This song would have been more appropriately released on 'Pop Trash' as I think it goes in the ironic category. 'Too Much Information' was an earlier public revelation that the band realized that the culture industry was perverse but also understood it's place in it: "I hate to bight the hand that feeds...". Even earlier (1984) was Simon's insistence that "it will never happen again" as he protested suggestions by the American music presss that they were on par with the first British Invasion by The Beatles. This hysterical commodification of the band drove them to exhaustion, ending the original lineup. (Bob Dylan and Thom Yorke have had more intense documented backlashes to the press.)
So, I'll get on with it. I think the song is about sexual commodification and the spectacle that is the vehicle of the message - it's about the 'Culture Industry' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry] as coined by Theodore Adorno. The fact that Simon is apparenly getting off with a machine has no consquence as the difference between man/machine is not realized - it doesn't matter. This is seen as an achievement by those selling the product. It is seen as a failure for those searching for nurishment:
"Whether or not we live in a world of simulacra, the term is certainly important in light of how we view media. Media theorists, especially Jean Baudrillard, have been intensely concerned with the concept of the simulation in lieu of its interaction with our notion of the real and the original, revealing in this preoccupation media's identity not as a means of communication, but as a means of representation (the work of art as a reflection of something fundamentally "real"). When media reach a certain advanced state, they integrate themselves into daily "real" experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediated, and the simulation becomes confused with its source. The simulation differs from the image and the icon (and the simulacrum) in the active nature of its representation. What are forged or represented are not likenesses of static entities, but instead the processes of feeling and experiencing themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the simulacrum (provisionally: the image of a simulation) has since been extended theoretically, and in the recent theory exemplified by the work of Baudrillard functions as a catch-all term for systems still operating despite the loss of what previous meaning they had held."
This song would have been more appropriately released on 'Pop Trash' as I think it goes in the ironic category. 'Too Much Information' was an earlier public revelation that the band realized that the culture industry was perverse but also understood it's place in it: "I hate to bight the hand that feeds...". Even earlier (1984) was Simon's insistence that "it will never happen again" as he protested suggestions by the American music presss that they were on par with the first British Invasion by The Beatles. This hysterical commodification of the band drove them to exhaustion, ending the original lineup. (Bob Dylan and Thom Yorke have had more intense documented backlashes to the press.)
So, I'll get on with it. I think the song is about sexual commodification and the spectacle that is the vehicle of the message - it's about the 'Culture Industry' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry] as coined by Theodore Adorno. The fact that Simon is apparenly getting off with a machine has no consquence as the difference between man/machine is not realized - it doesn't matter. This is seen as an achievement by those selling the product. It is seen as a failure for those searching for nurishment:
"Whether or not we live in a world of simulacra, the term is certainly important in light of how we view media. Media theorists, especially Jean Baudrillard, have been intensely concerned with the concept of the simulation in lieu of its interaction with our notion of the real and the original, revealing in this preoccupation media's identity not as a means of communication, but as a means of representation (the work of art as a reflection of something fundamentally "real"). When media reach a certain advanced state, they integrate themselves into daily "real" experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediated, and the simulation becomes confused with its source. The simulation differs from the image and the icon (and the simulacrum) in the active nature of its representation. What are forged or represented are not likenesses of static entities, but instead the processes of feeling and experiencing themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the simulacrum (provisionally: the image of a simulation) has since been extended theoretically, and in the recent theory exemplified by the work of Baudrillard functions as a catch-all term for systems still operating despite the loss of what previous meaning they had held."
[http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm]