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GRACELAND BY PAUL SIMON
by Johnny Black
Paul Simon’s second Grammy-winner focussed international attention on apartheid, and energised the emerging world-music scene.
Graceland may not have contributed directly to the downfall of apartheid but, in retrospect, it’s hard to understand the barrage of criticism Simon attracted from anti-apartheid groups, for working with the South African musicians on this genre-busting album. “Graceland’s instincts were right,” he insists, “and it called into question a lot of thinking, which is good.”
On 29 March 1985, largely because he had heard the track Gumboota, on the South African compilation Gumboots Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, Simon started two weeks of working in Johannesburg with local musicians.
But the big change on Graceland was not that Simon was working with ethnic musicians. His previous solo albums were peppered with exotic international sounds, and even in the days of Simon and Garfunkel, he championed world music long before it became a cause celebre, introducing South American instrumentation on El Condor Pasa.
What made Graceland different was that, in the past, Simon had tended to write songs and then create music tracks for them in the studio, but this time, as he explained, “I thought, I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write this song after the tracks are made.”
This set him off on a journey of discovery in which he learned a great deal simply from observing the unusual, to Western eyes, playing techniques of his South African collaborators. “African guitarists and the bass players were altering what they were playing from verse to verse,” he explains. “Choruses didn't have to always be the same. They could repeat, they could use material from a verse, they could introduce some new lyric idea and retain elements from one chorus to the next, like in that song Graceland. None of the choruses are exactly symmetrical.”
Happily, the resulting fusion of Western folk-rock with township jive, kwela and mbaqanga styles on Graceland seems to have prompted the re-vitalising of Simon as a songwriter. Tracks like Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes or The Boy In The Bubble, demonstrated a vigour and imagination that had been lacking in his work for some while.
The first flash of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s vocal harmonies in Homeless is a heart-stopper, as are Baghiti Khumalo’s mercurially slithering bass-lines in You Can Call Me Al, but it was Paul Simon’s determination to make the best album he possibly could that elevated it into the highest reaches of the pantheon of classic rock albums.
“When I was working on Graceland,” he has said, “I was thinking, If I don't make this interesting, I will never get my generation to pay attention.’ They are not paying attention any more to records. They were, at a certain point, certainly around the time of Bridge Over Troubled Water, but they no longer look to records to have their lives illuminated. They look to movies or literature.”
Graceland certainly made music relevant again, not just for Simon’s old audience, but for a whole new generation.
(Source : Johnny Black, originally published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2005)
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by Johnny Black
Paul Simon’s second Grammy-winner focussed international attention on apartheid, and energised the emerging world-music scene.
Graceland may not have contributed directly to the downfall of apartheid but, in retrospect, it’s hard to understand the barrage of criticism Simon attracted from anti-apartheid groups, for working with the South African musicians on this genre-busting album. “Graceland’s instincts were right,” he insists, “and it called into question a lot of thinking, which is good.”
On 29 March 1985, largely because he had heard the track Gumboota, on the South African compilation Gumboots Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, Simon started two weeks of working in Johannesburg with local musicians.
But the big change on Graceland was not that Simon was working with ethnic musicians. His previous solo albums were peppered with exotic international sounds, and even in the days of Simon and Garfunkel, he championed world music long before it became a cause celebre, introducing South American instrumentation on El Condor Pasa.
What made Graceland different was that, in the past, Simon had tended to write songs and then create music tracks for them in the studio, but this time, as he explained, “I thought, I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write this song after the tracks are made.”
This set him off on a journey of discovery in which he learned a great deal simply from observing the unusual, to Western eyes, playing techniques of his South African collaborators. “African guitarists and the bass players were altering what they were playing from verse to verse,” he explains. “Choruses didn't have to always be the same. They could repeat, they could use material from a verse, they could introduce some new lyric idea and retain elements from one chorus to the next, like in that song Graceland. None of the choruses are exactly symmetrical.”
Happily, the resulting fusion of Western folk-rock with township jive, kwela and mbaqanga styles on Graceland seems to have prompted the re-vitalising of Simon as a songwriter. Tracks like Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes or The Boy In The Bubble, demonstrated a vigour and imagination that had been lacking in his work for some while.
The first flash of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s vocal harmonies in Homeless is a heart-stopper, as are Baghiti Khumalo’s mercurially slithering bass-lines in You Can Call Me Al, but it was Paul Simon’s determination to make the best album he possibly could that elevated it into the highest reaches of the pantheon of classic rock albums.
“When I was working on Graceland,” he has said, “I was thinking, If I don't make this interesting, I will never get my generation to pay attention.’ They are not paying attention any more to records. They were, at a certain point, certainly around the time of Bridge Over Troubled Water, but they no longer look to records to have their lives illuminated. They look to movies or literature.”
Graceland certainly made music relevant again, not just for Simon’s old audience, but for a whole new generation.
(Source : Johnny Black, originally published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2005)