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The legitimacy has lasted, but, in 1976, some of the heat has died down. The music itself has become diffuse. Pop is not just rock: it is also disco, soul, reggae, country and ballads. The hottest trend in Top 40 music seems to be themes from successful TV shows. Last week's charts had no fewer than four, including the title songs from Baretta and Laverne and Shirley. When a smart, articulate song like Paul Simon's smash 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover gets to the top, it seems like a happy accident.
"The scene is wide open," says Clive Davis, president of Arista, which shared in 1975's booming record sales of some $2.3 billion. Danny Goldberg, former vice president of Swan Song Records, which has hit it big with Led Zeppelin, complains that "everybody in the business knows a new era has got to come, but they're too busy cashing in on the old one to help it along." Some are helping, either by working their own personal territory (like Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Tom Waits and James Talley) or, like Simon, Dylan, Bruce Springsteen (TIME cover, Oct. 27) or The Band, trying to make their private property public. There are superb performers (like Linda Ronstadt), and wizardry writers (like Jackson Browne) who are learning the tricks of showmanship. But finding spirited new directions for music is a tradition that, for the time being, is not widely practiced. "Now it has become fashionable not to be too serious," comments Jon Landau, producer of albums by Springsteen and Browne.
As a Beatle, McCartney ebulliently proved that he could mix with the best of them, but at the moment he is having fun being flippant about rock's old insistence on relevance. His tunes are elaborately homespun, lined with shifting, driving rhythms and coy harmonics, their lyrics full of flights of gentle, sometimes treacly fantasy. There are little science-fiction ditties and frequent paeans to Linda. Even during his Beatle days, McCartney was something of a sentimentalist, and not embarrassed about it. At this point in his development, he seems pleased to be a first-rate performer and a composer of clever songs. "People say the music's not as strong as it was," he told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "But quite possibly it is. If you're not a critic, not some old person who's been around the music business a long time, maybe it's as strong. And if you're a young, vital person who goes to discos looking for birds and all that, maybe it's just fine."
This puts McCartney in the company of good music craftsmen like the Eagles and Neil Sedaka, a singer-songwriter of strong commercial rock in the late '50s. Sedaka lay low during the Beatles era, but in the past few years, with the enthusiastic support of his friend Elton John, has come back as strong as ever. His music, somewhat more urbane, remains essentially unchanged: catchy songs designed for the top of the Pops. Sedaka treats McCartney as a fellow tunesmith of the highest order. "A Pop hit has to have certain hooks you can hang your hat on," Sedaka points out. "The hooks can be either musical or lyrical, but the best is a marriage of both words and music. McCartney does this. A song like Listen to What the Man Said is terrific."