The five songs Paul Simon said are seeped into culture: “Is it as meaningful?”
If there’s one thing that you can’t accuse Paul Simon of from his lengthy career in the music business, it’s a shortage of classic songs.
His works, both as one half of Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist, have become embedded in popular culture, and if you were to ask even the most casual fan to name a song of his, you can imagine that they’d be able to land on one. ‘You Can Call Me Al’ may well have been played to death, but it’s instantly recognisable, while ‘The Sound of Silence’ has been passed down through multiple generations as a solemn folk standard.
While there are a number of songs from his catalogue that have registered themselves as timeless, there are also a number that aren’t quite as ubiquitous, and people wouldn’t necessarily immediately recognise them. Everyone has to pad out albums with tracks that don’t quite have the same staying power as singles, and while a song like ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ may well deserve greater recognition, it’s fair enough that there are more popular tracks on Bridge Over Troubled Water.
That’s not a bad thing, of course; not all of your songs can be remembered for eternity, but Simon himself asks the question as to whether there’s any point in dragging them up repeatedly during gigs when there are much more notable hits that he could be dedicating his time to.
If you were to go to a Paul Simon concert, you’d want to hear him do all of the best-known songs rather than the slightly more obscure ones that have been forgotten about, and in a 2002 profile for the New Yorker, he discussed how there’s a definite difference between those songs that have become part of popular culture and those that he’s still proud of that sadly don’t get the same reception.
“I can still put together ‘Darling Lorraine’ or ‘You’re The One’,” he said of his efforts to craft the perfect setlist. However, he conceded that there are downsides to placing these songs in the setlist over better-known hits of his. “It won’t mean as much as ‘Graceland’ or ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’,” he continued. “Those songs had an effect on people’s lives. ‘Mrs Robinson’ or ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, or ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ – they’re in the culture. If the work isn’t part of the popular culture, is it as meaningful? Even though there are examples of posthumous recognition, for the most part, a song’s a hit or it’s gone.”
Of course, there are far more than just these five tracks that Simon has managed to have embedded into popular culture, but there’s no denying that these selections are among his finest works, and are definitely far more representative of him as a songwriter than ‘Darling Lorraine’ and ‘You’re The One’. As a fan of Simon, you’re definitely going to want to hear him play these over the rarities, although being treated to a more obscure song is going to stick in the memory if played. It’s a balance that you have to strike, and for the most part, Simon has managed this with aplomb.
