This is true for the Simon and Garfunkle albums because, well, they were basically teenagers. But you wouldn’t say that about songs like “Still Crazy” or “Slip Slidin’ Away,” which deal with themes that don’t occur to most teenagers.

I love it when I get to a new conclusion about what his lyrics.

While I’m sure this is a fun game for you, those conclusions are yours alone and weren’t necessarily put there by Dylan. You might very well come to new conclusions about the ingredients on the back of a cereal box, too, but that doesn’t mean that there is some deeper meaning there.

Dylan on the other hand holds my attention to this day. I love it when I get to a new conclusion about what his lyrics.

Who needs lyrics to make immediate sense anyway – 99 percent of pop makes no sense at all. Delivery-wise Simon is nothing without Garfunkel baby.

No comparison – like comparing Judy Blume to Melville.

But yeah, you’re right, I’m pretty much talking about only a part of his catalog. Somehow, even without knowing the stuff the article mentions, I always felt his other stuff was kind of a rip-off, in the bad sense of the word, as in ripping off something and making it worse instead of better. Though if i had to choose, I like his more ‘world’ type stuff better (better rhythms, better melodies).

I think I always had the feeling he was sort of a thief and I do vaguely remember something about the issues he had with some of the African musicians he ripped off for graceland. But bottom line is that to me, he looks like a prick (and now i have an article to prove i was always right about it). thanks.

as for steely dan, i dont see the comparison. musically and lyrically superior, funnier, cleverer, original, cooler, and i wish I could sit in some coffee shop or bar with Don and Walter making fun of everyone in sight. sitting with Simon for any length of time just seems tedious, exhibit one, the colbert report clip above (what is up with his hair?).

I wonder how you reconcile this with your affection for Steely Dan.

It’s true that Simon’s early career was dominated by stuff from an Anglo tradition (which he borrowed from the Everlys and Louvins and, ultimately Scottish religious music), but I don’t think you’d hear any of that in his non-Garfunkle albums.

And I actually think his lyrics are some of the best. They are descriptive in a way that, for me at least, creates entire scenes, as opposed to the clever-clever wordplay of somebody like Dylan (had to take that shot somewhere), which passes as complex, but is actually meaningless. I get that you can add your own meaning to Dylan’s words, but as a means of communicating an idea, that’s a failure. Worse, you end up with a bunch of Dylanologists congratulating themselves for figuring out what it all means. Heavy, man, heavy.

This article does lend credence to your idea that Simon is a dilettante, though.

And at least on Ode to Billy Joe, i get the sense that Bobbie Gentry at least knew what she was talking about (even though i’m fairly sure she never pushed anyone off a bridge). Simon talking about Magritte and his wife after the war? I guess Simon is trying to be surreal by putting Magritte as a new york immigrant dancing to the forbidden (?) music of the Five Stains, but if you ask me it’s a fairly lame attempt at surrealism.

“As was often the case with Magritte’s works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India near Hyderabad, which from the mid­fourteenth century till the end of the seventeenth was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region’s legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a synonym for ‘mine of wealth’.'”

So maybe these “Indians” refer to the Indian kingdoms or something similar. That would be a lot of research for Simon, though, so maybe this is just co-incidence. I mean, it could be he was just talking about Indian motorcycles.

Also, I’m curious about the “Gliding by like Indians” line as well. But it doesn’t dent the song for me.

Decades gliding by like Indians?

I don't think Paul Simon is a lyrical master either. Hasn't done it for me since I was fifteen (fifteen year old me spent hours listening to old Simon & Garfunkel records).