Download It #25: The Boy in the Bubble

July 17, 2009

9-11 1 (shrunk).jpg

On September 12, 2001, some 8-million New Yorkers, myself among them, had to deal with the fact that they’d been collectively raped the previous morning, and now had to take the first steps toward dealing with an awful, abrupt loss of security.

In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, it was easy to imagine vulnerability on every street corner, in every passing bus. You looked in the air a lot, not for fear that mass-murder would come roaring in again, but out of disbelief that it had ever appeared in the first place. Had it really happened? This was just supposed to be Wednesday, after all, not The Day After, and you felt like you were slowly drifting through an ugly slice of history, trying to get your head back into everyday existence.

On W. 55th St. in Hell’s Kitchen, where Jill and I lived at the time, you could actually smell sparks and scorched metal in the air; the streets were dotted with people wearing surgical masks. But there was simply no way to keep the horror from becoming a part of you. To one degree or another, we’d all be carrying it with us for the rest of our lives, sensations ready to be plucked from our unconscious and examined at a moment’s notice.

The way I looked at it, we had finally reached “the future,” but it wasn’t the utopian existence science books promised us back in grade school. Technology, rather than drawing the planet together for the common good, had finally enabled a handful of determined, “common” people to kill thousands of innocents via one hellish event. In the process, the last hypothetically free, untouchable society was rattled to its core— we had entered the new world with the remorseless impact of metal on metal, and there was no turning back.

Life was now science fiction.

                                                ***

Late in the afternoon on the 12th, I decided to go for a walk, just to prove to myself that the rest of the city was still standing. There was a strange calm to the streets in the weeks following 9-11 that New Yorkers still occasionally talk about, a silence that was heavy with disbelief slowly clawing its way toward acceptance.

But on this day, I was aware of an utterly unique situation, or, at least, a situation that was unique to my city-dwelling experience. As I passed my fellow New Yorkers on the sidewalk, I realized that each and every one of them had the same thing on their minds. All of us stared blankly as we made our way down the street, just trying to get back to our lives and some sense of comfort. But we were all vibrating on the same benumbed frequency.

Paul Simon (shrunk).jpg

Then something odd happened. Suddenly, as I walked up Columbus Ave., around W. 70th St., I spotted a familiar face in crowd. That short guy in a baseball cap and t-shirt was Paul Simon.

Normally, at the very least, I’d nod at someone of Simon’s cultural significance - I’ve been listening to his music since I was 16 years-old - just to let him know I recognized him. Simon, though, is one of those people I’d try to stop and talk to for a moment, if he’d have me. He gives the most fascinatingly precise interviews I’ve ever heard from a pop songwriter; his grasp of musical technique is genuinely astonishing, and he can state a logical reason for every twist and turn of his disciplined lyrics. The level of his songwriting has also remained remarkably consistent over the years. He may well be the sole superstar from the 1960s whose current work is actually better than what he was cranking out in his youth.

But I just let him walk by. He was almost grimacing, lost in the same fog that engulfed everyone else that day; his eyes seemed focused on some unseen image floating a few inches in front of his nose.

I knew exactly what that image was.

                                                ***

It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized Simon had, in fact, already compiled a roll call of the spiritual and technological elements that converged so horrifically on 9-11, and he did it over 15 years earlier.

His 1983 song, “The Boy in the Bubble,” the lead track from his classic album, “Graceland,” examines the promise of technological advancement and just how badly we’ve all dropped the ball by allowing that technology to be used for mass surveillance and soulless destruction. It’s an absolutely remarkable piece of work with a hard-hitting message that's somewhat blunted by the offbeat instrumentation that permeates “Graceland”’s South African musical experiments.

Here’s the terrific video for "The Boy in the Bubble," which, quite astonishingly, contains several glimpses of the World Trade Center.

Never mind the unique - to American years, anyway - arrangement that Simon and his gifted South African cohorts cooked up; when I first heard the song at the record store where I worked, I honestly didn’t know what to make of the accordion and vaguely disembodied, fretless bass line. Just read these lyrics as a piece of rhythmic literature, and remember this is a pop song that was played all over the radio one hot summer:

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

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

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

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Think of the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

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'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

There wasn’t anything this incisive written in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, let alone almost 20 years earlier. He’s written some tremendous tunes over the years, and I’ll almost certainly be suggesting some in future Download It installments. But I view “The Boy in the Bubble” as Paul Simon’s masterwork, the kind of song that Dylan used to write when he couldn’t stop them from pouring out of his electrified fingertips.

Simon’s multi-leveled powers of perception are impressive, and his meticulous approach to conceiving a lyric pays high dividends. There’s not a misplaced thought or ill-considered word in the entire song. Honestly, from “it’s a turnaround jump shot” onward, he's hitting a peak in his development as a popular songwriter.

Paul Simon couldn't have imagined the dark cloud that would one day rise from the southern tip of his hometown. But that loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, in case you haven’t noticed, is still with us, and they’re still playing games with our lives. The days of miracle and wonder, sad to say, are still killing us. Simon, a genuine artist, must feel it deeply.

Download: "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon. Album: “Graceland” (1983).

Paul Tatara

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