I Know What I Know
wry, detached, comically deadpan
A slippery, satirical cocktail-party exchange dressed up as an Afro-pop groove, in which Paul Simon strings together non-sequiturs and half-flirtations to mock the emptiness of social performance. The song resists resolution on purpose, circling back to a shrugging refrain that admits nothing while insisting on its own certainty.
social performance and vanity emptiness of small talk passivity and resignation surface vs. substance irony and self-deprecation
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator recounts a flirtatious exchange at a party, quoting a woman's odd remarks and his own noncommittal replies; he seems both amused and slightly bewildered by the interaction, an unreliable but self-aware observer of his own social awkwardness.
What happens
The song moves through a sequence of party pickup lines that never quite connect logically -- a woman making baffling observations, the narrator responding with a passive catchphrase instead of real engagement. Rather than building toward a resolution or romantic payoff, it loops the same exchange with slight variations, ending in a chant that dissolves language into repetition, as if the whole encounter was already forgotten the moment it happened.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form built on three nearly identical verses of dialogue, each ending in the narrator's stock evasive line, followed by a refrain that itself refuses development. The song's back half abandons narrative entirely for extended vamping and chant, mirroring the way the conversation trails into meaninglessness -- structure enacting the theme of directionless drift.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator recounts being sized up unfavorably at a party, establishing a comic, self-deprecating tone. The exchange's vague specificity -- a party he supposedly attended, a status he apparently fails to meet -- sets up a world where social value is measured in offhand judgments.
First chorus
“We come and we go”
The chorus generalizes the specific awkward moment into something almost philosophical, but the philosophy is deliberately thin -- a shrug elevated to a mantra, suggesting the narrator processes discomfort by retreating into vague truisms rather than reflection.
Second verse
The woman's comparison of the narrator to money is left uninterpreted and possibly meaningless, and his attempt to press her for clarification is met with the same evasive line as before, reinforcing that neither party is actually communicating.
Third verse
A shift toward more overtly admiring imagery introduces a moment of genuine attraction, but it's immediately undercut by the same repeated question and same non-answer, showing the pattern is inescapable regardless of how the narrator actually feels.
Extended outro/chant
The collapse into looping fragments of the title and hook suggests the conversation, and perhaps the whole persona performing it, dissolving into pure rhythm and habit -- knowledge reduced to a phrase repeated until it loses meaning.
Craft
- refrain as evasion
- The narrator's repeated deflective response functions less as an answer than as a verbal shrug, a device that lets him avoid ever actually engaging with what's said to him.
- non-sequitur dialogue
- The woman's lines don't follow logically from each other or from context, which comically underscores how disconnected and performative party conversation can be.
- repetition/incantation
- The mounting repetition of the title phrase and the 'back of my head' hook, especially in the outro, turns language into pure sound, dramatizing how thought becomes reflex or filler.
- irony
- The insistence on 'knowing' contrasts with a lyric that reveals almost nothing certain, making the title itself a kind of joke about false confidence.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a satire of social ritual: the dialogue's incoherence mirrors the disconnect between what people say at parties and what they mean, while the narrator's catchphrase response reveals his own retreat from vulnerability into practiced detachment. An alternative reading hears it as pure sonic playfulness -- Simon using the words primarily for rhythm and texture against the Ladysmith Black Mambazo-style vocal arrangement, with the 'meaning' intentionally beside the point. Both readings can coexist: the song's content enacts the very emptiness it describes.
Context
This track appears on Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland, recorded with South African musicians and vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose harmonies anchor the song's back half. Simon has described much of Graceland's lyric writing as improvisatory, built around the grooves the musicians created, which fits this song's loose, associative dialogue and its drift into wordless vocal repetition.
Listen for
- the call-and-response between Simon's lead vocal and the background harmonies in the outro
- how the same evasive refrain line recurs verbatim after each mismatched exchange
- the shift from narrative verses into pure rhythmic chant in the song's second half
- the deadpan delivery that keeps the absurd dialogue from tipping into overt comedy
About Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, known for his solo work and his collaborations with Art Garfunkel. He and Garfunkel, whom he met in elementary school in 1953, came to prominence in the 1960s as Simon & Garfunkel.
b. 1941 / United States
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