Paul Simon's 'Graceland'

obviously ladysmith black mambazo would have had a very different, way less succesful career without him. it did much to put 'world music' on the cd players and coffee tables of homes across middle engerland.

i dont like that record as a whole much, the one before (hearts and bones) and the one after (rhythm of the saints) especially are like waaaaaaay under-rated and fantastic. it has it's moments.

i was made to study graceland for GCSE music 4 years after it had been released which can't have helped.

The real beef was that he was breaking the UN cultural embargo of South Africa at a time when apartheid was at it's height, and when political protest at it in the west was coming to a head. Doing so, he maybe didn't give explicit credence to Botha's regime but gave the impression of normalcy at a time when it was anything but.

I remember at the time, Rhythm of the Saints got a very good response, but for some reason nobody talks about it now. I also think it's a much better record than Graceland.

Nearly 20 years later on, Ladysmith Black Mambazo's gotten a fair share of props. Clarify the problem with the album that got the spotlight shining in their direction beyond snarky one-liners, I'm interested.

hey geir, check allmusic. in the crucial cases, those 'backing musicians' got publishing. if you're so indignant, go learn their names.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=CASS70305221425&sql=Al68e4j470way

and here: http://onyx.he.net/~hotmoves/LIC/dylan/ds2.html
However, in 1986 he was temporarily blacklisted by the African National Congress and United Nations for breaking the apartheid boycott of South Africa with "Graceland," which was inspired by South Africa dance music and featured the South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. But the album was both a critical and popular success, and received the Grammy for 1988 record of the year. More controversy hovered over his short-lived 1998 Broadway musical "Capeman," based on a '50s New York Puerto Rican gang member.

Discuss....

The colonialist narrative is almost a potent as 'Buena Vista Social Club' - white entrepreneur 'discovers' long lost primitive music, conspicuously coded as 'exotic' and 'Other'? Fetishistic to say the least.

I only with he had continued making "traditional" Paul Simon albums. "Hearts And Bones" was his best ever, and he has yet to record a proper followup that is mainly the work of Paul Simon and not just Paul Simon trying to show some talented ethnic musicians to the world.

what if you don't care about the coding? I mean, is the music bad?

I lean towards the former, since I cannot get the songs out of my head (in a good way) without even listening to the freakin' album.

The whole album's good, and the best songs are way better than good.

You're the one saying 'primitive', 'exotic' and 'other', buddy! I don't think that's how the record is received. What has fetishism got to do with it anyway?

At this distance, the album is both a classic and overrated. There is an awful lot of filler on the second side. But the first six songs are among the best Simon has ever written, musically and lyrically. Boy and Graceland, especially, have fabulous lyrics, and Diamonds remains stunningly pretty. Nothing on Rhythm of the Saints or Hearts and Bones -- both of which I like a lot -- really comes close to those.

The colonialism charge is completely misplaced. This was totally different than, say, Joni Mitchell's Jungle Line, where she recorded over loops of field recordings of African drums, and used those sounds as a metaphor for mystery, darkness, man's primitive nature, primal truth, etc. Simon was inspired by a new kind of music he heard, but he was never using it in an objectified way. His use of township jive for hipster New York narratives emphasized the sophistication and (gulp) universality of the music, not its exoticism. He was using African music much the way Kurt Weill used blues in Mahagonny, or Mahler used Chinese music in Das Lied von der Erde, or Cheb Khaled used Irish music in Abdul Qadr, or David Byrne uses Brazilian music all the time, or, for that matter, all of alt-country: acts of cross-cultural engagement and respect, not appropriation.

And, just to make things clear to those who were not around then, Simon bent over backwards to credit his African collaborators at the time. Not just Ladysmith Black Mambazo, but also especially Ray Phiri (guitar) and Baghiti Khumalo (bass), both of whom also contributed to Rhythm of the Saints and toured with Simon for years. But there was never any question that these were Paul Simon songs (except for the one song that was recorded over a pre-existing track). That is part of what gave the project its strangeness and excitement.

My mom briefly dated a guy who was very into Brothers in Arms. That might be a partial explanation of my hatred of Dire Straits. (The rest, of course, is explained by their hideous music.)

i think my dad's primary '80s albums as of 1988 were Graceland, Brothers In Arms, and Winwood's Roll With It.

idk how you felt about it but the entire album kind of hinted at this mysterious life of adults.

oh yes! all the little notes about divorcee life, losing love being like a window in your heart, etc etc. I didn't understand ANY of it but I pretended like I did.

100% - I mean meeting someone who had recently been given a Fulbright at the cinematographer’s party, cmon

Funny to read all the above because my parents never played music in the car but i have the exact parallel memory of our living room, where my dad occasionally put on classical music but my mom had Geaceland in constant rotation with Beatles, Joni Mitchell and not much else

xps to pgwp about the word Graceland itself, I definitely shared that experience and I do think it’s intentional on Simon’s part, he always had an amazing talent for finding the latent beauty in familiar words and phrases. While the song “Graceland” is nominally about a pilgrimage to Memphis Tennessee, I have always thought of both it and the album as being about the search for a “Land of Grace” and think that’s clearly intentional

yeah for sure hes doing something to the name universalizing it the south african music the medieval looking warrior on the cover the desperate people in the song it all cooks down to something bigger than elvis house, but maybe elvis house is pretty big too, tho as we all know people are always surprised at how small it is

who am i to blow against the wind, diamonds on the soles of his shoes, hes coining classic phrases here they shouldve caught on

When I was a kid my parents played this album on cassette on car journeys, and I was convinced that Graceland must be the afterlife.

When I told them and they said it was Elvis' house I was disappointed.

Similarly, I was certain for a while that Bob Marley didn't shoot the deputy because he WAS the deputy.

ha those are good ones, and obviously completely valid

for years and years before i knew it was the brand name for those steel resonator guitars, i thought "shining like a national guitar" was just an evocative turn of phrase

lol same

omg i am so glad it wasn't just me!~

same story here, and I'm gonna go forward assuming that Simon was willing it into evocative then of phrase status

Ditto on all fronts. Damn did he really coin “who am I to blow against the wind”, the man was really firing on all cylinders.

I saw him earlier this year, and when he encored with "The Sound of Silence," I was like: this guy came up with "hello darkness, my old friend"!!

for years and years before i knew it was the brand name for those steel resonator guitars, i thought "shining like a national guitar" was just an evocative turn of phrase

― call all destroyer, Thursday, August 28, 2025 6:13 PM (three hours ago)

I always thought the lyric was a reference to this which came out the year before:

https://i.imgur.com/pN7MRf2.png

https://i.imgur.com/pN7MRf2.png

having not seen it in years after it being omnipresent through my childhood can i just say, dire straits, what a shitty album cover

True of all their records tbf

the one graceland fact that matters: "The names in the song came from an incident at a party that Simon went to with his then-wife Peggy Harper. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who was attending the same party, mistakenly referred to Paul as "Al" and to Peggy as "Betty", inspiring Simon to write a song.[2][3]"

(this is why the LP needed more serialism)

I saw Weird Al a few weeks back and he covered You Can Call Me Al (straight).

having not seen it in years after it being omnipresent through my childhood can i just say, dire straits, what a shitty album cover

― conspiracitorial theories (stevie), Friday, August 29, 2025 1:13 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

True of all their records tbf

― assert (matttkkkk), Friday, August 29, 2025 1:20 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Love Over Gold erasure!

brothers in arms and graceland two stone cold dad rock classics

always felt graceland's appeal transcends era, age and gender in a way bia does not

i mean its much better but dads do love both

dads do, but i feel more mums and kids also love graceland than bia

I think BIA has one thing in common with Graceland, in that it sort of goes for an exceptionally mild version of pan-global music here and there, but where Graceland almost creates this singular new genre of music, MK just added a few flourishes here and there to a song like Ride Across the River. I’ve actually listened to it a few times lately and while a couple of the tracks are harder to take now than they were 40 years ago, I think most of it holds up pretty well. So Far Away is good, Your Latest Trick is one of those “secret lives of adults” songs I heard as a kid and it being a grownup sound very mysterious, Ride Across the River is excellent, etc. Walk of Life sounds exponentially worse now.

They were also two of the first CD blockbusters. BIA is a unique case of an album that had to be edited down from the CD/Cassette master for the Vinyl release.

bothers in arms is a great album, its stylistically pretty much not what im looking for in music but still i cannot deny its power, i liked it when i was 11 and i like it now

having a sports bloopers based video is a perfectly placed grace note for this work and its era

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd9TlGDZGkI

Walk of Life sounds like a lovable losers era ‘80s Cubs team to me, I can picture Thad Bosley having an effective pinch hit at bat or Doug Dacenzo making a competent catch.

woo
hoo

I always put "Walk of Life" alongside "Sultans of Swing" as songs about musicians while the type of music the musicians in the song are playing isn't the same genre as the Dire Straits song itself.

(Unless the "song about the knife" the buskers play in "Walk of Life" is not Brecht/Weill's standard "Mack The Knife" but is in fact "Six Blade Knife" from the Dire Straits self-titled debut LP Dire Straits!)

"They were also two of the first CD blockbusters. BIA is a unique case of an album that had to be edited down from the CD/Cassette master for the Vinyl release."

That happened a few times. Union by Yes for example. The most recent non-experimental example I can think of is Goldie's Timeless, which omits "Mother" if you buy it on vinyl.

So in a way the vinyl revival has had one positive side-effect, which is that it has eliminated the hour-long album. That was a plague in the 1990s. The album that went on too long.

Someone has taken an incredible amount of time and effort to back up the idea that "Walk of Life" is the perfect song to end any movie.

(that probably should've gone in a Dire Straits thread)

Wasn't Brothers in Arms the first CD to go platinum?

xpost Walk of Life project rules.

XP Platinum on CD sales alone, yes.

brothers in arms and graceland two stone cold dad rock classics

I have probably said this before but these were literally the only music I heard on long car journeys throughout my entire childhood.
Occasionally some happy clappy church singing tapes or the odd Enya or Cat Stevens track, or Jokerman by Bob Dylan, tacked on to the end of a C90.

even as a kid I was fairly sure that a girl in New York City who said she was a human trampoline didn't actually mean 'we're bouncing into Graceland'.

or in the graceland.

why not?

i guess because I thought she was commenting on the nature of her interactions with other people and wasn't referring to going to a real or metaphysical location.
maybe if I said I'm a human basketball and someone said "oh you mean we're dribbling into Graceland" I'd go yeah sure idk

I have probably said this before but these were literally the only music I heard on long car journeys throughout my entire childhood.

Honestly being a dad or mom in the late 80s driving your family to the Grand Canyon listening to Paul Simon seems pretty great. Apropos of nothing did you know nostalgia was originally considered mental illness

they really knew what was up back then

More like the M4 than the wide open roads of Arizona :)

BIA was the first record I remember buying with my own money. I didn’t know about the songs on it being edited down to fit on vinyl. I remember being torn between getting the cassette or the vinyl, and ended up getting the vinyl, which I would then have to dub onto cassette using my dad’s stereo, but editing was not a concern.