In his 1986 review of Paul Simon’s Graceland, the self-proclaimed dean of American rock music critics Robert Christgau wrote:
by leading with “The Boy in the Bubble,” his most acute and visionary song in many years, Simon sets up every resonance. Here the African images—lasers in the jungle, a deathly desert wind, a baby with a baboon heart—are no way merely South African, because this is a song about “the way we look to us all.” Here the terrorist hides his bomb in a baby carriage and wires it to a radio in a world run by “a loose affiliation of millionaires/And billionaires”; here a boy wants to live so much he seals himself off from that world in a plastic bubble. You can hardly tell the horrors from the miracles, they're everywhere. … Simon has done the near impossible—brought off a song about the human condition.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the confluence of critic and composer over this song. Christgau is led by Simon to be incisive: there are times when and places where horrors and miracles abound. The human condition includes both, whether we would wish away the horrors or not.
The confluence of place and person can lead to insights, too. Indeed, there are plenty of horrors to be seen in Ghana: evil, corruption, disease, abject poverty, terrible accidents, and minor hardships galore. But, there are miracles, too: small kindnesses, beauty, sport, flight, joy among friends, charging Vandals, and music, so much music.
Inseparable, for now, they produce “days of ... wonder.”
—Matt
