World Music. What an awful label. People get paid a lot of money to market music and most of those people are bumbling morons.
The value of listening to music from across the globe is obvious to anyone who has, yet one of the only ways to do so in the anglosphere is through the treacherous waters of World Music. The World Music section, usually hidden in the corner of music stores or behind an icon on a streaming app depicting jolly Africans with drums, presents the music of the wider planet like a zoo where the consumer can catch a glimpse of an exotic form of music in a marketable enclosure before returning to the safe waters of English-language studio polish.
The only other way to find foreign music is through a world-crossover album, undoubtedly the most famous being Paul Simon’s Graceland.
Graceland brought Simon critical and commercial acclaim he hadn’t seen in a decade. It seemed like everyone loved it. Graceland sold 16 million copies making it the 26th highest-selling album of the ‘80s. It won the most useless award in popular entertainment: Album of the Year at the Grammys. Even Joe Strummer liked it.
Yet even the mere concept of the album is morally dubious. While working with a young songwriter, Simon was introduced to a bootleg tape of street music from Soweto, a Black slum of Johannesburg, which Simon decided to recreate for American audiences. Only, there was a boycott of South Africa in which artists were asked not to present or let their art be presented in South Africa in protest of the nation’s Apartheid policies. This boycott protected Black South African musicians from exploitation by White South Africans. The Apartheid government would never allow South Africa’s main cultural export to be a group of Black musicians unless the creative force behind them was White. Graceland is exactly what the boycott sought to avoid.
Paul Simon is an intelligent man. He had to know why such a boycott existed. The artist who introduced Simon to the music of Soweto understood the boycott: Simon informed them of his new project, and their working relationship soon collapsed. Yet Simon continued to produce the album.
Simon’s songwriting process on Graceland was unique for its time. He began by recording two weeks’ worth of jam sessions in South Africa, during which time he stayed and spent his money inside the white infrastructure where the musicians he so greatly admired were barred. Simon then returned to the States to assemble his songs using the music recorded in Africa. This method of composing songs in reverse resembles the work of hip-hop producers like Kanye West, placing Simon about a decade ahead of his time. After gathering an idea of how he wanted his songs to be structured, Simon recorded his vocals and flew musicians into New York for overdubs.
While recording the new material, he worked with Linda Rondstadt, who had performed a boycott-breaking show at a boozy whites-only resort in South Africa, and he recorded a song (All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints) with Los Labos, a Mexican-American band, which they claim they wrote. If what Los Lobos claimed was true, that Simon prepared nothing before their recording sessions and used music they played for him as his own, he would have done this for every other song on the album. When Kanye used samples to make a song, everything he used existed before his usage. That is not what Simon did. Simon took music written by minority groups unable to distribute their songs, rearranged them, and claimed they were his compositions.
Simon’s rationale regarding Graceland followed the logic that, while not political on the surface, the Black and White musicians playing together in harmony was a political statement. Simon paid the musicians rates worthy of top session players on top of sales royalties. Yet, Paul Simon is still the only name on the cover.
And despite all of the morally indefensible facets of its creation, I love Graceland. Every song is engineered to perfection, Graceland has a legitimate claim as the Aja of the ‘80s, and Simon’s lyrics on Graceland are among the best he ever wrote. Recently divorced and off the heels of two straight commercial flops, the lyrics juxtaposed the jovial tone of the instrumentals with his personal turmoil to make an album informed by great sadness that is at the same time incredibly warm and hopeful. I have not found another album that strikes this balance as beautifully. Also, the title track and Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes are probably the best songs Simon ever wrote.
Graceland is by far the most famous of the three major albums that brought Afro-beats into the American consciousness, yet the other two are not nearly as morally dubious.
Released three months before Graceland to a lesser success (though it was still a big hit), So by Peter Gabriel was also heavily influenced by African music. Gabriel recorded the album in the UK with a group of well-known session musicians, a group including Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Manu Katché, Jerry Marotta, Stewart Copeland, Daniel Lanois, Kate Bush, and Nile Rodgers.
Released to much less sales but similar acclaim in 1980, Remain In Light by Talking Heads was built around Afro-beat-influenced jam sessions played by the band.
Even Vampire Weekend, whose sound was so similar to Graceland at the start of their career that they were accused of plagiarism, recorded all of their music themselves.
All three groups did not violate a UN-supported boycott, and all three are incredible; I’d say Remain In Light is better than Graceland. But at the same time, neither album is as deeply entrenched in a specific style as Graceland. So features a Brazilian influence as prominently as the African influence, Remain In Light is in the shadow of the New York Art-Punk scene, as well as Brian Eno, the album’s producer, and Vampire Weekend are first and foremost a preppy indie pop band. Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, and Vampire Weekend wrote popular music influenced by African music: Paul Simon wrote African music influenced by popular music.
Graceland is an important piece of American culture. For many, it was the first time they heard African music. My mother, raised in a small town in Illinois, still talks about seeing Simon perform at the Grammy’s. Graceland is an amazing album that deserves all the fans it has. I challenge those fans to listen to The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. Many of the musicians on that compilation album played on Graceland. Here they play under their own names.
