Why was Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ so controversial?
There’s no question that 1986’s Graceland stands as Paul Simon‘s signature solo album. Released after a bout of commercial decline and the break-down of his marriage to Carrie Fisher, his seventh LP stormed the global charts and ushered in a new era of creative rejuvenation, yet the circumstances of its recording are still shrouded in controversy to this day.
During talks with Saturday Night Live house band member Heidi Berg on possibly producing her record, Simon was exposed to a tape of South African mbaqanga street music from the Johannesburg townships as a reference for her record’s sonic direction. Simon practically nicked the Soweto jive bootleg he’d been given and sought to capture the joyous beat for his next album.
“It was very good summer music, happy music,” Simon declared to The New York Times in 1987. “It sounded like very early rock and roll to me, black, urban, mid-fifties rock and roll, like the great Atlantic tracks from that period,” he said. “I was listening to it for fun for at least a month before I started to make up melodies over it. Even then I wasn’t making them up for the purpose of writing. I was just singing along with the tape, the way people do”.
With the help of his Warner Bros label, Simon was able to correspond with South African producer Hilton Rosenthal, who identified Boyo Boys and Ladysmith Mambazo from the tape and invited him over to collaborate. Once given the green light by the South African Black musicians union, Simon finished his piece for the ‘We Are the World‘ and headed to Johannesburg’s Ovation Studios, without a single song prepped, to begin work on Graceland.
Since 1948, the Afrikaner National Party had presided over a brutal segregationist regime of white minority rule with a strictly enforced racial tiering system, with Black Africans at the bottom. Denied civil rights and economic opportunities, the militant actions of the African National Congress brought international attention to the nation’s moral outrage to the wider world, while the UK and US governments repeatedly vetoed sanctions on the apartheid state due to their Cold War panic of South Africa’s Marxist Mozambique and Angola neighbours.
There was never a good time to help launder South Africa’s racist apartheid state, but Simon couldn’t have invited condemnation from the art community any harder, with international solidarity heating up following Steven Van Zandt’s United Artists Against Apartheid and The Specials AKA’s ‘Nelson Mandela’ singles. He was also defying the UN’s resolution 36/206 demanding “all states to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting and other exchanges with South Africa” and ordered “writers, artists, musicians and other personalities to boycott”.
Simon stressed he wasn’t endorsing any government nor playing to segregated audiences, but this didn’t hold water to the organisers fighting apartheid domestically and globally. Graceland‘s apolitical songwriting smacked of naivety at best, and his refusal to reach out to the ANC leadership reeked of a hubristic entitlement. With gobsmacking tone-deafness, he recruited country star Linda Ronstadt to sing backing vocals on ‘Under African Skies’, an artist who had accepted $500,000 to play at the whites-only Sun City luxury resort in 1983.
While the South African band that played on the album enjoyed decent earnings they’d never see in Apartheid’s economic discrimination, there’s a colonial pungence that still reeks from Graceland nearly forty years later. Simon forever claimed that he was just an artist, but providing cultural cover for a white supremacist ethnostate helps in no small part to afford a veneer of legitimacy—captaining a creative project in which the elephant in the room’s second-class power dynamics panged in the air beneath Simon’s good faith.
