Graceland began as jam sessions in South Africa. The Johannesburg recordings changed how Paul Simon wrote songs, with new chord variations and the Bagithi Khumalo bass lines shaping vocal melodies in ways entirely new to him.
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“The Boy in the Bubble” was the starting point, and it began with a piano accordion. Forere Motloheloa, who led a group called Tau Ea Matsekha, played the piano accordion and created a song with Simon that explores themes of inequality and terrorism. It’s a song of shared experience, evident by how two musical worlds complement each other.
Miracle and Wonder
Simon told Rolling Stone the song “…devolved down to hope and dread. That’s the way I see the world, a balance between the two, but coming down on the side of hope.” He wrote the music in South Africa with Motloheloa but finished the words in America. Due to the track’s complexity, Simon struggled to fit words into the African rhythms.
His producer, Roy Halee, edited reels of tape from the sessions, amassed from hours of studio time where Simon’s perfectionism required multiple takes before he was pleased. The process was new to Motloheloa’s group, who were accustomed to working quickly. Though the process was arduous, Simon emerged from the studio with the sound he was chasing.
It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
Sacrificing Sacrifice
Traveling to South Africa was complicated by the U.N.’s cultural boycott to end apartheid—the country’s racial segregation policy ensuring authoritarian minority white rule. The boycott called for artists, musicians, and others to refrain from exchanges with South Africa as long as its racist policy stayed in place. Knowing he’d be criticized, Simon ignored the boycott and traveled to South Africa to pursue his project. He told the New York Times he wasn’t there to perform for segregated audiences or the government but to work with people he “greatly admired.”
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The boycott not only stopped cultural imports but also restricted exports. Simon first heard South African street music—mbaqanga—through bootleg cassette recordings because the local music wasn’t allowed outside the country. He traveled to Johannesburg with Halee to record with South African musicians and explore the new sounds inspiring him. The new sounds lifted Simon from his depression following the commercial letdown of Hearts and Bones (1983); he felt refreshed to write again.
It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical, and magical is art
Think of the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
Critics challenged Simon for appropriating African culture for his benefit, and while the album became his most successful, it remains controversial. Anticipating a backlash, Simon paid the African musicians triple the New York recording scale and offered royalties to the songwriters who contributed to his compositions. Some musicians— breaking their country’s sanctions—toured with Simon and were joined in Zimbabwe by exiled trumpeter Hugh Masekela and singer Miriam Makeba.
Graceland‘s Impact: More Objective Good Than Subjective Bad
Graceland introduced South African music and culture to a broad audience; it also helped raise awareness of the country’s political strife. Western artists a generation later traveled to Africa—post-apartheid—for musical inspiration, like Blur’s Damon Albarn, who worked with Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen on albums for Gorillaz; the Good, the Bad & the Queen; and Rocket Juice & the Moon, featuring Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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Music is borderless and evolves like the rest of culture. Culture doesn’t just spring up from nothing. It’s how Jamaicans, listening to American rhythm and blues radio, began toasting (or rapping) to dubbed instrumentals, with sounds bouncing to and from West African chanting traditions. Hip-hop exists by way of jazz poetry, which traveled from African and European traditions to America.
How culture is exchanged—either shared, borrowed, or stolen through imperialism—hung over Graceland then and remains decades later. Was Simon right to defy the United Nations’ cultural boycott? The debates remain. But the pure joy of Graceland lives above the conversations surrounding the album. It is now a part of culture, and as the context of the album’s creation fades, the songs remain the same.
Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images
