"You think that people would have enough of silly love songs.
I look around me and I see it isn't so."
In the '60s, the Beatles had gone from writing and singing "silly love songs" like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to being a driving force in the culture shift later in the '60s. After the Beatles broke up, Paul made records solo and with Wings. But much of political nature was gone from the music of Wings and the critics took note.
That did not escape Paul's notice. The Beatles had been one of the most acclaimed bands (probably the most) in history and now he was looked at with a somewhat disparaging eye. Lennon was still largely silent at this point musically, but surely if he was making records they would contain more substance. So Paul answered the critics in the best way he could.
"I only know that when I'm in it,
... Love isn't silly at all."
We can talk about how rock music is a rebellion against authority, because at times it is. We can talk about how rock music has been a force for social change, because at times it has been. But whatever we say about it, rock music's primary subject has been love. It doesn't matter who the band is, sooner or later the subject will come up.
In discussing the song in an interview with Billboard in 2001, McCartney noted:
The song was, in a way, to answer people who just accuse me of being soppy. The nice payoff now is that a lot of the people I meet who are at the age where they've just got a couple of kids and have grown up a bit, settling down, they'll say to me, "I thought you were really soppy for years, but I get it now! I see what you were doing!"
We shouldn't be surprised. At it's best, music reflects things that we can relate to from our own experience and our dreams. Love is at the center of that for most of us, whether positively, as in "Silly Love Songs" or, unfortunately, not so positively (as in Jackson Browne's "The Pretender"). But love isn't going to go away as a theme in popular music, no matter how silly some think songs sound.
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