Ms. Robinson on Mr. Simon

     My friend GG balked when I said the words "Paul Simon" and "Indie Rock" in the same sentence, and as GG is a friend whose musical tastes and knowledge I often defer to, I backed off--but I don't think I'm completely ready to surrender. I grew up feeling instinctively that my appreciation for Paul Simon definitely classified me as un-cool amongst the people my age; his "world-music" tendencies, folk background, and appeal within the latter-day hippie crowd sealed his fate for the crowd I ran with. His honesty and lyricism, an embarrassment for kids my age--then, and now. I've never studied music theory and I'm not a musician, so I don't have a great vocabulary for speaking about things like tonality, texture, or structure and while I have got some (slight) aural skills, my perception in this instance is one that intuits Simon's aim as a songwriter. The classifications of Indie Rock--what mainstream means, record labels, and such--are not part of my articulation; Simon's musical intentions are. From what he was writing when he was working with Art Garfunkel to the the very early solo recordings, there is often an ironic detachment combined with sincere sentiment that seems to compose the precepts of what we generally think of as indie music. An emotional sincerity, intellectual irony, sensitive melancholy, and an unpredictable freedom to explore sounds. Elliot Smith came fairly early onto the indie rock scene and he and Simon share a similar sound/beat and vocal quality. "Waltz #2" is a decent example. Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or how I was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)" is too firmly rooted in the 60's to be used alone to demonstrate Simon's ironic simplicity, and "Slip Sliding Away's" heart strings are much more narrative (like a lot of his later music) than any music we usually identify as indie.  His tendency toward narrative songwriting is part of his genius--but is also a large part of what separates him from the indie scene that sings in a more alienated manner about their subject matter.   But have a listen to "Fakin' It", whose voice has a straightforward, presentational, layin' it on the line sensibility, and whose use of noise seems to anticipate indie music as we know it, or "The Sun is Burning" (Iron and Wine sing something that sounds like this tune over and over), and "Wednesday Morning 3a.m.", whose youthful longing lives in the dreamy realm that I find often characterizes the indie genre. "Think too Much A" and "Think too Much B" are also excellent examples of songs that I hear as progeny; if I were to imagine someone today attempting to write a pastiche of indie tunes, these might do.  Songs from his first solo album, like "Allergies", "Cars are Cars", and "When Numbers get Serious" are just weird enough for me to imagine them forerunners to songs by groups like The Mountain Goats and Vampire Weekend. And I bet there isn't an indie group around who doesn't wish they had written "The Only Living Boy in New York".

     Paul Simon has an enormous talent for reinventing his style; 60's troubadour, folk singer, pop soloist, poet, influenced by the music of Africa, electronic musician, musical lyricist, and on, and on. And it's within this infinite reach of his that I think one can find roots of the indie rock that so defines the hipsters of this generation; an approach to the musical form that often feels timeless by way of its inclusiveness.