I'm sorry but Paul Simon is so overrated

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

lol john as a child of the 80s i knew you eventually wouldnt be able to resist calling graceland 'a lil colonial'

aero everyone thinks what he said about musical theater was dumb

xp I'm saying a guy who "dabbles in world music" deserves some routine "srsly dude fuck off"s along with the propers he deserves for being a great songwriter

haha yes what i like about paul simon is his grandpaism

are we even talking about lyrics anymore or just stuff that annoys john about paul simon

whaaaaaat

"island rock"

you are crazy

― max, Sunday, 7 August 2011 16:38 (34 minutes ago)

yeah, cuz this is such a stretch

lol john as a child of the 80s i knew you eventually wouldnt be able to resist calling graceland 'a lil colonial'

jhosh I'm givin you a promotion

http://a3.l3-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/126/f17b062bea0e266e246cd2bec7c16596/m.jpg

it is, surm, i mean unless the island youre talking about is manhattan

are we even talking about lyrics anymore or just stuff that annoys john about paul simon

I think what's going on is I said a couple things & ppl who love paul simon are really eager to pretend that Simon's specifically musical opinions & practices have nothing to do with his music?

"Paul Simon wrote a musical, and in doing interviews about this musical revealed that he was profoundly ignorant about musicals...this obviously has nothing to do with his music"

i don't know i also like this point:

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

heres what i remember

me: paul simon rules leonard cohen drools
you: leonard cohen loves french poets
me: whatever
you: paul simon doesnt know anything about broadway
everyone: yep
you: paul simon is a colonialist
everyone: okay...?

paul simon may not have a musicologists understanding of the various musics of the world, he may not even have a plain txt message board posters cultural understanding, but he pretty clearly gets something abt making music which is why listening to the deeply sensitive soundz of graceland renders all the reductionist cries of cultural imperialism hegemony! silly

admittedly I never heard You're the One which was evidently Paul's penetrating look at "North African" music

i mean its a beautiful piece of music, who cares if he had to enslave los lobos to get there!

the deep sensitivity is the key

yeah I mean max it's a thread for talking about whether paul simon is overrated I think if discussing paul simon's songwriting thoughts & practices is a bummer to you you are on the wrong thread

i am probably going to fumble this observation but i'm not sure there's a way that paul simon could have made an African music album that was not colonial in the sense you mean, aero? i take your point that he could have gone further and you're right, he made use of african music to do a thing he was already doing, but that's what musicians do, right? i'm not saying there are no ethical stakes. i don't know, i love graceland so much, i am totally implicated in its colonialism.

me: paul simon rules leonard cohen drools

this thread title is stupid but i mean lets not go crazy here

i went a little crazy there i admit it

i feel like its p much an insult to the musicians he worked w/on graceland to call it colonialist, i mean who are they in this story

i am not really interested in doing anything but defending paul simon from the charge that he is not as good a lyricist as [insert yr favorite grizzled baudelaire fan here]

Lamp do you like the jerry landis stuff better than simon solo or s&g better? if the latter, u crazy, if the former i need to listen to these jerry landis songs

i feel like its p much an insult to the musicians he worked w/on graceland to call it colonialist, i mean who are they in this story

― ice cr?m, Sunday, August 7, 2011 1:22 PM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah like you can always a priori call an encounter between the first and third world colonial but it erases a lot of nuances

i don't think there's ever any indication in graceland that he's like *exploring* african music, i think he does keep it at arms length in this way, the same thing you're complaining about is a big strength i think for me. like he's not interested in african music AS african music or like taking this almost anthropological route with it, i think he's just thinking about how these are cool musicians to work with, let's see how we can get some milage out of this. i think for somebody that started out with like straight acoustic guitar and voice songwriting, he has spent a lot of recording time like *loosening* up the structures of his songs, from his first solo album on you get the sense of him moving in different directions (the lush jazziness and disco flourishes on h+b, the jam band vibe on one trick pony) that open out the rigid structures of his songs (his s/t is so good because he does this more successfully inside the songs themselves than ever again, peace like a river is the best example of what i mean but i don't know if i'm explaining this in any intelligible way at all) so like i get the feeling that he heard that careening highlife guitar sound and was like, "yeah that'll work, let's do an album like that" and so his interest in the music just works AS an interest in the music and not as something ethical and geographical and sociological but just like really formal and so it does seem pretty fair to me that he just dumped it after one (though listen to the guitar sound on father and daughter if you think he really DID just ditch that sound altogether) (i realise that there are major problems with this notion that hell i'm probably the ilxor most likely to jump on if somebody else started spouting them but in this case i'm willing to let him off the hook because rhythm of the saints is a damn good album and by john's prescription he shouldn't have made it)

ok lots of xps that more concisely say that than that block of bad grammar

peace like a river! i am obsessed with that song!

i am probably going to fumble this observation but i'm not sure there's a way that paul simon could have made an African music album that was not colonial in the sense you mean, aero? i take your point that he could have gone further and you're right, he made use of african music to do a thing he was already doing, but that's what musicians do, right? i'm not saying there are no ethical stakes. i don't know, i love graceland so much, i am totally implicated in its colonialism.

No, look, this is the question, and it's a hard q imo (and one that people've done plenty of handwringing about no doubt). There's going to be an element of cultural tourism no matter what, but most musicians & some (correct imo) listeners will say "look, music's a global conversation, what am I supposed to do, genuflect in front of a map or play benefits before I participate in that conversation, fuck you," but at the same time Simon's engagement with these musics seems profoundly superficial to me? I get that for max & many others "the only thing that matters is whether the tunes are good" -- and they are, you have to be an idiot to deny it -- but this is sort of symptomatic of a broader superficiality in his whole view, cf. "musical theatre! it's narrow, because I know nothing about it!"

Something So Right is my Simon jam

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