Paul Simon is presently on a UK tour. He is 84 years old, and like so many pop giants of his generation – see also Bob Dylan and the two surviving ex-Beatles – he looks in good fettle. Perhaps performing music keeps one young, although the means to afford first-rate healthcare must surely help.
It’s now 40 years since the release of Graceland, Simon’s most popular solo record, eclipsed commercially over his entire career only by Bridge Over Troubled Water, his final studio album with Art Garfunkel. They began work on another, in the early 1980s, following their triumphant reunion concert in New York’s Central Park. Then Simon decided the songs concerned were too personal for the duo. The pair’s already fractious relationship never recovered, and the songs became the basis of Simon’s album Hearts And Bones.
There is perhaps no artist more emblematic of New York than Simon, who was raised in Queens. Or rather, of a certain aspect of New York. That is, post-war New York (and its New Jersey environs, including Simon’s birthplace of Newark) as the locus of what appears, in hindsight, a Jewish golden age: one of those rare times and places wherein Jews, even if they were a minority, did not need to feel like one. Did not feel perpetually embattled, besieged, hypervigilant, waiting for the next blow to fall. A unique moment (today, those decades seem no more than a moment) of Jewish self-confidence and belonging.
You can see this in the culture of that New York moment: music, literature, journalism, film, theatre, all populated by Jews punching above their collective weight, defining their milieu. There is a certain character to all that creativity, at times bordering on self-caricature: the modern, urban Jew, turning his or her neuroses, amours and self-reflection into art. Film-maker Woody Allen was one celebrated manifestation of it; Simon, who had a small but significant role in Allen’s masterpiece Annie Hall, another.
Hearts And Bones is the musical ne plus ultra of that idiom, a counterpoint of jittery cerebration – it features not one but two songs titled Think Too Much – with sublime philosophising. At the time, it was, by Simon’s standards, a critical and commercial dud. He feared it would end his career. I have loved it from the moment I heard it, in its year of release, 1983. Simon evidently thinks well of it too. The lyric of the beautiful, melancholic Train In The Distance would provide a title for a 1988 best-of, Negotiations And Love Songs. On his current tour, no album from his formidable back catalogue supplies more songs in the set list.
It is Simon’s most Jewish album, in almost every sense. He sings on the title track of himself and his then wife, the late actress Carrie Fisher, as “One and one-half wandering Jews”. Like so much of his best work, it is pervaded by a sense of loss, whether feared, or already suffered.
To hear it now is to feel another loss still: of that all too brief period during which, when you thought about being Jewish, it was because you chose to, not because you had to. It is a product of finding a place in the wider world without needing to forsake your identity, a world where Simon & Garfunkel could become superstars without adopting deracinated stage names and personas such as their teenage iteration, Tom & Jerry.
Today, for any Jew hoping to make their way in the arts, the clock has turned back a hundred years. Your choice lies between renouncing – indeed, denouncing – a large part of who you are, or being forced back into a cultural ghetto from which we once deluded ourselves finally liberated.
Paul Simon is a great artist. One of the greatest ever to work in pop. You should see him while you can. Great art may be immortal; great artists, not so much. Simon’s Jewishness has always coloured and infused his art, without overshadowing it. Certainly, he would not be the artist he is were he not Jewish. And if the time and place he was born into had been anything like the one Jewish artists must contend with today, we might never have heard of him at all.
Meanwhile, as if to underline the above point, an organisation of “musicians and cultural workers”, featuring many of the usual suspects, is calling for a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest while Israel is included. It labels itself No Music For Genocide*. Much as with Stop The War*, and Stand Up To Racism* before it, to ensure accuracy, the name requires an asterisk and a disclaimer. Handily, the same disclaimer applies to each of them: *Unless It’s Against Jews.
The principle of “no music for genocide” is in itself a sound one. This is why, in October 2023, when genocidal Islamofascists attacked a music festival in order to slaughter Jews for the crime of existing, these same usual suspects immediately rallied to denounce this indefensible atrocity and the monsters who perpetuated it.
Wait, they did what?
Oh.
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