Although his aim may be higher, Paul Simon has always been more a wistful classicist than an adventurous romantic: He wouldn't dream of taking the Kierkegaardian leap to faith without first making a reservation at the best hotel on the other side. Even the fools don't act foolish in his songs, for such gratuitous and unchic behavior simply cannot be permitted in a closed off society where class and proper emotional manners are rated more favorably than quixotic clownishness and primal risk taking. Why should a fool be just a fool when he can be elevated to the loftier and more poetic status of victim? What's wrong with The Graduate anyway? Up there, there is almost no chance of being
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misunderstood or disliked, and everyone takes you seriously.
Still Crazy after All These Years, Simon's grim and ambitious new album, begs these and other questions as it sure-handedly paints itself into the usual corner under the familiar shadow of Bob Dylan. For inside the lush and dolorous Still Crazy, there is a lean, hungry Blood on the Tracks trying to get out. Both LPs chronicle the dissolution of a marriage, but where Dylan, with ofttimes awkward agony, makes you feel it. Simon, with more slick professionalism than is good for his subject matter, makes you think you feel it—a crucial difference. Dylan's pragmatic, toughminded "I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town/And I've never gotten used to it, I've just learned to turn it off" walks tall with its heartbreak, while Simon's
Four in the morning
Crapped out
Yawning
Longing my life away
I'll never worry
Why should I?
It's all gonna fade
sulks in ruinous self-pity.
Whereas the regenerative Blood on the Tracks was about someone lost, something gained. Still Crazy wears its depression like a merit badge of sensitivity, sometimes pushing its unrelieved bleakness into the realm of self-parody. On "My Little Town," a song which reunites Simon with erstwhile partner Art Garfunkel, the singers intone: "And after it rains/There's a rainbow/And all of the colors are black." From the unintentionally hilarious "Night Game":
There were two men down
And the score was tied
In the bottom of the eighth
When the pitcher died
Perhaps baseball is just too precarious a metaphor for marriage, sex or death. But it works scarcely less well than the color-coordinated pain—yellow sky, gray grass, orange juice, orange and blue rug—of "I Do It for Your Love," a song whose interior contains more decoration than intensity. Each detail is carefully arranged—the orange juice is a killer!—and primped into a precious still life worthy of the worst of J. D. Salinger's stories about the Glass family.
While a style at creative war with its content can set up interesting and ambiguous
