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I think that can be the case. But if someone says they're trying to make, say, a rap record does that make it invalid compared with someone who just starts rapping into a tape recorder? Surely the real test is the end result. The problem with a word like 'avant-garde' I suppose is that it has certain associations with value as much as it does style. To make an avant-garde piece is often perceived as superior to making something, for want of a better description, 'conventional'.
Ultimately though, I think "trying to be" avant-garde is an acceptable method so long as the result is itself "avant-garde" (whatever that may be). Saying that, McCartney has, to my knowledge, never really tried to be avant-garde and nor has anything he's ever done really fit into that category. I think in his case it's more that he was interested in what people working within the avant-garde were doing, and tried to incorporate some of their ideas into his own work. The same could be said of his so-called 'classical' work which, if you listen to it (not that anyone should, on account of its utter shittiness) is far more akin to some of the soundtrack work he did in the sixties with George Martin than it is classical in the usual sense. It seems that here again, Paul was more interested in adopting ideas from another style and adapting them to his own than moving head-first into it.
In that sense I suppose it's more a case of inspiration rather than aspiration.
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