False Prophet (2020) part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken

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False Prophet (2020) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

 On the poetic power of Paul Simon’s lyrics we can probably all agree. Like Dylan, he has a special talent for writing verses, couplets, entire lyrics even where he manages to hold the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. He, like Dylan, masters the art of moving with narrative songs (“A Most Peculiar Man”), and he distinguishes himself with the quality of the Very Great: articulating the wordless. “Hello darkness my old friend.” “All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.” Pure, majestic lyricism, both eloquent and profound – and these are just three examples. Simon’s 60-year-old oeuvre offers hundreds of such hits.

Leading, as with Dylan, is the sound, but beyond that Rhymin’ Simon doesn’t know how it works either. When Paul Zollo asks about it in his American Songwriter series (2011, updated in 2023), Simon’s first reflex is: it’s a mystery. “I really can’t explain it.” Where the songs come from and what the lyrics mean is and remains a mystery to himself:

“I really don’t know. I really don’t know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them, I think, “That’s really a better meaning than I thought and perfectly valid given the words that exist.” So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them and they might be more powerful than the ones I’m thinking.”

Which is exactly the same reflex as Dylan has, almost identically worded even: “I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good.* And you want your songs to sound good” (Nobel Prize lecture, 2017). And like Dylan, Simon can brood for years on a good phrase, on a beautiful image or an exciting word combination before finding a place for it in a song. “I had the title very early,” he tells about So Beautiful or So What (2011). “Way before, years before I had that song. I had written down a sentence, Everything is either so beautiful or so what.” And the creation of one of his Great Masterpieces, the song “Graceland”, illustrates how Simon arrives step by step at that trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. Driving through Wasteland it was at first, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s 1922 pièce de résistance The Waste Land, one phrase out of many on the estimated 50 pages in his yellow legal pad filled with sentence fragments, images and word combinations that will eventually be forged into songs on the album Graceland (1986). Simon leafs through it, and…

“…all at once Paul hit upon the single sentence, or half a sentence, that pulled everything together. It was a simple but profound change. Not “driving through Wasteland.” Going to Graceland. That was it. Now he understood that the idea of a physical journey had been the right one to search for the roots of the music he loved best, but the spiritual direction was wrong. Not Africa. Memphis.”
(Marc Eliot, Paul Simon: A Life, 2010)

In the fascinating documentary Under African Skies (BBC, 2012), Simon tells it slightly differently, but the thrust remains: Simon thematises the same as Dylan in “False Prophet”: rock ‘n’ roll as a metaphor for the path to enlightenment, to the state of grace, and the prophets who show us that path are Elvis, Mary Lou, Miss Pearl and Roy Orbison.

In the documentary, Simon goes into detail about the creation of those songs on Graceland. Political, explicit criticism of racism and apartheid was explicitly not the intention, he says. “I thought about writing political songs about the situation,” he says, “but I’m not actually very good at it.” A conversation with the pioneer of Xitsonga music General Sherinda reassures him on that front. Simon asks what the song he wants to copy, sung in Zulu, is actually about. “Well, you know it’s about… remember the 60s when the girls wore really short skirts? Wasn’t that great?” replies Sherinda. Ah, Paul sighs in relief. They don’t make political music either. It’s pop music. Twenty-five years later, at the reunion in South Africa, he asks guitarist Ray Phiri what the second verse meant again. The first one was something with mini skirts. And the second? Something about a chicken, right?

Ray Phiri: “Oh, the other one, it says… it means slaughter an owl, because there’s no chicken, and you cut the head and throw it away. The body will look like a chicken, so don’t worry. We will eat that in the train [laughs].
Paul Simon: “We will eat that in the train. It’ll look like a chicken. Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken. And then, you know – nobody will know. We’ll eat it on the train [laughs]. That’s what it meant.”

The content, Simon implies, is not too important. More important is that it sounds good, he seeks words “that would sync to the tracks and tell a clever story in the process”;

“Lyrics like don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party were written not just to tell a story, but to carefully scan with the rhythms.”

The example with the cinematographer’s party comes from the song that arises when Paul hears a song by General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters. “I could point to their record and say, ‘can you play this, but change it a little bit here?’” He is talking about the third track on Side A, the song after “The Boy In The Bubble” and “Graceland”: the brilliant, bouncy pop gem “I Know What I Know”, with its catchy, zingy, meaningless chorus

I know what I know
I’ll sing what I said
We come and we go
That’s a thing that I keep
In the back of my head

 

Paul’s template seems to be the song “Tekadzovo Undzi Bebula”, although “He Mdjadji” is just as similar, both by Mkhatshani Daniel Shirinda, General Shirinda. With both songs, at least, it is quite traceable that Simon in South Africa said: “Can you play this, but change it a little bit here?” Back in New York, it took “an extraordinarily long time to write the lyrics,” in which case he followed the rhythm and number of syllables of the original lyrics, and approximated the sound. Which turned out to be quite a task. “He went out and tried desperately to put words to each one,” recalls producer Roy Halee in the same documentary, “and he did. And he slaved at it. And it was awfully hard. Because there’s so much going on in those tracks. You know, they are very busy tracks.” It took a while, Simon explains, before I understood that I had to follow the bass, and not the “different symmetry” of the guitar. “So I ended up writing abstract or ironic or… but in either case sort of sophisticated lyrics to what were sophisticated rhythms.”

 

An approach, anyway, that Dylan seems to be copying for Rough And Rowdy Ways in general, so also for “False Prophet”, and for this third verse in particular…

—————

*Editor’s note: As you may have seen, this is the phrase also chosen as our headline on the home page of this site.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 5: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

One comment

  1. “But it sounds good”…. Takes Dylan’s words completely out of context …here he refers to a specific line from a John Donne poem (Sestos and Abydos). What he’s sayings is that he doesn’t have to know what a song or poem means (is getting at), not that the piece in fact contains no meaning at all, and therefore meaning’s unable to be ascertained in any degree. Words have a a life of its own!

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