Jesus, One Paul Is Just as Predictable as Another

Oh, just SHUT UP.

This is the "single" off the forthcoming new album. "If you don't have a wristband, my man, you don't get through the door. Wristband, my man, my man, if you don't have a wristband, my man, you don't get through the door...when I meet some dude with an attitude...wristband, my man, you don't have a wristband, you don't get through the door...and I said wristband? I don't need a wristband! My ax is on the bandstand...I mean...doo doo dee doo doo dee..."

Jesus.

And let's not bother with anything more than a "static image" video. A picture of the album. We don't even see Little Old Mr. Hipster sing the fucking thing.

How many fucking times is this guy going to steal some monkey percussion shit, and throw laconic bad lyrics over it? Then he sings it like he's some kind of bored, cool hipster. Or maybe he thinks he sounds black. Who knows.

There have been so many of these numbing songs on his last few albums. The little old guy seems to think he's profound. The theme here, is that SOME people have a wristband, and that makes them good enough to get into an event. But hey, he's PLAYING the event, so he don't need no wristband. Got it? Heavy. If you're an ARTIST you can be superior to...what...the fans on the line?

The last lines naturally have to reference his favorite brown-colored lazy self-entitled idiots waiting for some Whitey to justify their bad behavior:

"Riots started slowly with the homeless and the lowly...towns that never get a wristband, kids that can't afford the cool brand, whose anger is the shorthand for never getting a wristband..."

Something like that. A rapper he is NOT. A real rapper would blister that stuff with ten times the lyrics and rhymes. Paul just pouts and putzes his way along, at the speed that his dimwitted PBS-loving Starbucks-drinking fans can deal with.

As always, his fans just want him to say that the niggas are oppressed, and it's too bad, wink wink. That's enough. Hire a black nanny, that's enough, too. Paul's fans want their Starbucks coffee brown, the girl who serves it brown, but their co-workers white. That's how it works. As Phil sang it, "Love me love me love me, I'm a liberal." PS, we want our Afro-Cuban-Jazz fronted by a little white guy who sings like a little white guy.

I suppose there was always something creepy about a little white guy surrounding himself with Africans, or Afro-Cubans, or whatever, and deadpanning obscure pseudo-intellectual blab. Early in his solo career, Paul somehow found a way to seem cool with his ethnic rip-offs. Bony Joni had to confess, "W.C. Handy I'm rich and I'm fey, and I'm not familiar with what you played..." Maybe she meant OFAY. Whatever. But Paul? He surrounded himself with black Louisiana Negroes who got real close to the mike to sing "Tenderness" with him. And that stupid "Take Me to the Mardis Gras." And he sang "Me and Julio down by de School Yard...mama pajama..." Huh? What DOES that fucking song mean?

Frankly we didn't care, us Paul fans, because he was making us ALL feel black. Hip. Comfortably down wid da blacks and da browns without actually doing that. But don't catch ME being a self-hating Whitey. My ears can adjust to old Bessie Smith 78's, but I'd just as soon hear Paul and his pal Artie doing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" than a cover by some wailin' mammy. I think maybe because the song was written by a white guy and it's just sort of NOT authentic sung by what the white guy pretended to be, and isn't. "Know wuttum sayin?"

Like Dylan, who could rip off the blacks very well, Paul could sometimes seem like the white guy cool enough to hang with the blacks and make them respect him. He sang: "You Can Call Me Al." Listen to that and you might figure, "OK, maybe HE knows what the fuck it means. It sounds pretty good, though." But over the years, even judiciously spaced several years apart, each new album was like the one before "just not as good."

When he was with Garfunkel, you could enjoy lots of good alienated folk-rock. There were only a few of those peculiar deals ("Baby Driver") full of sound effects and cocky punk affectation. On his own? Gradually more and more of it driven by exotic (and then predictable) ethnic rhythms. Too many lyrics that you could enjoy as long as you didn't pay any attention to them. At best, you'd get a mood. But actually read them? "These lyrics make no sense." And not in a Dylan way, either.

Oh well. American Paul is like British Paul, writing a lot of drivel and all anyone cares about is that it's a familiar, comfortable 40 minutes of musical wallpaper. Here? Yep, that's his stillborn voice, that's his silly bunch of natives doing percussion behind him while he stands there narrowing his eyes and posing like he's the captain of the ship.

Same old ship. What a piece of ship.