back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I had forgotten how much I loved Paul Simon’s Graceland.  If I could be any poet it would be Paul Simon.

I saw the Imagine documentary on the creation of this album, the musical and political history of the creation of the work.

The album came out when I was 11. My father brought it with him on one of his many visits to Australia to see me and my siblings.  It was the soundtrack to our road trip around Tasmania. I was perhaps 12 when I first heard it.

I remember being entranced by the swirling rhythms of the music and how they carried Simon’s lyrics away. I remember the explosion of the  African sounds and the explosion of the other sounds. I remember the mixture of hope and cynicism in the lyrics.

What I heard there, that I recognise now but didn’t then, were several traditions of African music; blues, gospel, Zulu a cappella, township being woven into each other and into European traditions with the clever, clever New York Jewish lyrics.

Whenever I hear the opening bars of Boy in the Bubble I am taken anew to the familiar synthesis of Africa, New York and the road east of Adelaide.

One of the themes of the documentary was the tension between the breaking of the cultural boycott and the rights of artists, of individuals to do the best that they can. Simon recalls a conversation he had with an ANC manager who was telling him he should have asked permission to do the album. He should have asked permission from a government in waiting to create his art with whomever he wanted? And this seeking of permission would have been a blow against apartheid?

Whilst discussing the cultural boycott with a old-time from Artists against Apartheid Simon said something along the lines of

-At the top you have politicians. And behind them some shadowy money men and campaigners. Underneath the politicians come economists and military types. Then, below them are the artists. We get a call, come and do a concert for this cause and it’s like we work for the politicians. That we’re not artists in our own right.

Should Simon have gone to South African or stayed away?  Should his right to freely collaborate and the right of the other artists working on Graceland  given or taken priority to the needs of a larger freedom movement?  What the right answer is I’m not sure but I find a lot of my political thinking at the moment circling around the ability of the group to enforce behaviour on the individual in the long term best interests of the group.

The album sounds to me like one of the purest forms of post-apartheid multi-culturalism I've ever heard.

I’m left with the feeling that the work is a brilliant piece of collaborative musicianship and that it, if it had a political point, it was “Hey listen to this, this is the sound of us all being free. This is the prize.”

It remains, perhaps, my best loved music.