{"id":52836,"date":"2013-05-22T17:05:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T21:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=52836"},"modified":"2013-05-22T17:05:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T21:05:26","slug":"diamonds-are-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/22\/diamonds-are-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Diamonds Are Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Paul-Simon-Graceland-1986\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven\u2019t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city or in Brooklyn without thinking of the dancing in \u201cDiamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.\u201d Of course there isn\u2019t any actual dancing in \u201cDiamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes\u201d\u2014it\u2019s a plan they abandon, the diamond-soled girl and the poor boy\u2014but who would come back to the city a little bit older and sadder and think of the long nights on rooftops and not of the way that time collapses when you\u2019re young in New York and in love? She said, \u201cHoney, take me dancing,\u201d and they ended up sleeping in the doorway<\/i>. Time passes in that line from the start of the night to its aftermath, and the night itself is lost to memory in the way that everyday whimsy and arguments are, especially with wine, especially with pulls as relentless as those of the city\u2019s excitement and of the comforts of new love and home. The doorway is a compromise between the worlds that put them off-balance\u2014the world inside the doorway, and Broadway. She said, \u201cHoney, take me dancing,\u201d and they ended up sleeping in the doorway<\/i> \/ By the bodegas and the lights of Upper Broadway<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Wealth: you couldn\u2019t have a story like this of Upper Broadway and not describe the shames and trappings of wealth, the extravagant ludicrousness of having diamonds on the bottoms of your shoes, the thin pretense of trying to hide anything. She\u2019s like a fable, the rich girl<\/i>. You can hear her playing and taunting, fun and vain, eager to please and anxious to be reassured of what she knows is hardly true.<\/p>\n

\n

She said, \u201cYou\u2019ve taken me for granted
Because I please you
Wearing these diamonds.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If she pleases him, it\u2019s not with the diamonds that he has to compensate for, and because she knows this but wishes that she didn\u2019t, she says please<\/i> in two syllables and diamonds <\/i>in seven, as if to say how silly\u2014how crazy<\/i>\u2014it would be to want her wealth, as at least part of him does.<\/p>\n

He gets there in the end, wearing diamonds, but not without denial, resentment, and envy. It\u2019s this self-consciousness, if not self-awareness, that rounds the song out into drama. She makes the sign of a teaspoon<\/i> \/ He makes the sign of a wave<\/i>. She plays at doing something, and he, drawn inward, just plays at reaching out to her, but his self-consciousness makes it just the sign<\/i> of a wave, shy of what he feels is real communication. (Maybe his version of play is a pun like \u201csine wave,\u201d which, being a pun, feels too embarrassing to say.)<\/p>\n

\n

She makes the sign of a teaspoon
He makes the sign of a wave
The poor boy changes clothes
and puts on aftershave
To compensate for his ordinary shoes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The rhyme with aftershave<\/i> feels right, but it\u2019s hard to say why. Our ineffable certainty is like that of the poor boy reacting to his anxiety by fixing himself up\u2014likely because it feels right and not because he thinks the uncomfortable thought that he has to compensate. It\u2019s the narrator who thinks that. His interpolation helps to set the characters off-balance with themselves and each other, excited and anxious, ready for the dancing that never happens.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

After the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of Graceland<\/i> last year, I worried that the album was dead. I had grown up with it, but I had grown up. There were new heroes on the pop charts, and what you found in the anniversary reviews wasn\u2019t the exploration of genius but a kind of acknowledgment of it, almost a guilty pleasure, followed by the admission of guilt over Simon\u2019s having played in South Africa during apartheid or over the album\u2019s sounding, on closer inspection, a little bit glib and self-satisfied, as if to say that they loved the album even if they didn\u2019t like why. It was an oldie.<\/p>\n

But what about beauty, I thought. Were people hearing without listening to the musical poetry of \u201cDiamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes\u201d? It\u2019s hard to think of something less glib than that compressed and balanced story (set with the dark undertone of the diamond trade). To my surprise, when I listened to the album again after the anniversary, I found it hard to find other songs that were good in the way that \u201cDiamonds\u201d was, and this surprised me because the songs were all fluid in my memory. I suppose that this is because the music is fluid. The stories, however, are anything but, from the triumphal horns and drums at the start of the first song, \u201cThe Boy in the Bubble,\u201d to the bomb in the baby carriage<\/i> and the chorus that tells us that these are the days of miracle and wonder<\/i> \/ this is a long-distance call<\/i>. It\u2019s assonance and cognitive dissonance. One could understandably think that there are no reasons in the stories of the songs to justify this sort of reassurance, no reasons at all besides Simon\u2019s desire for grand reassurance which, acted on, would show a profound satisfaction with himself.<\/p>\n

You could say this of most of the great characters in Graceland<\/i>, Al and Joseph and even Fat Charlie the Archangel. Their epiphanies stand apart from their stories, unwarranted, unearned. Al walks around middle-aged and disoriented and somehow sees angels in the architecture. Joseph walks around at night in Africa and we hear that this is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein<\/i>. \u201cI Know What I Know\u201d and \u201cGumboots\u201d also have this disparity between the emotional muddles of the stories and the clear passion of the choruses, between, say, the banalities of a taxi ride and You don\u2019t feel you could love me<\/i> \/ But I feel you could<\/i> \/ Don\u2019t feel you could love me<\/i> \/ but I feel you<\/i>. It\u2019s one thing and often a good thing that Simon doesn\u2019t explain the road to musical epiphany, another that after a number of listens there comes to seem like no resolution but the music itself. Call it aestheticism or shallowness, it\u2019s not a profound take on our problems.<\/p>\n

What if that\u2019s the point, though? What if his subject wasn\u2019t pain resolved by music but the disparity between the everyday pain of our lives and the joy we still feel in them somehow? Or between the fullness of that joy and the clich\u00e9s we describe it with, or even the places crosshatched throughout the album. You shouldn\u2019t be able to explain the route from pain to clarity any more than \u201cThe Boy in the Bubble\u201d can explain how, despite the terrorism and all the technology that would rob the world of miracle and wonder, it still feels as though these are the days of miracle and wonder<\/i>. The question Simon poses by putting that song first in the album is how to reconcile those emotions, if we can.<\/p>\n

What follows \u201cThe Boy in the Bubble\u201d are varieties of failed love, from the failed marriage and lost love of \u201cGraceland\u201d to Fat Charlie the Archangel\u2019s divorce, the unrequited love of \u201cGumboots\u201d to the child handed off to God in \u201cUnder African Skies.\u201d In this light, the chorus of \u201cYou Can Call Me Al\u201d is less a revelation than the vulnerable side of the same cornball middle-aged sentimentalism Al spends the verses whining in, from Mr. Beerbelly, beerbelly<\/i> to If you\u2019ll be my bodyguard<\/i> \/ I can be your long-lost pal<\/i> \/ I can call you Betty<\/i> \/ And Betty, when you call me<\/i> \/ You can call me Al<\/i>. (The names are antiquated for a reason; this is the guy who told us that Joltin\u2019 Joe has left and gone away (Hey hey hey, hey hey hey)<\/i>.) To all this tumbling in turmoil, \u201cI Know What I Know\u201d is a kind of prelude, with all the smart guarded bullshit of courtship (She moved so easily all I could think of was sunlight<\/i> \/ I said, \u201caren\u2019t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright?\u201d<\/i> [Get it\u2014full bright?]). The happy coda is \u201cThat Was Your Mother,\u201d where a father talks to his son about how pretty his mom was before you was born, dude<\/i>, but that\u2019s boring. The song all the others are balanced against, the fullest story and the most reasonably optimistic, the emotional heart of the album, is \u201cDiamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an album of disparities and disjointedness, \u201cDiamonds\u201d is a model of coherence and qualified, tempered hope\u2014slow, sad, suspect and nebulous, off-balance but redemptive nonetheless. You know why you feel the miracle and wonder of it all. The song may not have the dancing of the rest of the album, but what it has is something else.<\/p>\n

Adam Plunkett has written for<\/i> n+1, <\/i>Bookforum, and the <\/i>New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He is a low-level editor on the literary half of <\/i>The New Republic and the poetry editor of <\/i>Design Observer. <\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven\u2019t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city or in Brooklyn without thinking of the dancing in \u201cDiamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.\u201d Of course there isn\u2019t any actual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":533,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[10928,46,8431],"class_list":["post-52836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-graceland","tag-music","tag-paul-simon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDiamonds Are Forever by Adam Plunkett<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 22, 2013 \u2013 Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven\u2019t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city\" \/>\n<meta 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