Unlike silly songs for children by, say, Raffi, or maudlin songs for parents like Dylan’s “Forever Young” or Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son”-two ballads eager to preserve their singers’ sons in amber-Simon had genuinely intergenerational appeal. Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints came out in 19 respectively, which was solidly in the middle of the millennial birth cohort, as our parents were navigating the onset of middle age. In my case, it was a little on the nose: my dad would play Simon’s albums, suffused with second marriages and children, as he picked up my brother and sister and me for his custodial weekend. Graceland was the album for boomer parents on road trips with their children. Like many people born in the 1980s, I first heard Paul Simon in a car with my dad. On getting sized up at the “cinematographer’s party” that’s the staging ground of “I Know What I Know”: “I guess she thought / I was alright / Alright in the sort of a limited way / For an off night.” Or the “one and one half wandering Jews” (actually Paul and Carrie Fisher, breaking up-again) who “resume old acquaintances / Step out occasionally / And speculate who had been damaged the most” in “Hearts and Bones.” At their best, his songs have an erudite lyrical grace that had developed from a tendency to pretension in his early folk records and would shade in his later albums into mystic mumbo-jumbo.īut in the 1970s and 1980s, in the middle of his career, was a studied oddness, an attention to the unexpected detail: “It was in the early morning hours when I fell into a phone call / Believing I had supernatural powers I slammed into a brick wall.” How better to describe a cavalierly self-destructive phone call? He evoked the fragility of aging and losing with an astonishing wordiness that could somehow transform a syllabic pileup into a long exhale. A consummate adult rather than a perpetual teenager, he sang about the compromises of apartment living, the journey through sobriety, divorce, breakdowns, second marriages, second divorces, fatherhood, depression, baseball. Over the twenty-year span comprising his middle age, from 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water (his last record with Garfunkel) to 1990’s Rhythm of the Saints, Simon put out eight albums charting the course of a thoughtful-or neurotic-voyage through maturity. Unlike many entries in the classic rock pantheon, Simon made his best work after the 1960s, only once he’d left behind the act that made him famous. His emotive, androgynous tenor and sensitive, imagistic songwriting have sustained a sixty-year career in American pop music that came to a close in September with three farewell concerts in New York City and, tonight, October 13-Simon’s seventy-seventh birthday-a ninth appearance on Saturday Night Live. A more bookish Bob Dylan, less prolific and mythic not as New Jersey as Bruce Springsteen not as California, but more New York than, Joni Mitchell more acerbic than the Beatles and more of a hippie than Randy Newman. Paul Simon has always sat uncomfortably alongside his boomer contemporaries. Paul Simon with his son Harper, June 7, 1973
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |