epilogue
Music & Literature
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
what’s happening in the title song. Art Garfunkel’s voice
in “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is so impossibly beautiful that it’s hard to fathom. It sounds so American, and so
young, as if it carries all the burdens of those days in it —
the war, the youth movement, the despair, the faith. Everyone knows now: it took Garfunkel something like a hundred
takes to do his vocal. Until he had driven Paul Simon and everyone else crazy. It was all worth it. And here’s some advice
for future music aspirants on American Idol and The Voice:
stop singing this song. You cannot compete.
Armed Forces
by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
The seventies were the decade when I started
to pay attention to music, instead of just hearing it on the radio, and therefore there were
many, many albums that had significance for
me: Roxy Music, Led Zeppelin IV, One Size Fits
All by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Station to Station by David Bowie, Foxtrot by Genesis. But those were all things that
I heard before punk happened. One day at the
high school radio station (where I worked) I was meant to play
Armed Forces as part of a show on new releases we broadcast. I knew nothing about this record. I thought it was kind
of adorable at first, not much more, until “Green Shirt” came
on. Wow. Not the usual thing, not the usual love song, not
the usual rock-and-roll posture: “You can please yourself but
somebody’s gonna get it.” Tuneful, strange, futuristic, ominous and played with great style by the band. The Attractions,
probably road-weary from incessant touring, sound like they
are attached to one very complicated brain. A truly amazing record, and one that changed the way I thought about the
popular song ever after.