Paul Simon’s Graceland at 40
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Why was Paul Simon’s Graceland considered groundbreaking in 1986?
Now, for anyone who is fretting about advancing in age, fret a little more, because this August, Paul Simon's Graceland album turns 40. It was a groundbreaking work that became a multicultural musical touchstone, but it was also not without its controversy, with Simon recording the album at the time of apartheid and being accused of cultural appropriation. Here to talk through its complicated but enduring legacy is music critic and senior features editor for the Irish Independent, John Marr. You're very welcome to the show.
Good to see you, Derval.
Were you very young when this came out?
I was 11. I was 11, but You Can Call Me Al was everywhere on MTV at the time. MTV really had come into its own by the mid-80s and I was very aware of Paul Simon at that stage. Probably not aware of the extraordinary legacy he'd already had, but that album was everywhere. I mean, it sold 16 million copies, which was a huge number for what was then called world music. Yeah. But very groundbreaking.
And when you go back to the 80s, and as you say, you were young, you weren't really aware of where he was in terms of his career, but he had already a very well-established career by the time Graceland was released.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, he was 44 when he started working on Graceland and already he'd been making music since a teen age.
14, I think, was when he first started writing. Yeah, his first song.
Quite extraordinary. And, you know, himself and Art Garfunkel had released some of the biggest selling albums in the States in the previous 20 years. To give you an idea about how big the two of them were, they played a free open air concert in Central Park in 1981. 600,000 people turned up. So he was absolutely enormous. But in the early 80s, he felt that... He needed a change of direction because, you know, he was seen as old hat, believe it or not. The writer David Hepworth, who founded Q Magazine, I interviewed him recently and he said that it's remarkable when you think that in the early 80s, older statesmen at the time, people in their early 40s like Paul McCartney were seen as just dinosaurs.
Yeah. I mean, they're still touring today. Paul Simon was in Dublin three months ago. He was and was fantastic, by the way.
But there is sort of pressure on artists. I actually recently watched the Kylie documentary and kind of seeing, you know, when she tried to pivot for a while and people were like, no, just get back to pop. Indie doesn't really suit you. It was a really, really interesting documentary.
Yeah, it's great.
But this was something of a kind of a plot twist or a musical turn for him. And what you reference as world music, it was becoming more mainstream, but it was still a bit sort of woo-woo at that time.
Yeah, you had people like Peter Gabriel, who founded the WOMAD Festival in England, which was bringing artists from all over the world to play there. You had the likes of Brian Eno and David Byrne of Talking Heads, who were... experimenting with different sounds, particularly polyrhythms from Africa. And today it's extremely commonplace. But back then it was still, it's just all these mixtures of kind of multiple percussionists kind of playing at different stages. It requires extraordinary musicianship, but it's completely thrilling when it happens. And it was quite unusual in the Western canon. Yeah, to Western ears. But of course, These kind of sounds that existed for centuries in various parts of the world.
In about 1984, Paul Simon discovers kind of essentially township music. You know, he's in New York and he's hearing these buskers play this kind of extraordinary sound. And he's thinking, I need something new, because, of course, we know that Paul Simon could just pen these extraordinary songs. particularly about kind of interior monologues. But you mentioned Kylie there. All artists want to change their sound, want to do something different because, of course, everybody could just keep doing the same thing, essentially.
And they want to innovate.
They want to innovate. And he certainly did.
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