Paul Simon: Greatest Hits, etc.

Teenage tastes, so quick to change. I'm guessing I bought this record not long after my Simon & Garfunkel collection. But I didn't take to it, and it remained on the shelf for… a quarter of a century until now.

For a bundle of reasons, mostly snobbish and puerile, I steered clear of Paul Simon in general for a long time. Graceland was probably the first one: when I first heard about, I thought it sounded interesting, but when it became clear that it was going to be incredibly popular and every Radio 4 listener in the country, especially those that rarely bought music, would have a copy, I headed rapidly in the opposite direction and did that horrible NME thing of feigning scorn at 'cultural tourism'. I probably had a little speech prepared about why David Byrne doing something very similar was actually not very similar, and quite acceptable.

I still haven't shaken off the music snob thing. "One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear," wrote Nietzsche. I think of my snobbery as a form of vanity — standing out from the crowd, away from the mainstream — but is it really extreme to scoff at Paul Simon? It's certainly mean, I guess — in which case, what do I fear from him?

Anyway, time smoothes away the prejudices of the younger man, and I don't bear Paul Simon any ill will. How big of me. I still gave his latest album a wide berth, mind you, even if it was produced by Brian Eno. I quite like some of the songs on this one, and in Mother and Child Reunion he anticipates Sting's white reggae by nearly a decade, and does it more faithfully. That's quite an accolade isn't it? "Did what Sting did, before Sting did it" (but not so good looking). There I go again, you see.

Lucy likes this '70s period of Paul Simon more than the ethnic '80s ones. Yep, some of them are OK. But some are just trite when they want to be poetic, and Still Crazy After All These Years is just so wet — about as crazy as poodle on tranquilisers. Unfortunately, I just read the fan 'shouts' on his Last.fm page, and they brought all the bile back up again.

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