Graceland

Big fan. Graceland may as well be best album of the 80s. How many musicians release their best album 20 years into their career?

quite possibly the greatest manlet to ever walk the earth

he's bretty good 4.5/5

Why do white people make nigger music better than niggers?

le cultural appropriation is bad meme

>>70945179
A little pretentious sometimes but has some great songs. Did you put the Graceland pic there for any specific reason?

Love Paul Simon, love Graceland. Hate that he's always being unfavorably compared to Bob Dylan.

I have a theory that in music, there are Pauls and Johns.

Pauls:
>melody is most important
>words are an accompaniment to music
>if it sounds good, it is good
>music exists for its own sake

Johns:
>message is most important
>music is a vehicle for words
>if it sounds good, it's too easy
>music exists to make you think

There are a lot of Johns in the world, and I'd venture that most critics are wordsmiths at heart and for the most part a bunch of Johns. And the Johns have all gotten together and decided Bob Dylan is the top of the heap, and more tuneful, less esoteric artists like Paul Simon are second-tier. I hate that.

he lives five minutes away from my house on the connecticut/new york border
sometimes i drive down his street when im showing people around the town
i've never done anything illegal though im not a stalker or anything

i also go to school with his youngest son, though; bumped into him once, but didn't say anything because i'm not that autistic

What happened to him after Graceland? He didn't release another album until 1990. You would think he'd want to follow up on the success of that.

>>70946445
Good assessment. Paul for life imo

One of the best musicians/songwriters of his era. It's kind of messed up that he gets overlooked just because Simon and Garfunkel were always seen as being less "authentic" because they weren't hippies and didn't try to force political messages into their music. His output has always been top-notch, and I respect him as a musician/writer more than many of his contemporaries.

>>70945274
This. And one of the coolest things about Graceland is how different it is compared to most of his earlier work. Most middle-aged musicians desperately try to recapture the kind of music that made them famous during slumps. Simon went off and made something original, and unapologetically based around his situation at the time (a middle-aged rich guy going through a divorce and trying to escape in different cultures), and pulled off a seriously good album. That's impressive.

>>70945179
It's amazing but it rips a lot from the township grooves that Paul was undoubtedly hearing at the time

https://soundcloud.com/afrosynth

this is a treasure of the aforementioned music, if you take a peek Graceland takes a lot of cues from any one of the tracks that are actually from African records at the time

>>70946445
this

>>70947390
That's kind of the point, though. The African stuff on that album is the result of Simon recording instrumental stuff with well-known African artists and then writing lyrics and adding other touches to them later. Gumboots is a straight-up cover with English lyrics.

>>70947590
Yeah, I wasn't really saying that to the detriment of the album; don't worry i'm not some fanatic tied to retarded notions of "artistic integrity"

Just saying there's more like it out there, if anyone was itching for more

Loved his So Beautiful or So What album that came out a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yom8vZ7lEnQ

>>70947149
>Most middle-aged musicians desperately try to recapture the kind of music that made them famous during slumps.

Funny because Simon went through that phase before coming out with Graceland.

>>70947662
This is true. Hearts and Bones was intended to be a Simon & Garfunkel reunion album before it was scrapped and reworked to be a solo album. A few great songs on there tho, but lacking a lot production-wise IMO

>>70945179
really big fan of him and graceland is easily one of the best albums of the 80s, if not, all time.

I'm also a big fan of There goes rhymin' simon and the songs he did for The Capeman.
Cant say much about the person himself because I dont know a whole lot, but musically I think most of what he's put out is A+

I love Diamond on the Soles of Her Shoes, cool funky bassline.

>>70946779
I've noticed a trend in music that there's a large gap in time from an artist's best or most successful album to the next album.
It makes sense when you think about it. When an album is very successful you will end up spending more time to tour in promotion of it. You will be a bigger star in the public eye so you have the talk and radio show circuit, magazines interviews, photoshoots, phone-calls, etc.

Being very successful takes a lot of time out of the day. Another factor is when you make it big, you have a lot of money and famous friends. That also obviously is going to take up a lot of time. So it's harder to motivate yourself to get in studio when life is so much fun.

Not totally examining Paul Simon as much as just trends I've noticed. I got thinking about this when I realized Helplessness Blues came out 6 years ago.

>>70949388
I forgot to mention George R R Martin. Really good example of this. That fat fuck's life has been so nice since Game of Thrones came out that he's been writing his last book for the last 6 fucking years, and it's reportedly unlikely to come out this year AGAIN.