“The most extraordinary lyrics written on a rock song”, according to Peter Gabriel
When Genesis first emerged, they signalled a new direction for rock music. Or at least they did when they managed to escape the ‘Christian music’ section where their debut was incorrectly filed, almost causing them to flop before things had gotten started.
While Peter Gabriel and his cohorts might now be deemed pioneers of ‘prog’, perhaps the clearest transition that they represented beyond genre was the sense of intelligence and depth that they imparted. Typical rock ‘n’ roll tropes were put to one side as the band took music in a new mystical direction.
They didn’t mind making it clear that they were more inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach than the hip ways of the Haight-Ashbury scene. In fairness, they scarcely had a choice when it came to making that clear. It was self-evident that a level of musical nerdiness abounded among the privately schooled band.
However, it could also be argued that the extent of their impact was felt in a musical sense rather than in a lyrical capacity. The advancement of their complex melodies and wavering time signatures was more of a notable departure from the mainstream of rock than their words. However, that didn’t stop Gabriel from looking out for astounding moments of lyrical development. This outlook drew him into the world of Paul Simon. When picking out his favourite tracks of all time, Gabriel explained, “Paul Simon, he’s written so many great songs. ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ was one [of them],” he said to ABC News.
The little New York songwriter’s famed South African record wove together a maelstrom of new sounds, modes and motifs in music that remained just about familiar enough to be categorised in familiar filing sections, unlike Genesis’ debut.
“Like many people, I loved the Graceland record. You get carried away with the infectious grooves, and you don’t always listen that much to the words. So that’s one of the most extraordinary lyrics written on a rock song, I think. It’s stunning,” he said of ‘The Boy in the Bubble’.
As the album’s opening track, the song explores a sense of “hope and dread”. Miracles and perversions sit alongside each other in the lyrics as Simon philosophically reflects on a period of upheaval on both a personal and political level, typified by his excursion to South Africa, where Apartheid was an active symbol of despair and cruelty, yet the opposite was also apparent in response. The oppressed were clearly striving to cling to some hope.
Such intricate and mature themes were rarely considered with such peaceable music. So, in many ways, Graceland represented a new high watermark for songs that could otherwise be considered pop. Sure, Bob Dylan and plenty of others might have imbued lyricism with a literary edge, but few had dared to pair profundity with a booming bassline as catchy as ‘You Can Call Me Al’.
Gabriel wasn’t alone in thinking that this changed songwriting. Even The Clash’s snarling Joe Strummer concurred, too. The punk frontman told the Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I don’t like the idea that people who aren’t adolescents make records. Adolescents make the best records. Except for Paul Simon. Except for Graceland. He’s hit a new plateau there, but he’s writing to his own age group. Graceland is something new.”
Continuing to eulogise Simon’s so-called South African record, which was released two years earlier, Strummer said: “That song to his son is just as good as ‘Blue Suede Shoes’: ‘Before you were born dude when life was great.’ That’s just as good as ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, and that is a new dimension.”
By no means was Simon the first artist to tackle more mature forms and new melodic sensibilities with Graceland, but the success of the record in every sense made it very notable. Adolescents are often innovative in their music because they are reckless with their progressiveness, but this is not a look that sits well on older shoulders. Simon, however, proved you can pen odes of great maturity and move forward with innovation all the same.
As Simon said of making the record, “My typical style of songwriting in the past has been to sit with a guitar and write a song, finish it, go into the studio, book the musicians, lay out the song and the chords, and then try to make a track. With these musicians, I was doing it the other way around. The tracks preceded the songs. We worked improvisationally.”
He continued, “While a group was playing in the studio, I would sing melodies and words – anything that fit the scale they were playing in.” Catchiness was his primary concern this time around.
Thus, during the sessions, Simon would transpose old folk toplines on classic African contours and rhythms, ironically, blending rhythm and melody in a way that Gabriel would term as being inadvertently close to ”rock”. This might sound jazzy, but in actual fact, the recording process was quite similar to some sort of primitive live version of sampling or proto-looping.
Sonically, this innovation gave the album a similar musicological freshness that punk offered escaping the synthy mainstay of the era, but the lyrics of fatherhood and the rejuvenation of rekindling relationships, of hope and despair, were a timeless twist on top that proved to Gabriel, Strummer and hundreds of others that you can be thematically mature without becoming stilted in your sound. In short, Paul Simon had taken his divorce rather well.
