Abstarct
Contrary to the Romantic assumptions, we can conclude from the evidence presented in Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond, that Paul McCartney’s freedom to act as a creative person has always been relative to the domain and field of popular music he works within. For us, free will, or the ability to make a choice, is always circumscribed by a set of structural factors. This may be a self-evident conclusion for researchers in sociology or philosophy, but for the many producers and consumers of popular music, who valorise the mythologies built up around The Beatles and Paul McCartney, this may be surprising. We argued here that the development of Paul McCartney’s ‘habitus’ came about through his many and varied interactions within the domain and fields of popular music. The situations he found himself in provided a set of predispositions to act. We suggest there was a large degree of agency involved in his songwriting, record productions and musical performances and, in fact, this may have increased over time as his power and leverage in the field increased. It is within this creative system, one that he has grown to know very well, that Paul McCartney has produced his most enduring life’s work.
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McIntyre, P., Thompson, P. (2021). Paul McCartney’s Multiple Creative and Business Ventures. In: Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_7
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