Trivialities:

Paul Simon is one of my favorite songwriters. His lyrics are witty and surprising and touching and so often near the bullseye. “Graceland” was released in 1986 to enormous success, and rightly so, winning Album of the Year in 1987. He had bucked the ongoing cultural boycott of South Africa that was implemented in protest to apartheid, and he was roundly upbraided for it. Other artists and politicians called the project “colonialist” and “opportunistic” and tacitly supporting of the apartheid regime. There were accusations and death threats, which go with the territory. Time has proven those critics wrong by most accounts, and to my mind. He paid the South African musicians multiples of their usual rate, shared songwriting credits (though apparently Los Lobos felt robbed of “Myth of the Fingerprints”), and introduced the larger world to musicians like those in Ladysmith Black Mambazo. I saw them live at Merriweather Post Pavilion on that tour and it was a terrific show. A triumph of art and collaboration over politics, and in a small way he shone a light on those very disparities and on the beauty of the native African music. I particularly like the fact that Simon was first exposed to those sounds on a loaned cassette from fellow singer-songwriter Heidi Berg (per Wikipedia). The bootlegged recording featured mbaqanga music from Soweto that he enjoyed for its bright and happy quality (#4/Lydian mode, perhaps). It has to start somewhere and often it’s with another person (an emerging theme that we will explore further down the road).

But what I wanted to talk about is bad lyrics. Or rather, in this case, misunderstood lines that turn out to be great. From the start I was a big fan of the album but never really liked the opening salvo of the title track (above). I mean, c’mon, a “national guitar”?? What hokem! Paul, you can surely do better than that. Every time I heard it I would cringe a little. Until decades later when I had started taking music lessons and realized that he was surely referring to the National brand of guitar (formerly National String Instrument Corporation, founded in LA in 1927) and their iconic shiny steel resonator guitars (below). Ah-ha!!

The lyric works well for me now as a double entendre, though not nakedly without this more specific reference. It just needed a capital letter, which of course you cannot hear. I have the vinyl in storage and will check the liner notes to see how this was officially handled. How wrong I was to doubt the great Paul Simon. And I wonder how many people actually get this reference. I’m pretty sure that Mark Knopfler did.