I Am A Rock

“This, according to Artie, is my most neurotic song. Don’t know whether that’s true or not.” - from the Simon’s own mouth. That’s saying a lot, but I believe Artie is correct. It’s surprising how much angst is buried underneath those pretty harmonies and benign looks. Most of it courtesy of Paulie, the songwriter extraordinaire. Needless to say, it’s a very adolescent sentiment, me against the world and all that. Most of us grow out of having that attitude, some more quickly than others. The ones that don’t presumably grow up to become serial killers and crazy cat ladies. Nothing wrong with adolescent sentiments. I totally thought this was a profound life mission statement when I was fourteen. Yeah, definitely one of those songs a peer-deprived teen can relate to, to the point of tears. Speaking of teens and angst and all that, doesn’t it just beg for a super straight-faced thrash metal cover? It’s like it was meant for Metallica to sing but the gods of song sent it to Paul Simon instead.

Homeward Bound

Like we saw yesterday, Paul Simon did some pretty important stuff in the 80′s. He helped introduce the world to African music and all that. Pretty stellar. But as good as Paul Simon’s music has always been, it just wasn’t quite as good after he dropped the ‘& Garfunkel’ part. Of course Garfunkel wasn’t as good without the ‘Simon &’ either. Simon & Garfunkel are like cheese & crackers, like tea & crumpets, like spaghetti & meatballs. That is, they’re tastier together than they are on their own. I mean, I’ll eat crackers straight up if I have to, but some cheese would be jolly good. Mmm, cheese. So I’m saying that, uh, Paul Simon is kind of like a cracker, very wholesome and crunchy and good for you, and Artie Garfunkel is the cheesy one who needs to balance out the crunchiness, and um, I think I’m going to fix myself an early dinner. I honestly don’t know where that metaphor came from, but I think you get the general idea.

Go Tell It On the Mountain

I know I promised not another Christmas song. Because I hate them. But here is one that I’ve always loved. Go Tell It On the Mountain is different from most Xmas songs, because for one thing, it’s actually about Christ being born, as opposed to insipid commercial pap like stupid Frosty or Rudolph the stupidass reindeer. It’s also head and shoulders above everything else because it holds up as a song. If you’ve noticed most Xmas songs have about as much musical substance as a TV ad jingle. This is a real song with real soul. Nowhere better than in the hands of gospel queen Mahalia Jackson. Jackson’s rendition is classic. She gives a stately performance over a rolling piano. While many singers going in the gospel style would have opted to sing it as big and loud as they could, Jackson’s singing is understated, only hinting at the vocal power she’s capable of. Going in an equally great but different direction, Simon & Garfunkel covered it barbershop style. It’s much faster, powered along by an almost bluegrass strumming. Paul and Art’s vocal harmony here is one of their best together. In yet a third, completely different iteration, The Wailers set it to a mid-tempo reggae beat. They also changed all the words but the refrain. “Jesus Christ is born” became “Set my people free” and it was just as good being a freedom song as a gospel one. In that form it became a signature anthem for Peter Tosh. These three performances couldn’t be more disparate, but in each one the spirit of the song remains, even if the words themselves are different. It’s one of those hardy classics that can be shaped into any style and not lose their power.

 

 

For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her.

Art Garfunkel can rest easy with this song under his belt, for it is surely his highest peak. This is Garfunkel’s voice at its most beautiful, perfectly complemented by Paul Simon’s lyrics. The song is a short, perfect love poem, approaching the purity and spirit of courtly ballad, yet thoroughly modern in its simplicity. I can’t overpraise the power of sheer simplicity. Fancy trick and sleek production are all well and good in their place, but I’ve said it time and again: it’s the bare bones of melody and words that transcend time and trend. The only niggling thing that prevents full enjoyment of the video below is the inexplicable close-up of Paul Simon’s Prince Valiant mug during the climax, when the focus should fairly have been on Artie. Oh, Garfunkel, again the eternal underdog!

Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall.

“I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end.”

Simon & Garfunkel were unexpectedly doomy for a pair of poetic college boys. Or maybe that’s not unexpected. Their harmonies were so lovely and their appearance so inoffensive (and the title Flowers Never Bend so misleading) that it’s natural to assume they’re middlebrow folkies who sing about love. And sing about love they did. But they also had a dark side. Paul Simon has an existentialist streak a mile wide. He just loves to write dark songs questioning the meaning of life. Even in his love songs, the theme is more often the transience of love rather than the joys of it. Along with that, his ongoing theme is a rueful contemplation of the passing of life itself. One of the most memorable of his recent material is a ditty called Old, from 2000′s You’re The One, with the chipper refrain “Getting old…old…gettin’ old.” Love ends, old happens, might as well accept it. Simon isn’t depressing with his musing about life, death and old age – his songs are simply too pretty to be depressing, especially in the days when they came dressed out in Art Garfunkel’s soaring vocals. Simon isn’t angry either, or particularly sad. He just likes to contemplate the way happy times tend to end, how life is all about the practice of moving on from things that have ended, and finding new things and repeating the cycle until you get too old to care anymore.

Feuilles-O

Never thought it would happen, but slightly twee acoustic folk-pop is making a comeback. I don’t know too much about it (me being such a hardcore rocker an’ all!) but if Pitchfork says it, it must be a thing. I’ve never given Belle & Sebastian more than the most perfunctory once-over, and I strongly disagree that The Smiths are anything twee. Paul McCartney is twee! UPDATE: Belle & Sebastian are pretty good, and very twee. My point, however, is; there can’t be any talk of twee pop without mentioning Simon & Garfunkel, who must be acknowledged as twee forefathers. They’re shamelessly intelligent and well educated. They wear possibly ironic dorky sweaters. They have an ampersand. They harmonize in French! While I suspect that Paul and Artie weren’t exactly at the height of coolness back in the sixties, they were popular all right, and they fit into a well established genre of tweedy middlebrow folk-pop. Which went way, way out of fashion as the decades rolled on and popular music gradually placed heavier and heavier emphasis on how loud and outrageous one could be, as opposed to whether or not one had the inclination to harmonize in French. That is, by the time my time came around gentle strumming and harmonizing of any kind were about as far from culturally acceptable as it was possible to be and still exist. But in the last decade, old has become new again. I’ve been watching with much gratification as bands who refer directly to the styles of the sixties and seventies become popular and acclaimed. On some level, as much as they might be aggravating, we have to thank the hipsters for making uncoolness itself a cool thing. Without ironic dorky sweater and bad haircut-loving hipsters, would bad hair and dorky sweater-loving Simon & Garfunkel be suddenly right in stride with our little Zeitgeist?

Feelin’ Groovy

Yes, it’s technically called The 59th Street Bridge Song, but that’s a silly title. The song is pretty silly too, though, and so is the video. What makes it particularly silly is the contrast with the other songs on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. With tracks like The Dangling Conversation, A Simple Desultory Philippic and Scarborough Fair/Canticle it wasn’t hard to tell how Simon & Garfunkel wanted to position themselves, image-wise. They were book-smart university types, with big vocabularies and poor taste in clothing. Their songs were meant to evoke the smell of coffee-shops and libraries. I’m not sure if that still came off cool in 1966. I think they would have come off hipper in an earlier time, like the fifties, when sweater vests and tomes still had mystique. Feelin’ Groovy, I suspect, was their offering towards the blossoming flower-power market. It’s totally a hippie song, a stoner song, what with the wandering about talking to lampposts thing. In the video the boys’ utterly square appearance is hilariously at odds with the countercultural overtones of the song. When you hear it, with it’s dreamy refrain and gentle harmony, you naturally visualize some long-haired but still wholesome enough not to be scary hippies, someone along the lines of The Mama & The Papas. What you get is two nerdy dudes in sweaters, and then at the end, two even nerdier dudes in even worse sweaters. But maybe they were uncool in an ironic way?

Fakin’ It

“Good morning Mr Leitch, have you had  a busy day?”

Random spoken-word segments are one of my favorite production gimmicks. If I produced records I’d stick them in everywhere. (Some people do stick them in everywhere.) It’s especially good when it a randomly British spoken-word segment. Anyhow, I always though Simon & Garfunkel somehow managed to convey a sense of Britishness despite being not British whatsoever. Maybe because they’re so self-consciously erudite. They do belong to a long line of brainy New York intellectual types, alongside luminaries like Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson, though I don’t know anyone who can match the young Paul Simon in using hefty thesaurus words. Like ‘dubious’.  I’m not making fun at all though. I think it’s thoroughly charming, and maybe old fashioned in a fifties kind of way, to be a pop star who yet wants to utilize things he learned at university. Because nowadays it’s more in style to dumb down as hard as possible.

El Condor Pasa

Just like Simon & Garfunkel to pepper in some Peruvian folk music on their albums. As it happened, Paul Simon ended up in court because he erroneously thought El Condor Pasa, a melody for which he’d written new lyrics, was an actual Peruvian folk song, and as such, copyright free. When in fact, though inspired by folk traditions, it had been composed (and copyrighted) by Daniel Alomia Robles in 1913. That’s what you get for not doing your research, Simon. It wouldn’t be the last time Simon faced litigation for improper credit-giving and royalty-paying habits. He’s still at loggerheads with Los Lobos for their disputed contributions to Graceland. In the Robles case the late composer’s son charitably admitted that it was all a big misunderstanding and not really Simon’s fault at all. Meanwhile, Garfunkel was merely an innocent bystander.

The Dangling Conversation

“Can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theatre really dead?”

Sometimes clever people feel the need to remind everyone how smart they are by ‘casually’ dropping great literary names. Which is fine. Who hasn’t succumbed to try on a tiny bit of snobbery? ‘Why of course, I do indeed read poetry for pleasure. Don’t you? Oh, you don’t? Oh…” we like to say, in our most condescending tone of voice. And we generally get away with it. But if you in the business of pop, be wary. You may succumb to the dreaded ‘Cemetry Gates Effect’ – instead of coming off all elite-like, you’ll just reveal that you’re really a bit of a loser at best and at worst a pompous twat. Writing and singing songs about yourself reading poetry, I think, is about as pretentious as pretentiousness goes. I’ll repeat myself – don’t sing about how great Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost were, even if you are the dreary type who actually reads such rubbish. What makes it so annoying is the logic that if you like to read poetry, and you’ve written a song about it, you must fancy yourself a bit of a poet, and ergo, you’re somehow striving to equate your own self with whatever poet it is you claim to be reading the works of. Which is even worse than the simple desire to make yourself look smart.