Riffs: Just Call Me "Sonny"

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Considering that I love popular music, that I have a rather large collection--on vinyl, tape and CD--of popular music, going back to the very beginnings of recording in the last century; and considering that I have been listening to popular music, first on radio--when Perry Como and Patti Page were big stars--considering all of that, I've been quite neglectful of sharing some of the music that I love here. I've been doing better this past week. Tonight, I'm putting up a song by another of my favorite singer-songwriters. Enjoy:


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Readings: When Baby Fae Went Down to Graceland

As I was surfing the net the other day, taking brief glances at the stories on various news sites, one of those which caught my attention was a notice "on this day in history" of the 25th anniversary of the implantation of a baboon heart in a human infant, whom the world came to know as “Baby Fae.” This in turn brought back to me the Paul Simon song, “The Boy in the Bubble” from Simon’s hit album “Graceland” (1986), in which Baby Fae is alluded to:

Its a turn-around jump shot

Its everybody jump start

Its every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

Medicine is magical and magical is art

The boy in the bubble

And the baby with the baboon heart

As the lyrics of that song played silently in my head, it next occurred to me how little our world, as it inspired Simon’s lyrics, has changed during the intervening years. As the French say, Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose, the Americanized, colloquial translation of which is usually rendered, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Just as the Baby Fae case gave rise to questions in the area of medical ethics twenty-five years ago, today medical science is embroiled in controversy over such things as stem cell research and human cloning.

Another headline announced the deaths of several UN workers and ever more American military personnel in the Middle East, where IEDs are nothing new. How little our current world differs from the one that inspired this stanza of Paul Simon’s song, back in the mid-Eighties:

It was a slow day,

And the sun was beating

On the soldiers by the side of the road,

There was a bright light,

A shattering of shop windows

The bomb in the baby carriage

Was wired to the radio...

And the rest of the lyrics of “The Boy in the Bubble”* seem equally relevant, even prophetic, when considered against the backdrop of current events in the 21st century:

And I believe

These are the days of lasers in the jungle

Lasers in the jungle somewhere

Staccato signals of constant information

A loose affiliation of millionaires

And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That is dying in a corner of the sky

Indeed,

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And dont cry baby, dont cry

Dont cry

Check it out:...plus c’est le même chose.

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*See the excellent video.

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Riffs: The Boy in the Bubble

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Over the years I made dozens of ninety-minute audio tape mixes which I now play in my car on the way to and from work every day. This morning the second song that came up was Paul Simon's The Boy in the Bubble from the album Graceland, released well over 20 years ago. As I listened with the pleasure Paul Simon tunes always give me, I couldn't help noticing how appropriate the song's opening stanza and chorus are to the world we live in today:

It was a slow day

And the sun was beating

On the soldiers by the side of the road

There was a bright light

A shattering of shop windows

The bomb in the baby carriage

Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry

Well, okay. Go ahead--cry if you want. WTF.

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