I'm sorry but Paul Simon is so overrated

i strongly dislike paul simon

a song like gumboots where he doesn't mention new york and its all african musicians but i hear it and i'm on prince street in autumn, i don't think his parsability accounts for how evocative he can be.

always felt like he vacillated btw adult contempo island rock and over-poignant emotionality. neither work for me.

whaaaaaat

"island rock"

you are crazy

yeah this is true! he's really good! but he's really not very daring - "Richard Corey" is a great poem by an underrated poet, but it's sort of telling that Robinson's sort of you-can-parse-this-cleanly style is where he goes when Cohen & Dylan are reading say Baudelaire and Rimbaud

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, August 7, 2011 12:18 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

youre a snob

the mama pajama rolled out of bed and logged onto ILX to post

youre a snob

http://freesamplefreak.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/commercials-grey-poupon.jpg

do u have any french poets that i could smear on my leonard cohen sandwich

it's true i have been really into clarity in song lyrics lately. i like leonard cohen, too, though; it wouldn't really occur to me to pit him against simon.

i don't get cohen until he puts on a corny deep voice and starts singing things like STICK ANOTHER TURTLE ON THE FIRE / GUYS LIKE ME ARE MAD FOR TURTLE MEAT. that's obv better than paul simon but that aside they're about on par for me.

"no one listens to me, I might as well be a Leonard Cohen record..."

i like leonard cohen too i was just being mean

i value your services itt max

also surm y u braek hart

paul simon is the best and people who dont like him can go str8 to hell

exactly

been listening to hearts and bones, the album, a lot lately. the smartest people in the world are gathered in los angeles / to analyze our love affair and finally unscramble us.

the new album is really good, too.

max srsly tho I get that you love Paul Simon, kick ass, but it's not snobby to say that he's formally a lot more limited than Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Phil Ochs, Townes van Zandt, Neil Young, and others - those people all really stretch out a lot. Not always successfully! but Paul Simon is musically kind of...ignorant?

Simon doesn't really dislike the idea of musical theater, only what the musical theater has become. So as much as he may shake his head in dismay at the success of "Cats," he happily listens to the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein and Cole Porter.

"It's not rock and roll, but I liked it," he says, then laughs. "I didn't mean to parody the Stones, but that's exactly what it is. I liked it.

"But it ended up in a weird cul de sac -- probably because it was never energized by rock and roll," he says. As Simon sees it, the trouble with modern musical theater is that "it's all descended either from the musical theater from its heyday in the '40s and '50s, or it's the English variant that Andrew Lloyd Webber popularized. Those are the two mainstreams of what a Broadway musical is today."

Trouble is, there's nothing terribly special about the music these plays employ. "There are all of these different stories out there, but the music kind of all sounds the same," Simon says.

You're sort of doomed to complacency when you think that what the stage that gives us Sondheim needs is...you!!!

the smartest people in the world are gathered in los angeles / to analyze our love affair and finally unscramble us.

typed this in all caps, clicked "submit", your post appeared

i guess i should red some edwin arlington robinson

xp <3

I mean I will defend him against people who say he sucks, but he really is kind of a Lou Reed figure. "Hey guys guess what I just discovered last week and now I have a lot to say about it? African music!!!"

Graceland, which is the only record of his that I have burned into my brain deeply enough to play this game with, has some flat-out corny lyrics but imho they are generally salvaged by the delivery (best example that comes to mind = "hey señorita, that's astute / why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute?")

then again it also has its moments of absolutely undeniable brilliance e.g. "she said 'honey, take me dancing' but they ended up sleeping in a doorway"

"Next, I will discover Cuba and Brazil, you ungrateful fucks!!"

aerosmith OTM re:sondheim/theatre/complaceny

that was a dumb thing he said about musical theater and maybe it does reflect badly on his approach to music but the self-titled album is still one of my favorite things in the world.

not tryna to play cap'n save-a-dilettante here but didn't the whole apartheid/sanctions situation make it kind of... difficult... for western musicians to engage more deeply with their african peers?

also real-time LOLs at this:

It is so clear that the talent behind Simon and Garfunkel rests solely in his taller, silent partner.

tho I would love to read a passionate defense of Artie's artsitry

"Next, I will discover Cuba and Brazil, you ungrateful fucks!!"

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, August 7, 2011 4:55 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

... idg where you're getting this from

i think graceland is one of my least favourite just because of the big gated drums

fwiw simon captures such a unique vibe w/ his lyrics and songwriting that calling him 'limited' in comparison to neil young joni mitchell et al seems really shortsighted. limited in what sense? being himself?

lou reed vs paul simon might actually be competitive on ilm

haha i knew i would virulently disagree with plax EVENTUALLY in this thread

lol

Stealing song from Los Lobos: Dud
Dabblings in and pronouncements on Broadway: Dud
Downplaying Artie's G contribution: Dud
Not making use of surrealist lyrical tradition in rock drawn from reading a few French poets and borrowing/stealing lyrics from Robert Johnson and old weird America songs on the assumption that they had already been borrowed: Fine with me
Everything else: Classic

i mean i love it and along with rumours its the album that i inherited from my parents but hearts and bones or rhythm of the saints easily take it (h+b is patchy as hell though)

fwiw simon captures such a unique vibe w/ his lyrics and songwriting that calling him 'limited' in comparison to neil young joni mitchell et al seems really shortsighted. limited in what sense? being himself?

limited in the sense of being pretty content with the self he located early on. Joni Mitchell can't stand to sit still for longer than an album or two, ditto Neil Young. Change up the instrumentation on "Me & Julio" and it fits fine on "Graceland."

john dogg if u want me to dig up bob dylan and leonard cohen saying embarrassing things in their interviews i will but you gotta wait till i get off work

do you like the 70s albums, plax? also i want Lamp to come back and explain his challop: S&G is better than Simon solo, or, like, that jerry landis stuff?

keep a cool head and always carry a light bulb xp

lou reed vs paul simon might actually be competitive on ilm

― iatee, Sunday, August 7, 2011 1:00 PM (22 seconds ago)

teamed up

I mean I will defend him against people who say he sucks, but he really is kind of a Lou Reed figure. "Hey guys guess what I just discovered last week and now I have a lot to say about it? African music!!!"

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, August 7, 2011 12:54 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it may be unsavory but if this is what it takes to make a great album then so be it

limited in the sense of being pretty content with the self he located early on. Joni Mitchell can't stand to sit still for longer than an album or two, ditto Neil Young.

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, August 7, 2011 1:03 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i love neil young like a brother but srlsy UH

for every embarrassing bob dylan interview quote you could come up with 10 'worth putting in a book' utterly classic quotes.e not sure you could say that about paul simon. (or anybody else really)

bob dylan and leonard cohen both give great interviews, it's true. don't really think of leonard cohen as someone who's constantly switching things up, not that it matters, great lyrics are great lyrics.

... idg where you're getting this from

it's just a lol

I mean it is true that it's a little weird when a guy who never showed any interest whatsoever in these musics just suddenly wakes up one day and says "whaddaya know, African music!" and, having had towering success with that...loses all interest in pursuing the genre further - like "I did African music, now I'll conquer the islands" - those musics are titanic, rich, endlessly complex, to "do an album" in that style is a little colonial you know? it's not like it's any crime to explore and participate in the musics of other cultures but when it looks like your interest was limited to some dilettante cultural-buffetism...idk man. Like again I think the dude is good but I would think that if you loved that music you'd explore Ghana, Nigeria, the sub-Sahara instead of going "well I did some South African stuff...now, on to Brazil!!"

you know what i look for in music, great interview skills

lol

So you are saying he should go the Ry Cooder route, John?

I mean obv everybody says dumb shit in interviews but in this case it's kind of evidence that Paul Simon's awareness of the music he's working with is profoundly limited. "What Broadway needs is rock and roll!" --srsly you guys are into that grandpaism? cool get yrs but it's kind of a v. lame look.

Joni Mitchell fwiw is way worse in interviews but I haven't see her say shit that is musically just igno-extreme like that