God's Immaculate Machine Monday, September 13, 2004

Didn't this used to be a music blog? At any rate, it's been a while since I gushed over a record, so let me recommend that everybody go out right now and listen to the remastered version of Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony. This was an old favorite of mine from high school; it's got a couple big hits ("Late in the Evening" and the title track) but real appeal are the "album cuts"--absolutely stellar songs with incomparably polished lyrics. Vintage Simon stuff: dead-on observational, the Seinfeld of singer-songwriters:

The boy's got a voice
but his voice is his natural disguise
Say the boy's got a voice
but his words don't connect to his eyes
He says, 'Ah, but when I sing,
I can hear the truth auditioning...'

Or a fave from my days as the village atheist:

Some people say Jesus, that's their ace in the hole
I never met the man, so I don't really know
Maybe some Christmas when I'm sick and alone
He will look up my number, call me on the phone and say
'Hey Junior! Where you been so long?'

Or just a gorgeous thought:

In the hour when the heart is weak
Memory is strong

Which, to be honest, is beter than any piece of contemporary poetry I've read in the last ten years.

The music, meanwhile, is groovetastic. Simon's backing band (who played themselves in the movie!) is a who's-who of top '70s session cats: Richard Tee on piano, Tony Levin on bass, Hugh McCracken (I believe) on guitar and the dean of discipline, Steve Gadd, on drums. All of these guys (maybe not Levin) are old Steely Dan hands, of course, and I think that's what I dig about the record so much: It sounds like Paul Simon making a Steely Dan album. The vibe is there, if not the particulars--John Lindsay's New York, Pelham One-Two-Three, rafitti everywhere, that whole scene. (Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard started the trend.)

I mention this record out of sheer joy. I've bought a few albums over the past month or so and none of them have stuck with me for more than a day or so; none of them have demanded to be listened to. "One-Trick Pony" has been galloping around my head for days now, and shows no signs of heading back to the barn.

Just to ruin the mood, there's Elvis Costello. I used to be a much bigger fan of his stuff; something shifted in me and he doesn't really speak to me anymore. Plus, the Diana Krall thing (the marriage and the record) just come off as sour to me for reasons I can't articulate without skirting slander. But anyway, he's got some new albums coming out and Costellonews.com excerpts a NY Daily News article about them, ending with the following:

Several songs address world issues, notably "Bedlam," which is set in the Mideast. Costello also renders his version of "The Scarlet Tide" (sung by Alison Krauss on the "Cold Mountain" soundtrack), a piece commonly interpreted as anti-war.

"It's not an anti-war song," Costello says. "It's an anti-dread song."

Costello wrote it in reaction to America's obsession with terrorism.

"It distorts our ability to see further than the next threat," he reasons.

First off: America's obsession with terrorism? This coming from a New York reporter, who I presume is aware of fairly recent city history? Carp all you want about the GOP drumming up phony war fever, but that little throwaway transition is a stunning bit of moral nullity. Obsession: As if we picked Al Qaeda out of the phone book and started bombing.

Then Costello. In one sense, his point about seeing further than the next threat is fair enough: You can't just focus on terror attacks, you have to have a longer-term strategy, and not just a military one. But can you reasonably say that the Bushies have not laid out a broad strategy for dealing with terror? Sure, you might not like the strategy; but can you honestly say that all they're doing is dealing with threat after threat after threat without proposing anything larger to link the responses? Even the administration's opponents concede the point--and use it to bash Bush for imperial overreach.

On top of that: Look at the "next threats" that have cropped up since 9/11, the threats we're supposed to blithely "see beyond." Bali. Madrid. Turkey. Jakarta. Russia, now. Lay it on me, Declan: Why, with that kind of malefaction waiting in the wings, should we not be looking squarely at every threat we can root out? Especially if the alternative is rock-star hot air about "seeing beyond" them (to, presumably, "a perfect world where everyone is equal").

That said, I understand there are other exegeses of that statement (the one from the reporter, however, is inexcusable). Moreover, I'm sure there was a paragraph behind it that spells out his case much better. But it rankled on first glance, and I wanted to put the mood in a Mylar bag while I could.

So don't write me any exculpatory e-mails! Go out and buy the Paul Simon record. It'll do you good.

@ 9:04:00 AM,

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