Has there been a better pop album since? No. I remember when Simon first started promoting the album, appearing with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on SNL and everywhere else, and it was easy to leap over the exoticness to just realize, wow, what great songs. I don't believe I yet have the words to describe the joy this album still provides. At the time, Bob Christgau wrote:
Opposed though I am to universalist humanism, this is a pretty damn universal record. Within the democratic bounds of pop accessibility, its biculturalism is striking, engaging, unprecedented -- sprightly yet spunky, fresh yet friendly, so strange, so sweet, so willful, so radically incongruous and plainly beautiful. . . . The singing has lost none of its studied wimpiness, and he still writes like an English major, but this is the first album he's ever recorded rhythm tracks first, and it gives up a groove so buoyant you could float a loan to Zimbabwe on it. . . . he's found his "shot of redemption," escaping alienation without denying its continuing truth. It's the rare English major who can make such a claim.
Buoyant. That's about the best word I can come up with, and I still don't know how to describe that palindromic bass solo in "You Can Call Me Al". I could pick out a hundred different lines from the album to quote right now, but for the moment let's go with this one:
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry
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