The problem, always, with Paul Simon is that lurking behind every clever turn of phrase and every strong image is the college sophomore desperately trying to call your attention to one line or another written specifically to have attention called to it. Simon’s a good writer– sometimes an excellent writer. The pitch-perfect tone of “Homeward Bound” cannot be denied. But for every “on a tour of one-night stands/my suitcase and guitar in hand” there’s a “like a rat in a maze” (“Patterns”) or a “you read your Emily Dickenson/ and I my Robert Frost” (“Dangling Conversation”). And you cringe a little.
A critic once referred to “The Boxer” as “one of Paul Simon’s few unpretentious songs”. I thought that was right twenty years ago and it seems more right now. That means I can throw on a CD of 20 or 25 Paul Simon songs and thoroughly enjoy them… about once every two years. Try not to think about whether “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” proves his sophistication, or “El Condor Pasa” his world-weary sensitivity.
One of his better songs– though I barely noticed it for years– is “A Poem on the Underground Wall”. Typically, it’s not a novel concept or a highly original insight: graffiti as some kind of authentic urban poetry. In this case, I liked the last verse, as the hyperventilating bum slashes onto an advertising poster “a poem/comprised of four letters”.
The author of the poem is one of those vaguely ghostly, invisible personages that inhabit the landscape of urban decay and disillusionment, a ragged man, a shadow, who races away, his heart beating madly, after making his “statement”. Simon has the sense to stop the poem before it becomes too weighty, though he needlessly conjures an image of the vagrant being suckled by the “breast of darkness”. Yes, there’s the preciousness. You could never imagine Dylan doing that line.
Simon has occasionally slyly complained about being taken less seriously, or monumentally, than Dylan. That’s why. That and the fact that Simon’s best five songs wouldn’t crack Dylan’s best 25. But it’s a good song. The urban world back in 1965 seemed madly in love with regimentation, conformity, mindless consumption, and the endless pursuit of trivial gratifications even as it rotted from within. It seems even more so today and the pathos and futility of the four-letter poem seems even more poignant. A casualty talks back. Ten years later, maybe he occupied a Harry Chapin song: Sniper.
In an earlier song:
And the sign flashed out it’s warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And echoed in the Sounds of Silence.
Okay. Bit cheesy. But most clichés exist for a good reason. Somewhere in the faint, dark echo of their original inspirations lies something true and interesting.