I'm sorry but Paul Simon is so overrated

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

xpost

jhosh I'm givin you a promotion

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, August 7, 2011 1:15 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol ty, ty

whoa hold on i am specifically not commenting on the colonialism or lack thereof of graceland lets not put words in my mouth

someone near the very start of the thread said that simon was less artisticly successful than cohen and dylan and i was surprised both by the comparison (i would never have really thought to lump cohen and simon 2gether) and by the statement (although i figure thats the sort of thing thats deeply dependent on where ur cummin from so)

but i kinda liked the comparison as a 'thought exercise' once it had been made cuz they do sorta parallel well and my fave albums by both are really different in tone and spirit but ill stick by my early assessments. also i mean i love both of those dudes records a lot they are the best!!!

john has now successfully hijacked this conversation away from a discussion of the lyrical merits of paul simon vs. leonard cohen because he knew he was going to lose

totally, leonard cohen + paul simon 4eva!

having said that I will always sigh deeply in appreciation at "And I could say Oo oo oo/As if everybody knows/What I'm talking about/As if everybody would know/Exactly what I was talking about"

i dont really know any leonard cohen

so i dont mind us not talking about leonard cohen

john has now successfully hijacked this conversation away from a discussion of the lyrical merits of paul simon vs. leonard cohen because he knew he was going to lose

can you point me at this imaginary earlier lyrical merits vs. discussion & the posts made abt? I mean literally everybody knows Simon's good & Cohen's great lyrics-wise, that's not even a discussion afaik

Lamp are you going to answer my question or what btw

stupid challop but i guess this is the thread for it: much of simon's best work was done before he started recording under his own name

― Lamp, Sunday, August 7, 2011 2:24 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

i just want everyone to agree that i won the fight and then you can go back to yr colonialism 102 seminar

u don't fuck with early leonard cohen

i am not stipulating that anyone is a better lyricist than anyone else. except, i guess bob dylan is better than everyone, but whatever.

i just want everyone to agree that i won the fight and then you can go back to yr colonialism 102 seminar

I lol'd

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 love the jerry landis stuff the best! i mean i know its not actually the best the way 'graceland' is but stuff like play me a sad song or lisa or lone teen ranger are some of my favorite paul simon ~songs~ maybe because theyre really limited in range and form, like these amazing static pop songs that still manage to be sorta weird and emotional idk

but this is why i wanted 2 do a longform paul simon poll - he has such a varied and distinct catalog & i think itd be rad to kinda see peoples take on that

i am going to lose my mind when the paul simon poll rolls around in 2012

wk was like "leonard cohen is better" and i was like "paul simon is as good a lyricist as leonard cohen" and then everyone felt like they had to defend leonard cohen, as though leonard cohen is someone who needs defending, leonard cohen winner of croatia's "porin" award, leonard cohen companion of the order of canada

yea rad like barf bags on airplanes xxp

okay listening to this jerry landis song on youtube and lolling at how in character it is for lamp to like this

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

― ice cr?m, Sunday, August 7, 2011 1:18 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

crammy is otmmy

prince of asturias award more like piss on ass urea award

is this the lil fella in that chevy chase song?

its super crazy that paul simon has been recording music since the 1950s

haha all things considered he looks great