Two takes on 'Homeless' - Paul Simon, Sizzla do song of the same name

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Paul Simon and Sizzla are some distance apart in age, location and music.

Simon did have more than a stab at reggae though. The live version of Bridge Over Troubled Waters from his 1991 Concert in Central Park has a rockers section. Plus, in 1971, he recorded Mother and Child Reunion in Jamaica, adding that 'yard' track to Cecilia.

Jamaican singer Ghost covered Simon's You Can Call Me Al, a major track from his multi-platinum selling Graceland album. That cover has its critics.

Simon was born in the United States in 1941, 35 years before Miguel Collins - eventually much better known as Sizzla Kalonji - was born in Jamaica.

Paul Simon, as part of the duo with Art Garfunkel, put his musical stock in delicate ballads of the Sounds of Silence mode, playing guitar to their vocals.

Sizzla was rockers all the way from the start, although there have been times when he has successfully veered off the strictly drum and bass path. He has done so with Give Me a Try and Take Me Away and there are times in performance when the musicians put some jazz influences into Black Woman and Child.

What Sizzla and Simon do have in common is the title of a song, Homeless, released much closer together than their birth dates.

Paul Simon's is on his renowned 1986 Graceland album, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Written by Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo leader Joseph Tshabalala, it is very strong on male harmonies.

The refrain, in English, is a personal testimony of being without a place to rest the head:

Homeless, homeless

Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

Homeless, homeless

Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

We are homeless, we are homeless

The moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

And we are homeless, homeless, homeless

The moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

Another section gives an indication of the reason for the homeless state:

Strong wind destroy our homes

Many dead, tonight it could be you

Strong wind, strong wind

Many dead, tonight it could be you

That strong wind could be natural, or the man-made tempest of violence.

There are no thoughts of natural causes in Sizzla's Homeless, made just over a decade after Graceland was released. A classic rockers track, it is a lyrical masterpiece in which Sizzla asks "de ghetto youth dem homeless, who is to be blamed?" He answers the query with "question mark is their surname".

He traces some of it to the political situation, in which the "house of false-have-ment I mean you haven't done a damn/we economical wealth a it oonu nyam/lef' we inna nutten but devastation/an now yu gonna call another election."

Of course, the security forces come into play, where those in power "sen yu police and yu soldiers kill a community clean."

Still, in encouraging the disenfranchised ("mi call upon de ghetto youth dem fi stay strong"), he comes up with a memorably stated observation of ownership:

"Dem nuh have nuh title fi di earth only fi di land."