Paul Simon loathes feeling groovy.

I'd seen that clip yesterday, and then this morning, when I was out on my sunrise run, the song came up in a "Daily Mix" Spotify had made for me, which I was listening to shuffled:

It's a perfectly happy song from 1966. I loved hearing it in the woods in the golden hour. But Paul wants to disown it. In particular, he hates to sing out "Life, I love you/All is groovy."

I said what I have to say about the word "groovy" back in 2007 — 17 years ago, in a post called "When does a song 'demobilize' a word, so that no serious lyricist can use it again?""

Betraying my age... I think of the mid-60s word "groovy," which spiked in popularity and then became unusable. In 1966, there was "A Groovy Kind of Love" (which was 34 on the Billboard 100 that year -- that great year). When that song came out "groovy" was nearly unknown slang (at least in the U.S.). The following year there was "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," the Paul Simon song that was a hit by Harper's Bizarre. It's 98 on the Billboard 100 for that year. And, the same year, there's also "Groovin'" by the Young Rascals (11th). When these songs were hits, "groovy" had become a word that no one would actually use in conversation. You might hear it on a TV show, but it would be embarrassing to say it unless you clearly conveyed that you were making fun of the word. But this is a big digression, because no song lyric killed "groovy." "Groovy" was killed by its own sudden, extreme popularity....

More than half a century after the word became embarrassing, how can it still be embarrassing? No matter how cynical and jaded you have become, you could still find a way to express some feeling about the feeling of once having felt groovy? You're old, but you can sing about the feeling of being young.

But maybe Paul never felt groovy, and even back when he proclaimed that he did, he was faking it.

 

There's a Wikipedia page for "groovy" now. We are instructed:

The word originated in the jazz culture of the 1920s, in which it referred to the “groove” of a piece of music (its rhythm and “feel”), plus the response felt by its listeners. It can also reference the physical groove of a record in which the pick-up needle runs. Radio disc jockeys would announce playing “good grooves, hot grooves, cool grooves, etc.” when introducing a record about to play.

And I'm reminded that "The 59th Street Bridge Song" was not Simon and Garfunkel's first song using the word "groovy." The B-side of their first hit — "The Sounds of Silence" — was "We've Got a Groovey [sic] Thing Goin'."

So there was always a manic/depressiveness to the Simon and Garfunkel work product. And somehow, even today, it's eating at poor Paul Simon. Who knows why?!