Paul Simon: So Beautiful Or So What

About the time I started this blog, I sat down with my aunt to have a talk about music and exchange some CDs. I gave her Zeus and She & Him and the Black Keys, and she made me a mix and lent me a Dinah Washington CD and her copy of Graceland by Paul Simon. When I finally got around to checking Graceland out, I found that the CD case was empty. I still haven't heard it in its entirety.

I like a lot about this album. I like the title, a neat turn of phrase, and I like that the title track comes at the end, positioning it fittingly as a culmination. I like the cover, a helixed blur of motion, an abstraction of brightness in darkness that ties into and represents the album's themes. The guitar sounds like that image, refracted and echoey and delicate and warm and mellow. "Getting Ready for Christmas Day," not a holiday song per se, zigzags and doubles back in on itself over excerpts from a call-and-response sermon between the vocals. "The Afterlife" is pleasant and spacey, with a lot of warmth and humour in its tale of heavenly bureaucracy and being the "new kid in school." "Dazzling Blue" is sweet and Indian-flavoured, with tablas and mystic strings and sweet harmonies. It's one of various songs here that seems to marvel at the beauty of the universe, a greater love beyond ourselves. "Love & Hard Times" is directly spiritual, with the amazing lyric, "There are galaxies yet to be born / Creation is never done," before changing its view to love at first sight. "Love is Eternal Sacred Light" is one of the handful of rocked-up numbers, and it while on paper its near-snarl might seem mismatched to the "marvels of the universe" lyrics, it works because in that snarl is joy. It's a twisting around of songwriting and performance mores, a wicked execution. The title track has a nice bluesy flavour, deciding finally "Life is what we make of it, so beautiful or so what?" It has a kind of cosmic logic to it.

This is an album with a quiet sort of beauty. It's not overly preachy, but the lyrics are often explicitly spiritual, and most of the rest of the time implicitly spiritual. The sound of the album is well-matched to the subject matter. Delicate at times, and lush others, usually very personal and direct, playing between darkness and light. It sounds very much to me like a man giving great consideration to his place on Earth and in the vastness of the universe, and his realization of things on a grand scale. That would indeed be a very large and yet very small thing to have to confront in song, and Simon does it extremely well. There are no resolutions of course, it is a difficult path to talk, and music is often its own solution. It should be enough that these thoughts were brought to mind, and in such a pleasing way. The history of pop music becomes a universal language: "Be-Bop-A-Lula."

Joe Strummer once said that he only trusted albums made by adolescents, with the exception of Graceland. I think Simon has definitely got a knack for making the kids of albums you can only make after you've been around a while. Many other reviewers have noted, rightly and relieved, that this is not a dire reflection on mortality. That would be too easy and not in the right spirit, celebratory instead of somber. He seems secure in his place in the world, even if his place is only to wonder what his place might be amidst all this beauty, to keep it from becoming "So what?"

Buy this album from iTunes now!