FEATURE:
Childhood Treasures: Albums That Impacted Me
Paul Simon - Graceland
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THIS is quite timely…
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul Simon in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Deborah Feingold
as Paul Simon’s seventh solo studio album, Graceland, turns thirty-five ion 25th August. It is definitely one of my favourite albums. In terms of the albums that were important to me as a child, Graceland is right near the top. It is a magnificent work that I still listen to a lot. There was quite a lot of controversy surrounding Graceland when it came out. I will explore that more in a bit. I adore how accessible the album is - even though there are South African musicians and sounds many of us are not be familiar with. Graceland arrived at a time when there was some commercial and personal struggle for Simon. Wikipedia explains more:
“In the early 1980s, Simon's relationship with his former musical partner Art Garfunkel had deteriorated, his marriage to actress Carrie Fisher had collapsed, and his previous record, Hearts and Bones (1983), had been a commercial failure. In 1984, after a period of depression, Simon became fascinated by a bootleg cassette of mbaqanga, South African street music. He and Halee visited Johannesburg, where they spent two weeks recording with South African musicians. Further recordings were held in the United States, with guest musicians including Linda Ronstadt, the Everly Brothers, Louisiana band Good Rockin' Dopsie and the Twisters, and Mexican-American band Los Lobos”.
There are few albums as important to me than Paul Simon’s Graceland. It brings back so many memories and transports me to some fascinating places. The musicianship and songwriting is so rich and deep that every spin reveals something new!
I want to bring in a couple of reviews for Graceland. Despite some condemnation when it was released, Graceland has received hugely positive reviews. It is considered to be one of the greatest albums ever released. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“With Graceland, Paul Simon hit on the idea of combining his always perceptive songwriting with the little-heard mbaqanga music of South Africa, creating a fascinating hybrid that re-enchanted his old audience and earned him a new one. It is true that the South African angle (including its controversial aspect during the apartheid days) was a powerful marketing tool and that the catchy music succeeded in presenting listeners with that magical combination: something they'd never heard before that nevertheless sounded familiar. As eclectic as any record Simon had made, it also delved into zydeco and conjunto-flavored rock & roll while marking a surprising new lyrical approach (presaged on some songs on Hearts and Bones); for the most part, Simon abandoned a linear, narrative approach to his words, instead drawing highly poetic ("Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"), abstract ("The Boy in the Bubble"), and satiric ("I Know What I Know") portraits of modern life, often charged by striking images and turns of phrase torn from the headlines or overheard in contemporary speech. An enormously successful record, Graceland became the standard against which subsequent musical experiments by major artists were measured”.
Just before wrapping up, there is a review from Pitchfork . They assessed the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the album in 2012. It is compelling and really intriguing reading the entire thing. For those who do not know much about the history of Graceland, it is a must-read. Pitchfork provide some story behind Graceland:
“As I prepared to review the 25th Anniversary Edition of Paul Simon's Graceland, I thought a lot about what the album means to me. It's a more complicated question than it seems. This is an album that's sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and was vigorously protested in certain quarters on its release. It has sat at the center of arguments about cultural exchange, cultural imperialism, and whether Simon was right to skirt the United Nations' cultural boycott of South Africa in order to record with black musicians from that country-- arguments that remain part of the record's story even as the tragedy of apartheid fades further from the headlines.
As unignorable as the context of the record is, there's no doubt in my mind that its songs transcend the context as listening experiences. These songs are astute and exciting, spit-shined with the gloss of production that bears a lot of hallmarks of the era but somehow has refused to age. Taken as a whole, the album offers tremendous insight into how we live in our world and how that changes as we get older.
The stories Simon tells on Graceland wouldn't have been told without the collaboration of the mostly South African musicians he worked with on the record. Their music sparked Simon's imagination after the commercial disappointment of 1983's Hearts and Bones, and the jam sessions he recorded with them in South Africa gave rise to all but a few of these songs. Simon learned to write differently by homing in on the ways guitarist Chikapa "Ray" Phiri varied his playing from verse to verse, and by grounding his vocal melodies on the basslines of Bagithi Khumalo. Khumalo's playing has such fluency and personality that, at least on the five songs he's a part of, this is nearly as much his record as anyone else's. On the brief disc of outtakes included in this set, there's a version of "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" that's stripped down to just vocals and bass, and his line so completely frames the song (rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically) that the other elements of the album version's arrangement are barely missed.
So we get songs where the groove came first, and the lyrics long after. Simon considered writing political songs about apartheid but quickly concluded that he wasn't very good at it and owed it to the other musicians involved to stick to his strengths. Still, the album's opening song, "The Boy in the Bubble", is a thriller that ties together threads of technological progress, medicine, terrorism, surveillance, pop music, inequality, and superstition with little more than a series of sentence fragments, all tossed off in the same deadpan delivery. The song sets a monumental stage on which the small dramas and comedies of the other songs can play out, and it also establishes the record's unsettled tone-- out of all these songs, only "That Was Your Mother" is sung from a settled place, and even that one is a reminiscence about itinerant life.
But more than Simon's single-minded devotion to his art and Tambo's ideological politics, the experience surrounding this album is best conveyed by the musicians who made it. They were violating the boycott, too, just by participating in a dialogue with non-South African musicians, and there's a moment where Ray Phiri describes a meeting he was called to in London with African National Congress officials while touring to support the album that speaks volumes. The ANC officials told Phiri that he was violating the boycott and had to go home, and his response was that he was already a victim of apartheid, and to force him to go home would make him a victim twice. In the end, Simon's assertion that Graceland helped put an emotional, human face on black South Africans for millions of people around the world doesn't seem off the mark. This set also comes with a DVD of the concert Simon and these musicians played with South African exiles Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1987, and the joy visible on stage and in the audience certainly speaks to that.
It's easy to overstate what Graceland was. It wasn't the first world-music album, as some critics claim. But it was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations”.
I hope that there is celebration and new investigation of Graceland after thirty-five years. Various controversies have plagued the album - though I don’t think any really tarnish one’s enjoyment of it. Asa we discover from this NME article from 2012, Paul Simon spoke of having no regrets recording Graceland in South Africa:
“Paul Simon has insisted that he was no regrets over the recording of his album ‘Graceland’ in South Africa.
The folk legend was widely criticised for travelling to the country and making the 1986 with South African musicians, for effectively breaking the cultural boycott of the country due to its racist Apartheid regime.
Although the album was a smash hit and is now credited with bringing local music to the a global audience, he was also censured at the time by the African National Congress, who implied that he was supporting the regime. The controversy is documented in new film Under African Skies, which marks the 25th anniversary of the album.
Speaking at a screening as part of the Sundance Festival in London yesterday (April 26), Simon was asked whether he has any regrets of his actions. He replied: “As for regrets, no I don’t have any regrets because it’s a happy ending. Would I have done things differently? Perhaps. If anybody had come to me and said, during the recording or in the 16 months between the recording and the release of the record anybody from the ANC had come and said ‘we don’t want you to do this’, or ‘we wish you would make some sort of statement supporting us’ I would have been very happy to do so”.
If you are unfamiliar with Graceland, then go and check it out. It was a breakthrough and eye-opener when I was a child. I would say, behind Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside, it is my favourite album. Ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to mark and recognise an album that has impacted so many people. As a collection of songs, there are few other records that match it. Graceland transcends any controversial and criticism. It helped popularise African Rock in the West; some have viewed it as a bridge between cultures and worlds. It is a magnificent album that I will love…
ALL of my life.