Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

Music often touches our pain and our longing for beauty in ways that go beyond mere words. And sometimes that touch comes from unexpected places.

Paul Simon, who has had a successful career with Art Garfunkel, then as a solo artist, has written and recorded many memorable songs that have become part of our culture—“Sounds of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Graceland,” to name a few.

Simon, who turns 70 this month, is not one of the more popular musical artists today, but he continues to make music that is both complex and accessible. His latest album, “So Beautiful or So What,” fits that description but also presents a strong religious theme throughout.

This is surprising, since Simon, though Jewish, says he is far from religious. Yet he also acknowledges that “God comes up a lot in my songs.”

Let’s consider some of the nine songs on this CD. The opening song, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” uses excerpts from a 1941 recording of a sermon with that title by J.M. Gates, an African-American preacher and gospel singer. The song includes the reminder, “When Christmas comes, nobody knows where you’ll be.”

In “Rewrite,” which is really about rewriting one’s life, Simon sings, “Help me, help me, help me, help me. Thank you! I’d no idea that you were there.” Later he repeats the “help me” and adds, “Whoa! Thank you for listening to my prayer.”

Several of the songs are ballads, and the most beautiful one is “Love and Hard Times.” Simon has a unique way of combining humor and pathos, and here he sets the scene in a way that only an artist not constrained by religious rules can:

“God and His only Son
Paid a courtesy call on Earth
One Sunday mornin’
Orange blossoms opened their
fragrant lips
Songbirds sang from the tips of
Cottonwoods
Old folks wept for His love in these
hard times.
‘Well, we got to get going,’ said the
restless Lord to the Son
‘There are galaxies yet to be born
Creation is never done.’ ”

The song deftly weaves together this humorous, offhand conversation with an aching declaration of love to a woman and ends thus:

“But then your hand takes mine
Thank God, I found you in time
Thank God, I found you
Thank God, I found you.”

What better description of our humanity and our walk of faith than this dance of “love” and “hard times”?

Simon goes on in “Love Is Eternal Sacred Light” to set that against the evil that is darkness, “a demon that feeds on the mind.”

“Love and Blessings” presents “simple kindness / Ours to hold but not to keep.”
In the title track, he sings, “Life is what you make of it / So beautiful or so what” and warns against “mistaking value for the price.”

In liner notes, Simon describes the mystery and fascination of the creative process. He writes: “The trick is, as I know it, to care like hell and not give a damn at the same time or, as more elegantly proposed here, ‘So Beautiful or So What.’ ”

In other liner notes, Elvis Costello writes that this album “rejects the allure of fashionable darkness and the hypnosis of ignorance—better to contemplate and celebrate the endurance of the spirit and the persistence of love.”

Yes.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.