So much has been said of this album already, it arrives like one of those arty, highly-prized films bequeathed to us from the Cannes jury, embalmed in the munifence of its own good intentions. Don't get me wrong.If America has had five or six genuine popular singer-songwriters of genius in the last 100 years, and it has, then Paul Simon is one of them - though not the pre-eminent one - that is Mr. Bob Dylan. But we have to admit, he's in that lucky choir of voices that sing more sweetly than we do, and to which we must bend our ears and attend.
So, I respect Simon, and especially Graceland, which arguably influenced contemporary poetry in how it showed the way music, wisdom, playful ease of wit, and style could cohabitate and form something of enduring quality, while still being for the people. Surely, it is an American classic, and not only because the once-fallen and newly-ascendant Gore used "You Can Call Me Al" on his election campaign tours.
I respect Simon, but do not love him. There was a time, when he was part of a duo, when I may have - a few of those songs can still render me seventeen and heart-broken. But in the last few decades, Simon's work has left me admiring, but not embraced.
His new album is all about that sort of pristine, polished excellence that American entertainers of a certain caliber achieve and exude. The product, which is this album, impresses even as it pushes away. It is, alas, slick as a magazine. But not just any magazine, friends: Atlantic Monthly, or The New Yorker. For this, surely, is one quality magazine - one that is liberal, decent, but pragmatic - rational humanist, you might say.
Simon is joined in this enterprise by workers of supreme skill and renown, from Brian Eno, certainly the greatest living record producer - musicians like Herbie Hancock and Bill Frisell - and even America's most-respected living book cover designer, the legendary Chip Kidd, recently praised by John Updike as being something of a genius himself.
What Eno has done is laid on, or under, the near spoken word of much of the prose poetry of the album, a translucent ebb and flow of musics that is at once ethereal and grounded in human noise and even anxiety - it is like a bush of ghosts being exorcised by a stockbroker - Eno has made the "sonic landscape" American, haunted, professional, and yet his own - as if U2 or The Talking Heads might wander into the same aural desert at any moment, and see a vision.
Next, Kidd has laid out the booklet and lyric texts with the elegance of a very hip magazine from the East Coast. He uses various fonts, and images, that all reference myths of water, of human origins, scientific and religious; and, he has emboldened certain words, festishizing them to highlight words that refer to water. It is all very lovely, and smart, and somewhat sophomoric, if the sophomore was from Yale.
Now, for the songs themselves. They are brilliant, written from a pristine chapel that's had one half of its architrave knocked away by a terror attack. Humane, wondering, erudite, and always sharp as a tack and funny as Bugs Bunny with a PhD, Simon has exceeded the work he'd done before.
The whole thing, though, is ever-so-slightly watered down (for me at least) by an all-purpose sentiment, that is both Simon's curse and calling - these songs, about war, and faith, and family devotion, skirt saying what the exact problem is, in favour of a poetic subtlety that doubles as marketing prowess - no listener need be offended in the playing of this album, all pieties are here confirmed.
Perhaps, finally, that is Simon's surprising message: he has exceeded the limitations of any one ideology or belief system - and neither praises nor blames the soldiers, so much as the act of war itself (in "Wartime Prayers") - and, sundered from its moorings, America itself floats free of blame, is simply a ship of state that needs all good hands on deck, fast. Sink, then, or swim - but either way, end in an oceanic feeling. Over and above troubled water.
Eyewear gives Surprise 4 out of 5 specs.
Comments