James Bennighof's The Words and Music of Paul Simon is part of Praeger's Singer-Songwriter Collection, which includes studies of Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, John Lennon and David Bowie. Bennighof, a professor of music theory at Baylor University in Texas, has published articles on vernacular music in American Music and College Music Symposium. His book is a thoroughgoing analysis of Simon's entire official recording output up to 2006's Surprise, discussed song by song over seven chapters. The book also includes a glossary of musical terms, a selected discography and summaries of Simon's compositional materials and approaches.
Bennighof discusses each of Simon's officially released recordings, subjecting each to a reading as a text comprising music and words. He covers Simon's official oeuvre exhaustively, though it's hard not to imagine that there could be something of value in the many unauthorised recordings of Simon's music that are readily available through trading networks (the website paul-simon.info lists over 150 live and outtake releases). In any case, Bennighof's focus is on Simon's songs as texts. In terms of music, these texts are primarily chord progressions; in terms of lyrics, they are repositories of imagery and narrative. Typically, relationships between lyrics and music are noted as well. Performative details such as vocal and guitar style, orchestration, phrasing, timbre, rhythm are all but ignored. As well, the critical texts associated with the reception history of Simon's music are not dealt with beyond some brief anecdotal points.
Each song is discussed primarily in terms of its chord progression and melody, with lyrics discussed on their own as poetic texts and in conjunction with the music in terms of word-painting. This approach is not dissimilar to some of Wilfrid Mellers' work analysing popular music, for example in his Beatles monograph Twilight of the Gods (1973). The interceding thirty-six years, however, have seen an expansion of the analytical toolkit in the hands of Robert Walser, David Brackett and Philip Tagg, to name only a few. Readers who are familiar with some of this more recent work on popular music may find Bennighof's approach rather outdated.
Perhaps most disastrously for a book that spends so much time talking about musical sounds, no notated examples, diagrams or visual transcriptions of sound of any kind are included. This forces the author to render his discussion in the blow-by-blow style of the undergraduate music student. A typical example is Bennighof's analysis of ‘The Sound of Silence’:
The melodic contour of each verse very clearly supports this pattern of establishment, motion to a climax, and return to a stable idea. The first couplet pairs an arpeggiated A–C–E–D figure with its echo a step lower, G–B–D–C. The motion of the second couplet is then underscored by repeating the arpeggio at a higher level, stretching each time above the top note: C–E–G–A–G … (pp. 9–10)
I find it hard to imagine anyone rushing to their recording of ‘The Sound of Silence’ to confirm the efficacy of Bennighof's analysis, let alone to the roughly 250 recordings that are analysed over the course of the book.
Bennighof makes occasional reference to guitar figurations in Simon's music with some specificity, and this is admirable. He seems to rely primarily on amateur tablature transcriptions found on the Internet for his sources, however, and this sometimes leads to missteps. For example, on p. 29 he refers to a chord in ‘Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall’ as a D thirteenth chord with a suspended fourth over an A bass note and notes its ‘complexity’ and ‘discordant sound’. This chord, better identified as A minor 9th, is not nearly as discordant as its mislabelling would suggest, and Bennighof falls into the trap of marvelling at the complexity of the chord name instead of the chord's sound. The most readable chapter in Bennighof's book follows his many pages of musical and textual analysis. This chapter, oddly titled ‘Identity’, draws some conclusions about Simon's music and attempts to explain the creative process behind Simon's song-writing. The primary structural principle of Simon's music, according to Bennighof, is ‘synthesis’: ‘It is characterised by identifying various musical and textual components and assembling them into a song, rather than routinely beginning with a traditional, fully integrated, tune–text combination and then adding other elements (contrasting sections, interludes, textures, and other details of arranging) to the core ‘song’ idea (p. 162)'. Moreover, ‘assembly’ is the main point of departure. Simon's recordings are comprised of intricate layers of ‘text, instruments, performers, chord sequences, textures, and even styles themselves’ (ibid.).
Whilst this characterisation of Simon's music rings true for much of his later output, such as the well-known Graceland album (1986), it is less convincing as a catch-all description of Simon's music. Furthermore, this description could be true of a number of musicians' work – Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Tricky, Steely Dan, Sting and others come to mind. Bennighof, for all of his analysis, does not adequately explain the appeal of Simon's music nor his distinctive creative ‘voice’.
Even the politically contentious collaborations that Simon undertook with South African and Brazilian musicians (for Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, respectively) are seen as yet another example of Simon using outside sources as ‘a springboard for his own personal explorations’ (p. 109). Bennighof does not acknowledge the academic and popular critique by Louise Meintjes and others of Simon's ‘colonialist’ exploitations of non-Western musicians.
Perhaps the most salient aspect of Bennighof's book is its completeness in terms of dealing with Simon's entire songwriting career up to the time of writing. The energy behind this completist urge might, I would suggest, have been better placed rendering a more meaningful analysis of a smaller section of Simon's work. By discluding any discussion of the wider contexts of Simon's music, Bennighof does an injustice to the richness of that body of work. The Words and Music of Paul Simon is marred most egregiously by its parametric narrowness, its failure to include any reading of Simon's music beyond the most pedestrian musical and literary aspects. That said, Bennighof's book might have use as a reference book on harmonic technique in Paul Simon's music for use in a course on singer-songwriters. As a whole, though, Bennighof's book has little new to say about Paul Simon's words and music.
