Graceland

Art Presents Meaning in Layers

I remember decades ago when Paul Simon’s Graceland album and the title song arrived on the radio and in our collective imagination. I was a middle school student, learning about Biblical allusions in novels like The Old Man and the Sea. So when I heard the title track, Graceland, I knew he was talking about heaven as much as Elvis’ sprawling mansion. The meaning was layered and I was privy because I had been lucky enough to be taught. I was made savvy by others who were learned in the subtleties of meaning as transmitted through art. I remember explaining this to someone less versed, someone who didn’t know about allusion. It just didn’t register for him. I was sad for the flattened perceptual experience he was living.

A year or so ago, when in mourning, I was focusing on the song Graceland again. The line, ‘losing love is like a window in your heart’ gave me pause. I liked the simile, and yet it was the revelation and the commonality that Simon imparted through his rendering that was and is most operant. He was reaching for truth and we were along for the ride.

‘She comes back to tell me she’s gone. As if I didn’t know that. As if I didn’t know my own bed. As if I never noticed, the way she brushed her hair from her forehead.’

We revel in his use of lyric and music, feelings and unvarnished scenes, to get to the real. To help us slip into ourselves and under our defenses. To embody our most tender inner being, to feel seen. We discover commonality there with the writer and all who choose to withstand and soften through life’s vagaries.

And yet music and art don’t automatically shed light. We can watch a film that propagandizes and distorts. We may read misleading pseudo-history and come to wildly inaccurate conclusions. We too often believe false narratives about pivotal scenes in history and the actors who played upon the world stage. Through art and speech, sound and image, we can be taught or tricked, aroused or sickened, ginned up for war or mollified.

Our capacity to perceive is fallible. See death cults and abusive relationships for context. We can reject the trustworthy and embrace the charlatan. We don’t know what we don’t know. So humbly seeking truth via education is a choice to accept our functional incapacity to learn, to perceive clearly without the intervention of not only experts in a subject but teachers—exemplars of discernment—those who dare us to think, to examine, to wrestle with truth. They challenge our assumptions and show us the stakes.

We must be willing to see the chinks in our perceptual armor, the fizzures where deceptive arguments seep in to court our core wounds. How the algorithm cases the joint. It sizes us up and glamours our prideful egos, luring us to court deception, mapping where we harbor half-truths and false beliefs, where we entertain fallacies that are at once tantalizing and life-threatening. Extinction event catalysts in sheep’s clothing.

So in the school of life, all art is not created equal. Some works free us and others serve us a 1-dimensional script for who we are and will be. Media can feed us generalized narratives about our identity that too many seemingly lap up and wear with pride. I see this most egregiously in radio country music. I have always found it mindless and deeply insulting. Easy tropes about tractors and trucks and other facile identity cues make me shudder. It feels like a Kincaid painting but with barbs—with consequences that would become all too clear as politics shifted and metastasized in the only nation I’ve called home.

I sensed that country music was selling its listeners a soft propaganda—a ready-made script. A hokey caricature of patriotism, regionalism, masculinity, rural life vs city life, American-ness that you can slip into and skip all that useless introspection. No nuance, no search, no layers. Here it is. Plop. Eat your gruel. Whatever I see on the surface is what everything means. No inquiry, no risk and of course, no doubt. No time for nuance and no need to veer into the uncomfortable, the messy or the taboo. No stark encounter with self and shadow. No subtle urging to face our biases, to humanize those different than us. It seems innocuous, but it’s not.

Radio country brainwashes and dumbs-down vast swathes of our population with results that have become all-too apparent in the last 10 years. My disappointment is not that there is such a Nashville machine that churns out fluff for profit—that makes mindless grist and calls it music. Capitalism is like that. I’m incensed that so many consume such tripe so willingly. They wear it like a badge of honor. Coupled with dogmatic religions that asks people to have faith in unseen saviors, too many have become the unwitting pawns of those who would usurp—the highwaymen who would gladly separate us from our sovereignty. These engineers of chaos, of the demise of our American Experiment. The stakes could not be higher.

And yet all is not lost. Our capacity to course-correct may be our saving grace. Our willingness to see past the surface is needed now more than ever. Cynical times led by cynical politicians leads to cynical citizens. We are starting to resemble our counterparts in Russia and other non-free nations. They are wise to the propaganda. They vote and yet they know that this vote is a charade. They are initiated in public deception. We must become so and yet not lose our sense of people power.

We do this by examining, by employing awareness, by seeking understanding. By measuring our capacity for discernment with humility. We must listen to our guts, but assess the conclusions we would jump to with scrutiny. The appreciation of art is part and parcel of the embodiment of discernment. Art presents us information in a fashion that deeply soothes and harshly confronts. It blurs lines and breaks rules as it contorts and swirls and toys with the permutations of meaning. It seeks to meld the ethereal with the mundane, the vulgate and the sacred. Art dissects and scrutinizes. It magnifies what it encounters. It passes judgment and redeems.

Art demands and rewards presence: something that is often in short supply. Humility and beginner’s mind go a long way in our vigilance against misinfortion and disinformation. Let’s investigate the seemingly innocuous streams of entertainment that we digest, for they could be our custom-tailored and bespoke Trojan Horse. True art does not lull us to sleep. It does not typecast. It does not generalize. It beckons: awaken and experience your humanity and alchemize your suffering through rhythm and integrated chaos, not mere spectacle. Witness yourself through the mirror that art and nature provide. Come back to center. Metabolize the detritus. Venture out once more and see the world anew.