By John Adams
For a man who turned 70 last October, Paul Simon still sounds remarkably spry, much more musically creative and lyrically wise than most younger musicians yet still energetic and upbeat after all these years. After spending the 1960′s as the first half of the legendary Simon & Garfunkel duo, Simon has carved out a respectable solo career for himself since the early 70′s. Along the way, he’s established a reputation for adventurous musical syncretism (most notably on his 1980′s album, Graceland, which brought African instrumentation and rhythms into mainstream American pop music) and also as something of a spiritual seeker.
So Beautiful or So What picks up both of those threads and carries them further. The album’s music style is tinged by world music, employing exotic instruments such as the kora, celeste, marimba, and talking drum and melding African, Appalachian, Zydeco, and Native American influences (among many others) into a spicy gumbo that tastes good to the soul. Simon then uses this tasty music concoction as a launching pad from which to explore spiritual themes and spin tales about souls aspiring to make their lives into something significant and even beautiful.
The orienting number, and the first song Simon wrote for the record, is “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” a title which betrays both the hope and the urgency of Simon’s spiritual quest as an old man approaching death. The song samples sermons preached with gusto by the Rev. J.M. Gates, a fiery Southern Baptist preacher from the early 20th century. While the tone of the song is generally upbeat, its lyrics also reference the brokenness of the modern world (“Got a nephew in Iraq, it’s his third time back”) and there is perhaps an intentional irony in sampling Gates, since he was mostly known for preaching sermons attempting to warn people away from going hell. The hope of Christmas and of Heaven, Simon seems to imply, coexists with the darkness of the world and the horror of wasted lives.
The double-edged nature of ultimate reality is a theme that resurfaces at other points on the record: “Love is eternal, sacred light, free from the shackles of time,” Simon croons on “Love is Eternal Sacred Light, before continuing, “Evil is darkness, sight without sight. / A demon that feeds on the mind.” The choice of what we become, Simon seems to urge throughout, is ours to make. “I’m gonna tell my kids a bedtime story, a play without plot,” he sings on the album’s title track, easily the strongest number on the record. “Will it have a happy ending? / Maybe yes, maybe not. / I tell them life is what we make of it. / So beautiful or so what?”
The album at times feels like an old man’s retrospective take on his entire life: good, bad, and everything in between. In “Love and Hard Times,” Simon thanks God that he found his true love before it was too late, and “Dazzling Blue” recounts similar moments of bliss. “Questions for the Angels,” on the other hand, finds a homeless man in Brooklyn at the end of his rope, asking, “Who am I in this lonely world? / And where will I make my bed tonight?” and “Rewrite” is the story of a crazy Vietnam vet eking out a living at a local carwash, hoping to change a “so what” life into a “so beautiful” ending. “The Afterlife” ventures imaginatively into story after the story, imagining it as a place which requires a long process of waiting and change, but which eventually leads to a place where “you feel like swimming in an ocean of love and the current is strong, but all that remains when you try to explain is a fragment of song.” Simon’s mystical, poetic take on spirituality and life is moving and often beautiful, although it never does justice to the fullness of Biblical revelation.
At the same time, however, as Ben Witherington said in his review of the album, Simon seems to be a person who is “wide open to the Spirit,” a person who, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is being made into God’s instrument (a quote which interested Simon himself). Seeing as how Simon’s last album contained a song titled “I Don’t Believe,” perhaps this is an encouraging sign that the Lord of every heart is leading Simon closer to a relationship with himself. No matter what the ultimate outcome of our spiritual speculation, So Beautiful or So What? is valuable in its own right as the record of a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, and of a musician who has completely mastered his craft. It’s easily one of the year’s best albums.
