I can understand how someone might cringe when he realizes that posterity will hold him at least partially responsible for inflicting "In My Life" or "Revolution No. 9" on the world, which is why I don't hold Paul McCartney's attempt to switch the songwriting credit on some Beatles' songs from "Lennon-McCartney" to "McCartney-Lennon" against him. More to the point, is there any reason to pretend that they existed as a songwriting team in any real sense after, lets say, 1965? The whole fiction seems to have been designed to satisfy their greed more than anything else.

Lennon's combination of flaccid experimentation in psychedelia with treacly anthems has dated rather badly over the years; outside of "Revolution", "TBOJ&Y", "Come Together", "Rain" and "Cold Turkey", his post-1965 material is more a testament to how easy it can be to glide along for years on a reputation. He's kind of like the Arnold Palmer of rock. Arnie quit winning tournaments after the age of 40, and wasn't close to Gary Player or Lee Trevino, much less Jack Nicklaus, after about 1969. But he was great once, and moreover, had tons of charisma; even though his accomplishments really don't measure up, he still gets paired with the Golden Bear as a "rival", and was as much a symbol of his generation as John Lennon.

Over the passage of time, McCartney's songs have held up better; most of the ways the Beatles influence music today were Paul's ideas, not John's. Maybe McCartney just handled his drug use better. But Lennon died young, and he will always be remembered for what he supposedly stood for, while McCartney has spent the past twenty years producing crap as bad as anything Lennon put out in Walls and Bridges or Double Fantasy. So he complains now, and looks petty, even though if truth-in-advertising had anything to do with the music industry, one or the other (but not both) would receive sole credit for most Beatles songs.