Countertexts

Reading the YouTube Comments to Graceland

This is an interactive poem.


The Full Sense of Humanity is in these things
These most proverbially sunbaked,
Perused, experienced pieces, their dialogues with the public.
Could populism be analogized to nodes prodding nodes?
Like a slow drive with yardsigns in mowed lawns.
with not an instant of unneeded scrolling
one encounters the sloganeers.

@BEKBOON:
‘Losing Love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow’

Everybody sees
His avatar the innocent, pristine, unimitable,
Picture of himself non-descript
(a search by image returns STEPPE and we smirk knowlingly as it misses a human right before it)

@BEKBOON. smiling here, sums it “brilliant”
And who is to argue with taking 3 lines and zipping it to us in 1 word
You’re meant to sort of intuit it beside him, this user,
As the song treks over them proffered lines,
Each time, like mutualism, trading brilliance for page views.
With backward double arrows; the brilliance is retraced
He dances beside you, forever, and the shadow thrown grows and shortens

I imagine @Susy Q enjoys this arrangement
Afterall, @Susy Q thanks Paul Simon personally (Paul!) for, I paraphrase,
Making her soul smile

@Marta Flitx Panella names it:
“This is peace. This is Healing”.

In a somewhat dour formulation,
@Rigel Fish states he listens to Graceland for one reason only:
That is “TO RECOVER MY SOUL”

@Susy Q  replies to @Rigel Fish’s comment.
She says Paul Simon’s Graceland is like giving her soul a breath of fresh air…
She feels the need to reiterate
“It makes my heart smile.”

1 month ago

@Rigel Fish has yet to respond.
No one ever explains what is quite ailing their soul.
Perhaps it’s inexplicable.
@NameNick1234, elsewhere,
muses: “The bass goes so hard for no reason”

@Mike Weir, however, states,
as if bound covenant-like:
“There Goes Rhymin' Simon...May He Never Leave, But If He Does...May We All Go With Him. Amen”

4 weeks ago

This was on a video from the Newport 2022 Folk Festival.
and it's like learning the world fair still occurs
because, loathe to say it, rhymin’ Simon is certainly but a historical blink
from Leavin’

Dying.

Ye, joining Cohen in that embalming tower.
Dedicated hymns, refreshed, sung, digitally flickering.
Posthumously, they’re guaranteed to be churning out these eternal songs.
A cult of personality is any face on any screen.
Even your own face on your own words.

alt-tab: carillons à musique


This is losing track.
This is as unfocused.
but ekphrastic lines to drivel tickles my cynicism like a blues lick
so I riff, so i riff, bad-faith slacker rock

@B.C. Zähler
“Listen Mike, you can die with your messiahs and I with mine. Amen”

You can't let these people pick the saints.
All St. Cecilia did to corner music was sing to herself at her
wedding...internally.
but John Lennon took a bullet and Jackson C. Frank had those scars
and when you read what happened to our american Lochinvar's eye on the way to Woodstock...

Chaucer said Cecilia meant something like:
lily of heaven, the way for the blind, contemplation of heaven and the active life, as if lacking in blindness, or a heaven for people to gaze upon.
but he spoke a different English; nowadays it just means begging on your knees.

Amen

@petervanderarend7635
"Paul Simon's Album Graceland gave me respite in a period where my employer required super long hours away from my family"

Are these conversations? Is this talking?
I’m saying, outloud to myself, when I read @smnoy23 write:
“I also like to hope that we will all be received in Graceland, When we are ready to go there.”
What is graceland but a crime scene of the civil war?
Surely, it's not just Memphis.

@Jake-qw1rl
"I liked the cheeky "Elvis" moves too :)"

You can't let these people pick heavens.
Liturgy thru Simon’s Whoah oh oh
Are we to browse paradise in Elvis’ symbolic tomb? shoulder to shoulder like the louvre?
Jumpsuit equaling Mona Lisa
(Jumpsuits are always smaller than expected)
I guess I'll be wearing the “Where Elvis Lives” zip hoodie, if it ever gets back in stock,
Throw ourselves into utopic paradox, theological puzzler,
because if Elvis gets to live again
and I get to live with Elvis,
why not the Canadians with Neil Young?
These people would attach their souls to a grammy award winning track.
Flippantly.
I've long prefered not being birthed-again
English in my blood; American in my regrets.
You know I could never eat another peach, and be okay with the metaphysics.
instead escaping this gift shop saṃsāra to the tune of Hassa's sitar

Trastevere 1599, Incorruptable.
Machine Politics
White Saviors


To quote C. S. McLeod:
"It’s all in Syncopation between guitar,bass,percussion."

Syncopation

One recorded in an apartheid studio equipped with “a Harrison console, 3M tape machines and modified James Lansing monitors”
Gumboots, a secret Johannesburg flight, zero-songs
fleshy finger on gutstring into metal, into metal, into metal.
The most impressive metal was something called a syncalvier,
(Which is to my understanding like a musical vivisection machine)
with it, Paul Simon created an electronic “Shadow”
His shadow voice was masterfully delayed.
Did you realize the You Can Call me Al bass breakdown is a man playing backwards?
Except, a man can’t play backwards.
until a scratch of tape, a switchboard technique
sends the sonics reeling on their heads as if wrong-turned
back to Montauk
into plastic circles that sing when they itch.
Years later, there were three men, three hand grenades, and a fax machine
but nothing seemed to really happen
Mostly: my computer screen now theaters a town hall
and the music is all in two numbers

Ringball
mbaqanga
Hit Factory

@isabellalenz176
"Call in my mouth I know it feels like the roof of my mouth is so dry I am I do you know about me I’ve told you last time I got high resolve it was your meeting about anything like that right now I’m like always so actual allergies are flowing"

What Are these people saying?
What Are these people seeing?
What Are these people hearing?
Idealism is believing these geriatrics figured out bluetooth.
Idealism is coping with the concept of language barriers.
Idealism is praying all these folks were as stoned as I was
writing this, writing those.
Regardless:
"World Music" signage on an endcap, webpage scrapes,
and the politics of chatter: as long as one thing is being remarked upon by another
This is the shit they're training robots on.

Watch:

Do you like graceland by paul simon?

"I think 'Graceland' is a fantastic song! Paul Simon’s storytelling and musicality in that track are both compelling. The blend of folk and world music influences really creates a unique sound, and the lyrics capture a sense of both personal and geographical journey. Do you have a favorite part of the song?"

Yeah it's when Paul Simon sings “Their morality comes out of the barrel of a gun.”

"That’s a powerful line. It’s interesting how Paul Simon weaves social commentary into his music. The lyric you mentioned reflects a critical view of political and social systems, highlighting a stark contrast between different forms of power and influence. The way he integrates these themes into the personal and introspective narrative of 'Graceland' adds depth to the song. What about that line resonates with you?"

can you write a shorter sentence, like a comment on youtube?

"Paul Simon’s “Graceland” is a masterpiece—no one should suffer for creating such art."

Culpability
stoned & stoned


Nothing personal against Paul Simon or his fans
He and they here were bundled Everymen
in a parableesque experimental about the capturability of noise,
responsibility in communicating,
sunbaked circuitry and writing for money.

lamellae

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