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Infidels is prime Dylan, but the master of simple love songs, Paul McCartney, is his own worst enemy on Pipes of Peace (Columbia). After last year's superb Tug of War, McCartney returns to his deep-pile pop and sinks without a trace. Some of this material was apparently intended for Tug of War; it would have been kinder to McCartney's reputation if the stuff had stayed on file. You have to be very good indeed to survive lyrics like "I know I was a crazy fool/ For treating you the way I did/ But something took hold of me/ And I acted like a dustbin lid." There are two collaborations with Michael Jackson, the wonder boy of mainstream soul, that sound peppy only by comparison with the rest of the record, which may be remembered as the album that asked (in Keep Under Cover) the question "What good is butter if you haven't got bread?/ What good is art when it hurts your head?" No headaches here.
Undercover (Rolling Stones/Atlantic) begins with the Rolling Stones doing a kind of ghetto-blaster version of Sympathy for the Devil called Undercover of the Night. Like much of the best Stones stuff, this song is a dance through a nightmare, behind a slick, heavy beat that is unmistakably contemporary and irresistibly funky. The lyrics make scary references to "100,000 disparus lost in the jails in South America" and "The smell of sex/ The smell of suicide." Undercover of the Night launches two sides of grizzly humor, humid sexuality and gut-level rock. The song titles—Too Much Blood, She Was
Hot, Tie You Up (The Pain of Love)—promise the band at its naughtiest and nastiest, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are delighting here in twisting their band's carefully cultivated bad-boy image into a tight knot. All the Way Down takes a typically randy, amoral Stones musical protagonist and sets him up against a woman who is more than just his match. Undercover is a rough-and-tumble reminder that, as Jagger sings in It Must Be Hell, "The strength of darkness still abides."
Like 1981's Tattoo You, it confirms that the Stones, in hearty middle age as a band, are on a fresh roll. "Negotiations and love songs," Paul Simon observes, "are often mistaken for one and the same."
Anyone capable of such a misperception might also pardonably take Simon for the best musical litigator in the business. Hearts and Bones (Warner Bros.), an album of old and lost love, shattered dreams and delicate possibilities, is rueful, mature, self-mocking and hauntingly melodic in a way that is supposed to get rock in trouble: too far from the street, too close to the stage.