When I saw that this set included a two-hour documentary on the album, I wondered whether it would shy away from the issue of Simon's violation of the cultural boycott on South Africa, but to its credit, it doesn't. Graceland was the first many of Simon's fans had heard of South Africa's black music.
"You Can Call Me Al" traces Simon's own arc on his trip to South Africa, beginning in confusion and ending in ecstatic realization- he goes from"far away, in my well-lit home" to, "He sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity/ He says 'amen' and 'hallelujah.'" To have Simon's songs mingling with mbaqanga, township jive, shangaan music, zydeco and chicano rock, all played by their real practitioners, complemented the themes of dislocation, misplaced identity, and the meeting of worlds.
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.
#GRACELAND TAB PAUL SIMON SONGSTER SERIES#
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. 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. So we get songs where the groove came first, and the lyrics long after. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Taken as a whole, the album offers tremendous insight into how we live in our world and how that changes as we get older. Lyrics with sophisticated pop music.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.
The vanguard of the singer-songwriter movement, marrying brainy Much acclaim and success as a solo artist. Studio Recordings 1972-2000 (2004) Remastered īeing one-half of pop's legendary duo Simon & Garfunkel wouldīe enough for most people, but Paul Simon went on to reap just as