Everyone's So Proud of You, Kevin, for Lifting the Debt Ceiling!!
PLUS: A review of Paul Simon's "Seven Psalms" AND the legacy of Tina Turner
Apologies to Dan Pfeiffer, who beat me to one of my main points as well as my “participation trophy” metaphor by two days. You can read his Substack post on the same topic here. It’s good stuff.
Last Wednesday night, after the House finally figured out how to raise the debt ceiling—a totally made-up thing, by the way, akin to believing the ceremonial first pitch of a baseball game is an official pitch that must be thrown before a game can begin even though everyone at the game has already bought real tickets using real money to see real pitchers throw real pitches to real batters—Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gifted his chief negotiator Rep. Patrick McHenry this souvenir:
If you can’t quite make out what that is or what it says, it’s a Speaker’s gavel reading “Patrick, you made history” and signed by McCarthy himself.
“History”? WTF is McCarthy talking about? Is successfully resolving a fake crisis infused with catastrophic stakes with little to show for it besides a new fossil fuel pipeline running through the heart of West Virginia and making it harder for hungry 50-54-year-olds to buy food history? It’s Sunday morning and the entire nation has already forgotten this whole ordeal. McCarthy’s note should read, “Patrick, you did the basic governing thing.” That gavel is nothing more than a participation trophy, a reminder McHenry showed up, played an ultimately inconsequential game, and then went home. Put it on your shelf if it makes you feel good, but it’s just clutter.
In truth, it wasn’t the history that was made by raising the debt ceiling but rather the history that was avoided. Remember, the debt ceiling is a completely unnecessary atomic tripwire Congress has stretched across the global economy; they could just write it out of existence or fold it into every spending bill. Because most Americans don’t understand what the debt ceiling is—they incorrectly assume raising it allows the government to spend more when it actually authorizes the government to pay its creditors and meet its financial obligations—the only purpose the debt ceiling serves is to allow politicians to grandstand on how tough they are on government spending. That becomes a problem when enough politicians suddenly feel they have to maintain the outraged spectacle over “debt” (or, more worryingly, actually believe the spectacle is true) than act responsibly in order to avoid a global economic meltdown. So maybe the “history” McCarthy and McHenry made was finding 149 (they promised Biden 150) Republican House members to do the right thing. Maybe that gavel should have read, “Patrick, Phew! We didn’t do crazy (this time)!” (“This time” indeed. Reports are the House MAGA caucus that forced McCarthy to endure multiple votes on his way to becoming Speaker isn’t out for his head at the moment even though McCarthy failed to deliver on so many of their demands. They’re surely keeping score, however.)
Don’t buy the line Kevin McCarthy is some sort of legislative mastermind. Let’s chronicle how this all went down. First of all, a few months ago, McCarthy declared his GOP House caucus would be taking the debt ceiling hostage. Yet for weeks he couldn’t name a ransom beyond vague references to reining in “waste, fraud, and abuse” and defunding “woke indoctrination.” (The bill passed this week has nothing to do with those things.) In other words, McCarthy refused to avoid an economic catastrophe unless Democrats gave him…something, whatever, he didn’t know. In the meantime, all the dilly-dallying on McCarthy’s part let Biden and the Democrats say he wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. That led McCarthy to definitively say such cuts wouldn’t be part of his package and that any cuts would have to be made to the “non-defense, non-veterans discretionary” spending of the pie chart. That meant the guy who was so worried about government spending couldn’t do anything about the biggest drivers of government spending: Entitlements and defense spending.
McCarthy did finally get a bill through the House in April that would cut government spending to 2022 levels, cap further spending, repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act, and raise the debt ceiling to March 2024. It managed to draw Biden to the table (actually, I’d say it meant Biden had to let McCarthy sit at the grown-up table) but the final bill Biden and McCarthy negotiated is a shadow of the House GOP’s original bill. Some of the deals he cut with Biden—such as restarting the student loan repayment program—were slated to take place anyway. Even some of their more prominent ideas, like attaching work requirements to government aid, got watered down. The overall savings from this whole debacle amount to less than 0.5% of the federal budget.
In other words: McCarthy played a very dangerous game with little to show for it. We can be glad there won’t be a default. I’m glad his agenda went mostly unfulfilled. But really, that was what all this fuss was about?
This all culminated in a series of very weird floor votes. The first occurred in the House on the rules package that brought the bill to the floor. It is customary for the majority party to whip their members to pass that bill without the support of the minority. It turned out McCarthy didn’t have the votes to bring what was by now a must-pass bill to the floor, so he had to cut a side deal with Democrats on a bunch of earmarks to get it passed. (Kind of contradicts his whole “tough on spending” rhetoric.) When the vote on the actual bill took place in the House, a greater number and greater proportion of Democrats (about 80% of the caucus) voted for it than did Republicans (about 2/3.) A similar ratio among Democrats appeared in the Senate vote, except a majority of Republicans voted against it 17-31.
Those votes to me are mindboggling. Outside the supremely important substance of the bill—the actual raising of the debt ceiling—everything else was essentially something McCarthy demanded. You might say McCarthy didn’t get much, but what little McCarthy did get is still more than the nothing Democrats got. Yet it fell on Democrats to do the heavy lifting during the roll call. Now you might say, “No, Democrats got something big they wanted out of the deal, which was raising the debt ceiling.” To that I say
Let’s say this again: Everybody—Republicans included—should want the debt ceiling raised. If Republicans don’t—that is, if rather than act responsibly, they’d prefer an outcome somewhere between the Great Recession and the Great Depression—then that’s a pretty good sign the American people shouldn’t allow them anywhere near Capitol Hill.
But if McCarthy needed to lean on House Democrats to get this bill passed and a majority of Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t get on board with his handiwork, then it would seem to me Democrats are entitled to something more than the least sucky version of McCarthy’s wish list. If the theme of McCarthy’s dance is “Debt Reduction,” Democrats have things called “tax increases” that could help with that and could have been included in the package. Biden reportedly made nineteen such proposals that McCarthy rejected.
At the end of the day, Democrats wouldn’t scuttle a necessary debt ceiling hike and definitely wouldn’t do so over such relatively small potatoes, particularly after Biden had managed to dramatically scale back McCarthy’s plans. Which brings me to Biden’s role in all this. I get a kick out of this Twitter message from (the self-proclaimed sensible) Republican South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace:
Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants. I’m voting NO on the debt ceiling debacle because playing the DC game isn’t worth selling out our kids and grandkids.
What precisely is broken? Who’s playing games? Does your team even know what pants are?
Apparently, President Biden talked to former President Barack Obama after the Senate passed the bill Thursday night. I would love to have been in on that conversation. If you recall, Obama vowed to never again negotiate a debt ceiling hike after Republicans took it hostage in 2011 and saddled him with a bad deal. (Then-VP Biden and Mitch McConnell had to put together a deal when it appeared the country was careening toward default.) Obama used that strategy successfully when it came time to raise it again in his second term. Biden held to that position until McCarthy got the House to back the initial GOP package.
I’m with Obama on this: I wouldn’t negotiate on it, period. (In fact, Democrats should have gotten rid of it when they had the chance in 2021-22.) I think Biden has left himself vulnerable to other episodes of legislative hostage-taking by playing along with McCarthy. I would have made it clear to McCarthy months ago that Democrats were open to negotiations on his issue list but not around the debt ceiling and made sure there was a channel open for those negotiations to be occurring and working.
But Biden and his team are temperamentally wheelers and dealers so the White House may have had a more instinctive sense not only for where a deal was to be had but where he actually had the leverage. Or maybe Biden’s just better at counting than McCarthy. My guess is Biden intuited McCarthy would never be able to command the unity of House Republicans, which meant, given the very narrow margins in the House, that any must-pass bill would need Democratic support in House. Biden also probably counted on a fractious yet more disciplined Democratic House caucus, one that learned in the Pelosi era that unity was their strength. If McCarthy came to Biden with a plan that needed twenty Democratic votes to get over the finish line, Biden probably told him he’d end up with eighty or none and that McCarthy’s bill would need to be watered down some to keep the bloc of majority-making votes intact. And the more the bill got watered down, the more Republicans would jump ship and the more Democrats Biden anticipated would get onboard, leading to an even further weakening of the bill.
It also helped that Biden ignored the urge to get in front of the cameras to stir up his Democratic base and inflame Republicans. McCarthy and his allies were constantly on cable news selling their misleading pitch about controlling government spending by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Biden caught flak from Democrats for not returning fire. But bills aren’t negotiated on CNN; they’re hashed out behind closed doors, where trust rather than toxicity is the coin of the realm. Peter Baker of the New York Times captures this dynamic pretty well:
In the days since he struck a deal to avoid a national default, President Biden has steadfastly refused to boast about what he got as part of the agreement.
“Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote?” he asked reporters at one point, referring to himself in the third person. “You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
The president calculated that the more he bragged that the deal was a good one for his side, the more he would inflame Republicans on the other side, jeopardizing the chances of pushing the agreement through the narrowly divided House. His reticence stood in striking contrast to his negotiating partner, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has been running all over the Capitol in recent days asserting that the deal was a “historic” victory for fiscal conservatives.
While Mr. Biden knew that would aggravate progressives in his own party, he gambled that he could keep enough of them in line without public chest-beating and figured that it was more important to let Mr. McCarthy claim the win to minimize a revolt on the hard right that could put his speakership in danger. Indeed, in private briefing calls following the agreement, White House officials told Democratic allies that they believed they got a good deal, but urged their surrogates not to say that publicly lest it upset the delicate balance.
I can just imagine Biden at some point telling McCarthy as the scope of the GOP bill narrowed that if the Speaker can sell FOX Nation on the mythical link between the debt ceiling and future government spending, he can surely tell them whatever bill they ended up with is a historic win for conservatives, too.
So maybe it helps to have a president who’s 80 years old and has been around the legislative block a few times. And maybe it helps, too, that at 80 years old, Biden is self-assured enough to know he doesn’t need to win a counterproductive messaging war on an hour-by-hour basis. If anything, he’s probably taking comfort in the fact he managed the berserk, came out of the episode rather unscathed, and can now refocus on more serious (and more real) matters of governance.
Debt ceiling showdowns are silly, contrived games with very serious stakes. McCarthy and McHenry seem thrilled to have walked away from the ordeal with a participation trophy. Biden has won his fair share of those and probably threw this latest one in the trash.
Further Reading: “Biden’s Debt Deal Strategy: Win in the Fine Print” by Jim Tankersley of the New York Times (“In pursuit of an agreement, the Biden team was willing to give Republicans victory after victory on political talking points, which they realized Mr. McCarthy needed to sell the bill to his conference. They let Mr. McCarthy’s team claim in the end that the deal included deep spending cuts, huge clawbacks of unspent federal coronavirus relief money and stringent work requirements for recipients of federal aid. But in the details of the text and the many side deals that accompanied it, the Biden team wanted to win on substance. With one large exception — a $20 billion cut in enforcement funding for the Internal Revenue Service — they believe they did. The way administration officials see it, the full final agreement’s spending cuts are nothing worse than they would have expected in regular appropriations bills passed by a divided Congress.”
Signals and Noise
Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic about how the debt ceiling showdown is really a “collision between the brown and the gray,” with Republicans protecting programs that benefit the elderly while aiming to cut programs that benefit young (and increasingly diverse) Americans.
Could this bipartisan bill sponsored by Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) offer a way forward on immigration? (From the Washington Post: “The result is a roughly 500-page bill called the Dignity Act that, among other things, would provide billions of dollars for border security measures, create pathways to citizenship for some undocumented migrants already in the United States, update the legal immigration process, and establish ‘humanitarian campuses’ on the U.S. border that would process asylum claims in 60 days.”)
CNN is reporting on a potential smoking gun in the Don Trump classified documents investigation: A recording in which Trump admits he kept a classified document concerning plans to attack Iran along with an acknowledgment he was limited in his ability as president to declassify such documents.
Charlie Sykes, the morning of Ron DeSantis’s campaign kick-off with Elon Musk on Twitter: “In 2023, a major candidate for president of the United States is paying court to an erratic, decompensating, narcissistic, endlessly needy, petulant man-child, who has spent the past few months posting poop emojis, taking counsel from someone called catturd, and destroying the social media platform he bought on a whim.”
Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney got a primary challenger. For his part, Romney has not announced whether or not he plans to run for re-election in 2024.
The brother of crackpot Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville has distanced himself from the legislator in response to the senator’s promotion of “racial stereotypes [and] white supremacy.”
“I don’t want reality.”—Republican Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin during a Senate hearing as he hectored a committee witness discussing the topic of race, education, and child care. The comment drew a side-eyed glance from, of all people, Sen. Tommy Tuberville. An unknown Democratic senator also chimed in with, “Got it on tape.”
“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control, and I was there at the counter and went to pay for it, and the price was very, very high… I said, ‘It’s cheaper to have a kid.’ And I left it there, and now I have my third son.”—Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was laughed at by Democrats when she was presiding over the House and called for “decorum.”
Let’s stay in Georgia. Here’s the newly-elected Republican chair of the 1st congressional district in Georgia on something called the “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” broadcast: “The people that defend the globe don’t know anything about the globe. If they knew a tenth of what Matt and I know about the globe they would be Flat Earthers….All the globes, everywhere. I turn on the TV, there’s globes in the background … Everywhere there’s globes. You see them all the time, it’s constant. My children will be like ‘Mama, globe, globe, globe, globe’ — they’re everywhere. That’s what they do, to brainwash. For me if it’s not a conspiracy. If it is real, why are you pushing so hard everywhere I go? Every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere. Every movie, every TV show, news media — why? More and more I’m like, it doesn’t make sense.”
Hey, look: It’s a globe.
South Carolina has passed a six-week abortion ban. Meanwhile, Nevada’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo signed a bill codifying an executive order issued by his Democratic predecessor protecting women travelling from out-of-state seeking abortions in Nevada.
The majority of bills passed in state legislatures since the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last year have expanded rather than limited access to guns.
The Democratic-led Minnesota state government, however, accomplished everything it set out to do. Here’s a picture of the Democratic wish list posted by Gov. Tim Walz:
From MinnPost: “Democrats codified abortion rights, paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, drivers licenses for undocumented residents, restoration of voting rights for people when they are released from prison or jail, wider voting access, one-time rebates, a tax credit aimed at low-income parents with kids, and a $1 billion investment in affordable housing including for rental assistance. Also adopted were background checks for private gun transfers and a red-flag warning system to take guns from people deemed by a judge to be a threat to themselves or others. DFL lawmakers banned conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, required a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, adopted a new reading curricula based on phonics, passed a massive $2.58 billion capital construction package and, at the insistence of Republicans, a $300 million emergency infusion of money to nursing homes.”
Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman of the Washington Post look at the backlash in deep red Hernando County, Florida, to the investigation of a fifth-grade teacher for showing the animated Disney film Strange World to her elementary class. At least fifty teachers in the county have resigned following the incident, with many citing a hostile work environment for doing so.
A federal judge has overturned Tennessee’s law restricting drag shows in the state.
After a Texas House panel heard testimony from investigators alleging Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton broke state laws, misspent office funds, and abused the power of his office to aid a friend and political donor, the Republican-led Texas House voted overwhelmingly to impeach Paxton.
If you know nothing about Democratic Virginia state Senator Joseph Morrissey, know that the guy is a creep.
Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is under scrutiny (again) for meeting with businessmen under investigation by the federal government.
Joey Flechas, Jay Weaver, and Sarah Blaskey of the Miami Herald report Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez took $170,000 from a real estate developer looking to cut through red tape slowing down one of his projects.
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to eighteen years in jail for his role in the 1/6 insurrection. In pre-sentencing comments, Rhodes described himself as a “political prisoner” and backed Donald Trump for president.
Wanna know who just got sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison? This guy:
Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri—you know, the dude who stoked the mob on 1/6 before Capitol security cameras caught him fleeing the mob he sicced on himself, the guy who told Ketanji Brown Jackson that a woman was someone who “can give birth to a child, a mother…someone who has a uterus” (none of which is technically true)—has written a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. Monica Hesse of the Washington Post reviewed it and found that because Hawley offers no biological requirement for “manhood,” he has actually written a gender-neutral book about how anyone can meet his (very old-school Christian) definition of a man.
The right-wing think tank the Family Research Council led by Tony Perkins has for tax purposes with the IRS declared itself a church. But as Andrea Suozzo of ProPublica discovered, when you call its headquarters and ask what time services start, they tell you they don’t hold services.
If someone offered to sell you $99.99 worth of “Trump Bucks” that you could redeem for $10,000 once Trump reclaimed the presidency, would you think that’s a scam? A lot of diehard Trump supporters are willing to bite…and losing thousands of dollars in the process. (UPDATE: Now those “Trump Bucks” websites have been taken down.)
By Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic: “Twitter is a Far-Right Social Network”
Nate Cohn of the New York Times finds evidence millennials (like every other demographic cohort) are shifting to the right.
A deal is in place to save the Colorado River, which has been vanishing in recent decades.
According to the Federal Reserve, the number of Americans who said they were “doing at least OK financially” fell sharply from 78% to 73% last year. Thirty-five percent said they were worse off financially.
Low-income workers saw their pay increase significantly during the pandemic, which actually narrowed the income gap. Now that government pandemic relief programs are ending and the Fed raises interest rates, those gains are in jeopardy.
A University of Chicago study found that the student loan moratorium resulted in those with student loans taking on more debt and did not reduce delinquencies on other debts.
I’ll just bring your attention to this article by Chloe Xiang and Matthew Gault of Vice and let you make of it what you will: “USAF Official Says He ‘Misspoke’ About AI Drone Killing Human Operator in Simulated Test: The Air Force's Chief of AI Test and Operations initially said an AI drone ‘killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.’”
Ava Sasani of the New York Times reviews the tenuous legal status of the Afghan women who served in an all-female platoon alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan and are currently seeking asylum in the United States.
Anna Nemtsova writes for The Atlantic about the repercussions within Russia stemming from the recent incursions launched from Ukraine into Russian territory.
Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group has effectively taken control of the Central African Republic, a poor nation they are stripping of its gold and diamonds in order to fund Russia’s and Wagner’s military operations in Ukraine.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has promised “nuclear weapons for everyone” if they join the alliance between Russia and Belarus.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a nationalist leader with autocratic inclinations who has played his neighbors and allies in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East off one another while harboring dreams of reclaiming the international prestige his nation once claimed as the center of the Ottoman Empire—won re-election this past week with 52% of the vote despite a deteriorating Turkish economy. Erdoğan is set to become the predominantly Muslim nation’s longest-serving leader.
Uganda has passed a law that would sentence those convicted of engaging in same-sex activity to life in prison and, in some cases, death.
And now maybe something you’ve never thought about: What if someone here on Earth picked up a signal from extra-terrestrial aliens? What would we do? Sigal Samuel at Vox investigates the issue. (It turns out the United Nations has a file on it.)
Top 5 Records Music Review: Seven Psalms by Paul Simon
In 1965, Roger Daltrey of the Who sang, “I hope I die before I get old”. A year earlier, Jack Weinberg, a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, advised activists not to trust anyone over thirty. Both quotes became something like a creed for the youth movement that would sweep across the United States in the 1960s.
When the remixed version of “The Sound of Silence” was released in 1965, its writer, Paul Simon, was not quite twenty-four years old. In other words, young enough to trust. The year before, he and Art Garfunkel, his musical collaborator, had released their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., to little buzz. Only after producer Tom Wilson added drums and electric instrumentation to “The Sound of Silence” did the kids take notice, sending the song to #1 and turning Simon and Garfunkel into the voices of a generation.
Simon released his self-titled debut album in 1972 when he was thirty years old and, supposedly, no longer trustworthy. Yet Baby Boomers and their musical idols had discovered by then that the advance of time is relentless and that they needed to revise their notions about age and expiration dates. Simon for his part became one of the most accomplished artists of the 1970s. (For what it’s worth, while Simon and Garfunkel created some of the most iconic songs of the 1960s, I prefer Simon’s solo work.) Simon faded toward the end of the decade but revitalized his career in 1986 just shy of his 45th birthday with Graceland. Like a number of other rock stars of the 1960s and 1970s, he found a way to hold on during the MTV era.
But the 1990s turned nearly every musical icon of the 1960s not named Neil Young into an artifact. By this point, the alternative rock crowd regarded any new record a classic rocker released as a cash grab aimed at Baby Boomers with Deadhead stickers on their Cadillacs. It was also hard for the 60s generation to carry the countercultural torch when one of their own lived in the White House. Regardless, no one was going to humor classic rock artists anymore: They were, to quote the title of a Paul Simon song from You’re the One, an album he released in 2000 one year shy of his 60th birthday, “Old”.
It’s unfair to assume an artist can’t create meaningful work in the years beyond their youth. Maybe we base that assumption on the belief that great art should present us with something new and that only a new voice representing a new perspective can bring that into the world. That forecloses the possibility, however, of an older artist mastering their craft and producing something that, if not necessarily novel (although why can’t an older artist create something novel?) is still sublime or poignant. I’ve long wanted to rummage through the catalogs of “over the hill” artists to discover the overlooked gems, the songs or albums that would compare favorably or even surpass in quality the beloved work of their so-called prime.
There are a few rock and roll artists, however, who have managed to refute the idea that rock musicians cannot consistently make vital music beyond their prime creative years. Although they both experienced creative lulls, the two artists who immediately spring to mind are Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Another who has done this, although to less fanfare, is Paul Simon. Simon has been less prolific than Dylan and Springsteen, but the three albums of original material he’s released over the past twenty years—Surprise (2006, produced by Brian Eno), So Beautiful or So What (2011), and Stranger to Stranger (2016)—are not only of consistently high quality but compare in quality to the beloved masterworks Simon recorded in the 1970s and 1980s. If I had to give up every Paul Simon album but one, I’d keep his greatest hits comp, but if I could only keep a studio album, it would probably be either Surprise or So Beautiful… (although maybe I’d hang on to There Goes Rhymin’ Simon just for the three-and-a-half minutes of “Kodachrome”. The irony.)
Simon, who will turn 82 this year, is out with a new album titled Seven Psalms, and while it’s not as adventurous as his previous three records, it may serve as an official coda for his career. (Simon has retired from touring and has considered retiring from recording as well.) Seven Psalms is a thirty-three minute album consisting of seven acoustic guitar songs on one unsegmented track. You should always listen to an album in one setting, but this one demands it. It is essentially a half-hour long meditation on what Simon calls in the opening line “the great migration,” or the inevitable passage from life into death. He does not seem preoccupied with the mystery that awaits him. Instead, he is more concerned with getting this life right before his time is up.
The first song on Seven Psalms is titled “The Lord”, who is not some entity awaiting him in an afterlife. The Lord is instead all around him: The Lord is his “engineer”, “a virgin forest”, “a forest ranger”, “a meal for the poorest of the poor”, “the ocean rising”, “the Covid virus”, “a terrible swift sword”. Later, the Lord is a “personal joke”, his “reflection in a window”, his “record producer”, “the music I hear” and the “train I ride on”. God isn’t sitting on a cloud passing judgment on our deeds and keeping score in a ledger but instead an awe-inspiring deity Simon encounters and interacts with on a regular basis. We live our lives in the midst of the divine. Death threatens to deprive us of that relationship. So how do we live now? How do we get that relationship right?
Well, we can love one another, which Simon captures in the beautiful simile “love is like a braid”. But he also seeks forgiveness for the times he disrespected the sacred surrounding him. Simon looks back on his life and finds a young guitar man who has blazed a “trail of volcanoes.” This 82-year journey he’s been on—not only from place to place but from year to year—has left behind so much damage, severed so many links to the divine. At one point he equates the Lord with this “path I slip and slide on.” That’s a reference, of course, to his 1977 single “Slip Slidin’ Away” (“You know the nearer your destination/ The more you’re slip slidin’ away”). It is troubling to think that as we age and approach our final destination that a lifetime of work and deeds has only distanced us from God.
To fully appreciate Seven Psalms, it’s worth refamiliarizing oneself with Simon’s catalog. The album is brief but dotted with lyrical callbacks to songs like “Homeward Bound”, “Mother and Child Reunion”, “Loves Me Like a Rock”, “St. Judy’s Comet”, and “Graceland”. But absent that, just remember the great theme running throughout Simon’s work: The wisdom of innocence. It’s a theme that originated in the 1960s as the “wisdom of youth,” with two wide-eyed college boys stepping into a world of injustice and war with pure hearts and angelic voices to bridge the generation gap, find the America of its ideals, and rescue Katharine Ross from a bad marriage. But by the time the 1960s ended, Simon had grown “old,” so he had to detach the virtue of youth from a numerical value and landed on “innocence.” Innocence was pure, unfiltered, and uncompromised. It was honest, fun, and unpretentious, carefree even. It was the spirit of youth.
Simon’s music argues the best way to approach and serve the world—which, on Seven Psalms, is permeated by God—is as an innocent. To approach the world as an innocent means we can still be moved on a day-to-day basis by a sense of wonder and that our sense of morality is reduced to basic, uncomplicated precepts. Problems arise (and we grow distant from God) when we lose that innocence: When we take the world around us for granted and begin using it to serve our ambitions, or when we begin to accept and live with moral compromise.
To live a better life and mend that relationship with God, we need to return to innocence. This is why so many of Simon’s songs fondly recall the past and delight in childhood. It isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but the notion we can find something wise and unadulterated there. It’s also why Simon is always singing about going home (not the home we escaped because it was dull and constraining, but the home we explored as kids and that nurtured us) and stepping out into a wider world that can still dazzle those who have yet to discover it. Simon’s catalog is a tribute to the musical sounds he encountered in his innocence: The country, blues, and gospel music he found as a kid on the radio dial; the doo-wop he heard on the streets of New York; and the sounds of Jamaica, South Africa, and Brazil he would come across later in life. Unlike his peers, who often invest these styles of music with totemic power, Simon uses them to transport both artist and listener to simpler, more joyful, and more wondrous times and places.
One of Simon’s greatest gifts is his ability to convey with the sound of his voice alone the fine line between a life of peace and contentment and a life of melancholy and jadedness. His songs are not grand dramas about the Fall of Man but how we ever so slowly lose touch with the transcendent as the years strip away our innocence. As an octogenarian, Paul Simon could have recorded an album with the answers to all of life’s great questions. Instead, Seven Psalms finds its creator trying to shed a lifetime’s worth of baggage and encouraging his listeners to do the same. In this way, the point of this album isn’t to stare down death but to offer advice to the living. As Simon sings in the album’s concluding lines:
Children! get ready
It’s time to come home
Amen
Exit Music: “The Best” by Tina Turner (1989, Foreign Affair)
It may seem odd that one of the most iconic musical artists of the twentieth century does not possess one of the all-time great catalogs of recorded music. Do not get me wrong: Tina Turner’s great songs—from the more obscure Chitlin’ Circuit classics she recorded with Ike Turner such as “A Fool in Love” and “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” to the volcanic Phil Spector production “River Deep, Mountain High” to the smoking early-70s records she made with Ike before leaving him (“Workin’ Together”, “Proud Mary”, “Funkier Than a Mosquita’s Tweeter”, “Nutbush City Limits”) to the 4-minute monuments that made her a fixture of the 1980s pop canon (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”, “Better Be Good to Me”, “Private Dancer”, “We Don’t Need Another Hero [Thunderdome]”, “Typical Male”, “The Best”)—are unquestionably great. It’s just that she does not have a greatest hits album that can compare to other great pop stars of the era like Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Elton John, or Madonna.
Additionally, it’s always felt somewhat distasteful to boil down her status as an icon to that of “survivor.” Of course, it is impossible to tell the story of Tina Turner without mentioning the brutal abuse she suffered at the hands of Ike and how she reclaimed her artistry and became a global superstar in his absence. “Surviving” is a theme of much of her solo work, and for many women who endured what she did, her music remains a source of strength. But watch the recently released documentary about Turner on HBO and note how she reacts at the premiere of the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It when asked for her assessment of the movie. It turns out she didn’t watch the film. She didn’t want to relive all that pain. At that point, those who made and viewed the documentary are implicated in the sin of making Tina Turner’s life story about that pain, of giving Ike a starring role in her story, of reducing what Turner accomplished in her life to a well-worn narrative rather than an artistic achievement.
So let’s set the record straight: When it comes to the great female vocalists of the rock and roll era—the era we’re still in, by the way, as nothing new has come along yet to displace the paradigm—you can draw a triangle with the delicate formalism of Diana Ross at one point, the Sunday morning soul of Aretha Franklin at another, the Saturday night rock of Tina Turner at the other, and arrange every other female singer (and frankly, when it comes to Turner, a few of the men) in relation to those three points on the diagram.
And setting aside the guitar theatrics of the Who’s Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, when it comes to the great, archetypal performers of the rock era—the ones who would define what rock and roll would look like live on stage—it all comes down really to Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Tina Turner. The montage below is Exhibit A:
“But what about Mick Jagger?” you ask. “Surely he belongs in the pantheon.” Well, sure, except Mick Jagger didn’t really become Mick Jagger until the Rolling Stones toured with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in 1966 and Tina taught him how to dance in her dressing room. To watch Jagger strut around the stage is to watch an Englishman paying homage to Tina Turner.
In so many ways, that is her true legacy. It is one that far exceeds her recorded output and that does not hinge on a relationship with an abusive man. It is the story of a woman so original in her artistry that an entire genre of music when performed and sung live is in many ways an homage to her. R.I.P. Tina Turner.