1986: Graceland

There goes sanction-bustin’ Simon

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Hints and allegations

It didn’t start well. Paul Simon was working with Heidi Berg, a young singer-songwriter, who gave him a home-recorded tape of South African music as a reference for the kind of sound she wanted to achieve. Simon immediately fell in love with the music, took the tape, identified the musicians, and went off to make his own record, leaving an annoyed Heidi Berg in his dust.

And that was just the start, because when the record, Graceland, was finally released everyone else got annoyed. This was the period of racist, apartheid rule in South Africa, and the UN had called for a worldwide cultural boycott. By going to South Africa and working with South African musicians, Simon had broken that embargo.

His defenders argued that he was working only with black South African musicians, giving an outlet (and money) to oppressed artists. But the power of this boycott didn’t lie so much in its economic pressure as in the most effective punishment known to social apes: ostracism. The point was to tell the ruling white South Africans that their repugnant views made everything about South Africa unwelcome among other humans. Whether they were selling oranges or township jive, their political system made their cultural products untouchable.

In other words, the embargo was indiscriminate, as all embargos must be. But the case of Graceland seemed to draw out a particularly painful quirk: if it had worked as intended, it would have isolated the black South African creators with whom Simon collaborated. This was – to use a word we didn’t use so much then – problematic. The album was released barely one year after Live Aid, a pioneering international rock concert that raised millions for famine relief in Ethiopia and featured not a single African artist. Here, finally, were some African musicians appearing in the pop charts. They were not receiving Western charity; the audience was not asked to interpret them as the victims of oppression. They were, unequivocally, artists: the makers of music, the spreaders of joy.

The embargo aside, there were other controversies. Many of the tracks are co-credited to Simon and his collaborators, but there have been various accusations of plagiarism, not least from some of his American collaborators, including the Mexican-American band Los Lobos. As with many creative collaborations it seems that origins and inspirations were frequently muddy, but in the end everything was – at least in part – credited to ‘Paul Simon’. This wasn’t the first time Simon had been accused of playing fast and loose with attribution; English folk singer Martin McCarthy was furious with him for leaving the customary ‘trad.’ off the credits to ‘Scarborough Fair’, and thus appearing to claim authorship of one of England’s most enduring folk songs. But then Bob Dylan did the same when he used some ‘Scarborough Fair’ lyrics in ‘Girl from the North Country’. The folk tradition is full of versions, adaptations, reworkings and developments; all popular music is. Everything is a remix. Sadly, copyright law is less catholic. The history of popular music is all too often one of famous artists writing down, recording and getting the credit for the work of the creators who preceded them.

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Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

A lot of this fuss only made the headlines because the record was a hit. By the mid-’80s Paul Simon’s career had slumped, but it was revived spectacularly by the unexpected, joyful sound of township jive and zydeco. The mainstream was full of lumbering rock dinosaurs peddling flatulent rock n’roll; Graceland was extraordinarily different. This ‘60s rock star sounded more like Talking Heads (similarly influenced by African music) or Lloyd Cole and Commotions, or – in the case of the track ‘I Know What I Know’ – alt-rock legends fIREHOSE.

In truth, Simon had never had much in common with the rock dinosaurs. His background in ‘50s pop and ‘60s folk meant he had always had a peculiar relationship with the rock mainstream; his output had always been far more poppy and far more literate. His lyrics place him as at least partly within the tradition of musical theatre; he has the rhythmic verbal knack of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, and Cole Porter’s delight in multisyllabic rhymes and inventions. Graceland is full of surprising and beautiful images. Think of the opening line to the title track: ‘The Mississippi Delta / Was shining like a National guitar’. (The 1985 Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms had featured a gleaming, chromed National guitar on the cover.) There’s the joyful metonymy of ‘Empty as a pocket’, and incisive epigrams: ‘Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts’.

His folk inheritance, meanwhile, gives him a gift for poignant storytelling - ‘My travelling companion is nine years old / He is the child of my first marriage’ - and a light and illuminating poetry. The last verse of ‘Boy in the Bubble’ contains a perfect little summary of the late 20th/early 21st century:

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
…
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry, don't cry

‘These are the days of miracle and wonder / And don’t cry baby’  should be the words written over the door to the modern world.

Best of all, this verbal dexterity plays beautifully with the rhythms of the South African backing, his sweet voice with the intricate verbal dexterity dancing around the chiming guitars, choral voices and propulsive bass. You could see this mixture of upbeat music, adult lyrics and hummable pop tunes as the epitome of self-confident and sunny Reaganite America, resurgent across the world, hoovering up everyone else’s art and repackaging it as disposable fast culture. This is particularly easy if the image in your mind’s eye is of Chevy Chase in the video for ‘You Can Call Me Al’, linen jacket over his t-shirt and a smug smirk on his frat-bro face: the very icon of the ‘80s Boomer. I certainly felt uneasy listening to it, aged 16. I was vaguely aware that I should be listening to something harder, obscurer, less commercial.

But you can’t write Graceland off as plastic corporate output. (The closest it gets to conventional mid-80s schlock is ‘Crazy Love, Vol II’). The music is internationalist and inclusive, the lyrics are adult, literate and funny, and the tunes remain hummable. The innovation and invention that made it a massive worldwide hit have also made it a lasting and rewarding piece of work. It still sounds fresh and exciting.

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Paul Simon has always been lurking away in the background of my life. Our story started with my dad’s copy of The Graduate soundtrack, the impeccable storytelling of ‘Mrs Robinson’ (‘Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home’) and the delicate gem that is ‘April Come She Will’. Throughout my childhood he was on the radio with cheerful pop hits: ‘Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard’. ‘Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover’. Lately Spotify has been slipping tracks into my playlist: ‘Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War’. I was beginning to suspect that I was becoming a Paul Simon fan. On re-listening to Graceland I discovered I had been one all along.

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For slightly more unsettling sunshiney ‘80s pop, there’s always the looming threat of the Boys of Summer: