‘Graceland,’ 25 years on
The creativity and controversy of landmark album won’t die
Parents always tell their kids “the ends don’t justify the means.”
But is that necessarily so? The question becomes a vexing one when dealing with the legacy of Paul Simon’s historic album “Graceland” — a project that employed some questionable means on the way to a happy ending.
It’s a tale so controversial, history has never fully settled it. In fact, the gnarliest stuff from the bottom is about to get a fresh stir.
On Tuesday, Simon’s record company will issue a 25th anniversary “Graceland” package, available as both a double set (with one CD and one DVD), and a super-sized version (with three CDs and one DVD). Both sets include a full-length documentary which, to its credit, doesn’t shrink from the brouhaha that dogged the album in its day. In fact, it forms the film’s central drama.
To get the context right, you have to go back to the era and location of “Graceland’s” initial inspiration: 1980s South Africa. At the time, apartheid defined the country, inspiring a “cultural boycott” by the dissident group the African National Congress. In an attempt to pressure the racist government, the ANC decided to cordon off the country as a way to advertise it as a global pariah. Artists were told not to play or work there under any circumstance.
Simon knew about the boycott, and its political importance, but chose to travel and record there anyway. He now gives as his reason that the timelessness and freedom of music fall outside the petty bounds of passing politics. But when Simon went to his friend Harry Belafonte — whom he respected, and who knew the fraught politics of the country well — Belafonte advised Simon to ask the ANC for a kind of creative pass.
The star decided to ignore that advice and went on his merry way to Johannesburg. While it’s understandable why Simon would be loath to ask any political organization for creative approval, his choice to ignore Belafonte’s advice makes him look sneaky and his bemused reaction to the torrent of subsequent criticism speaks to a star’s insularity and arrogance — qualities that didn’t go over well after the story of the album’s creation got out. While no one (not even the ANC) would think Simon proapartheid, the organization and its worldwide followers did believe he was hurting their cause. And you can see why.
On the other hand, Simon’s employment of many South African musicians gave them much-needed, and much appreciated, work. Better, it got the richness of their township jive sound out to the world, giving people everywhere a human connection to the country, potentially highlighting its pain.
To bookend the documentary, we see Simon back in South Africa meeting with the son of the ANC’s old honcho. Together, they hash out their points of view on the original controversy. While there’s no contemporary tension in their discussion, in the ’80s there would have been plenty. And the disparity matters. The current ease of their rapport whitewashes the pained and heated context of the day.
The documentary’s mellow revisionism also winds up downplaying the other charge leveled at “Graceland”: cultural theft.
In the broadest sense, this accusation now looks uninformed. Without question, Simon brought his own Central Park West W sensibility ibili to the hb beats and chorales of Soweto. Besides, genres don’t belong to a single musician, or even a certain locale. They’re sounds any artist can elaborate on and (potentially) make their own. If that weren’t true, half of the players in America would be liable for copyright suits from the pioneers of country, folk and blues.
Yet, Simon is hardly without blame on the issue of sourcing. Right in the documentary he admits that the hook line of “You Can Call Me Al” — the punchy horn part that made it a smash — was created by guitarist Ray Phiri. Yet that musician’s name appears nowhere in the publishing credits. He does get a “coarranging” acknowledgment, a nice gesture but a generator of zero income.
So how do we prioritize the value and vices of Simon’s disc?
For all the irksome qualities surrounding its creation, “Graceland” ultimately did far more to help than harm. More than any other album, it opened up the Western masses to music not only from the townships but from all of Africa. More, “Graceland” influenced an entire generation of younger, Western musicians to put African musical languages into their own words — acts from Vampire Weekend to Maps & Atlases to Antibalas and beyond.
Though the “Graceland” documentary can’t put the comfy conclusion on the troubling issues it means to, it does help reframe the question we started with.
It turns out your parents were sort of right. Yes, the ends never fully justify the means. But they can go a long way towards explaining them.