Paul Simon’s music benefits from cultural appropriation
I am done. I saw Leonard Cohen perform at London’s Wembley Arena in 2012, Carole King in Hyde Park in 2016 and Paul Simon at the same venue on Sunday evening. I can’t think of anyone else for whom I would shell out £70 a ticket, and those three will not be coming back. Cohen died in 2016, King has always been a reluctant performer, although exuberant on the night, and Hyde Park was Simon’s European farewell. When I saw them on stage, Cohen was a few days shy of his 78th birthday, King was 74 and Simon, still with a strikingly strong voice, is 76. Their fans were largely a decade or two younger, having spent their teenage years and early loves immersed in their music. On Sunday, couples, still dancing after all these years, twirled each other around the straw-grass carpet of a scorching British summer. And when, after encore upon encore (Simon seemed reluctant to let us go), long queues waited for the park to empty, some broke into a spontaneous, word-perfect rendition of “Homeward bound, I wish I was . . ” For all the enjoyment of the evening, I sensed more respect for Simon than the love that Cohen and King had attracted. Some of that may have come from Simon’s insistence that his audience do more than simply listen to their old favourites. He sang and then he talked about some of his more demanding, less well-known music too. And he has a “this is how I wrote this great song” between-tunes patter that is different from Cohen and King’s unaffected gratitude to their audiences for, as Cohen put it, “keeping my songs alive”. But Simon’s has also been a more varied career than those of the other two, and not just because he started out as a duo with Art Garfunkel. His excursions into different styles have been more dramatic. His has been one of those long careers marked by constant reinvention. This is not to take anything away from King, a prodigious composer with her then-husband Gerry Goffin, of other artists’ music. But her fans know her for her 1971 album Tapestry, which she sang from beginning to end in Hyde Park. And while Cohen — sage, philosopher, the greatest of the troubadour poets (sorry, Bob Dylan fans) — recorded new compositions right up until the end, he was reluctant to stray too far from what he knew best. There was synagogue cantorial music in You Want it Darker, his final album, but he was not one for adopting others’ traditions. “I know Russian music, because my mother sang Russian songs around the house. I know country and I know Greek music, because I lived there for several years. So I feel comfortable with all those styles,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 1985. “I’d be reluctant to write in an idiom that wasn’t native to me: I wouldn’t want to sing the blues, because I’m not black and it’s not my music.” Simon has had no such qualms. He has mined Latin America, the Caribbean, west Africa and South Africa in search of new music. The last was the most controversial, because he went to South Africa when the country was still subject to a cultural boycott over apartheid. Yet Simon argued in 2012 that he did not go to South Africa to perform, turning down a money-spinning gig at the Sun City resort, but to bring black South African music to a wider audience. The polemics over “cultural appropriation” have grown sharper since then, but Simon’s argument that he has helped rather than hindered artists from elsewhere seemed strong on Sunday evening. He assembled a large and diverse cast of musicians on stage, generously introducing them and giving them a good part of the limelight. That he didn’t need to was clear at the end when he played and sang, effortlessly, on his own. He has remained fresh, seeming younger than his years, and that continued exploration must have played its part. There is plenty of fulfilment to be had from doing what you know, while taking new risks, going to new places and trying new things. That is something for Simon’s fans to think about as they contemplate their own late-life projects.
I am done. I saw Leonard Cohen perform at London’s Wembley Arena in 2012, Carole King in Hyde Park in 2016 and Paul Simon at the same venue on Sunday evening. I can’t think of anyone else for whom I would shell out £70 a ticket, and those three will not be coming back. Cohen died in 2016, King has always been a reluctant performer, although exuberant on the night, and Hyde Park was Simon’s European farewell. When I saw them on stage, Cohen was a few days shy of his 78th birthday, King was 74 and Simon, still with a strikingly strong voice, is 76. Their fans were largely a decade or two younger, having spent their teenage years and early loves immersed in their music. On Sunday, couples, still dancing after all these years, twirled each other around the straw-grass carpet of a scorching British summer. And when, after encore upon encore (Simon seemed reluctant to let us go), long queues waited for the park to empty, some broke into a spontaneous, word-perfect rendition of “Homeward bound, I wish I was . . ” For all the enjoyment of the evening, I sensed more respect for Simon than the love that Cohen and King had attracted. Some of that may have come from Simon’s insistence that his audience do more than simply listen to their old favourites. He sang and then he talked about some of his more demanding, less well-known music too. And he has a “this is how I wrote this great song” between-tunes patter that is different from Cohen and King’s unaffected gratitude to their audiences for, as Cohen put it, “keeping my songs alive”. But Simon’s has also been a more varied career than those of the other two, and not just because he started out as a duo with Art Garfunkel. His excursions into different styles have been more dramatic. His has been one of those long careers marked by constant reinvention. This is not to take anything away from King, a prodigious composer with her then-husband Gerry Goffin, of other artists’ music. But her fans know her for her 1971 album Tapestry, which she sang from beginning to end in Hyde Park. And while Cohen — sage, philosopher, the greatest of the troubadour poets (sorry, Bob Dylan fans) — recorded new compositions right up until the end, he was reluctant to stray too far from what he knew best. There was synagogue cantorial music in You Want it Darker, his final album, but he was not one for adopting others’ traditions. “I know Russian music, because my mother sang Russian songs around the house. I know country and I know Greek music, because I lived there for several years. So I feel comfortable with all those styles,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 1985. “I’d be reluctant to write in an idiom that wasn’t native to me: I wouldn’t want to sing the blues, because I’m not black and it’s not my music.” Simon has had no such qualms. He has mined Latin America, the Caribbean, west Africa and South Africa in search of new music. The last was the most controversial, because he went to South Africa when the country was still subject to a cultural boycott over apartheid. Yet Simon argued in 2012 that he did not go to South Africa to perform, turning down a money-spinning gig at the Sun City resort, but to bring black South African music to a wider audience. The polemics over “cultural appropriation” have grown sharper since then, but Simon’s argument that he has helped rather than hindered artists from elsewhere seemed strong on Sunday evening. He assembled a large and diverse cast of musicians on stage, generously introducing them and giving them a good part of the limelight. That he didn’t need to was clear at the end when he played and sang, effortlessly, on his own. He has remained fresh, seeming younger than his years, and that continued exploration must have played its part. There is plenty of fulfilment to be had from doing what you know, while taking new risks, going to new places and trying new things. That is something for Simon’s fans to think about as they contemplate their own late-life projects.
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