly upbeat, cheerful way it's sung and played
2. The lyric
Things I don't like about this:
Nothing really.
(Look, I haven't included a video as there appear to be no originals out there, and the only one I found was some stupidly disabled (by which I mean the sound was partially disabled) version. I'm sure most of you know it already, if not check it out on Spotify.)
Rating: 