"Graceland" by Paul Simon

I review one of the most revered (and complicated) albums of the 1980s.

This album review takes a look back at Paul Simon’s Graceland, a wildly successful cultural bridge-maker that turns 40 years old this month.

Genre: Worldbeat, Pop, Folk Rock

Label: Warner Bros. Records

Release Date: August 25, 1986

Vibe: 🌍🪗

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I remember my first reaction to Graceland being incredulity.

“This is Paul Simon?” I thought. The folksy singer-songwriter guy? The “Mrs. Robinson” and “Sound of Silence” guy? The “lie-la-lie” guy? He made this? My early-teen brain couldn’t wrap my head around the incongruencies that kept jumping out of my headphones and into my brain, song after song after song. Sure, there were recognizable elements of pop and rock sprinkled throughout the tracklist (though, in my defense, a lot of those tropes weren’t ones that Simon had explored with any consistency prior to this LP), but it didn’t sound like any pop or rock album I’d ever encountered. As a kid who grew up in suburban Canada, who had no concept of any localized African musical traditions or legacies, South African styles like isicathamiya and mbaqanga may as well have been beamed in from another dimension. I was perplexed by Graceland, but also utterly enthralled. These songs were thrilling and spiritual in a way I’d never felt before, causing my blood to pulse with excitement.

Initially, all of that buzz came from the ultra-seductive surface layers. The irresistable rhythms, anchored by the myriad percussive elements including Bakithi Kumalo and Ray Phiri’s magnificent work on the bass and guitar, respectively, were elite. The melodies were crisp. The lyrics, arch though they still were, were a lot of fun. It wasn’t Simon at his most intellectualized or self-serious, which certainly helped as a hook to get me more interested in his larger oeuvre, but, as I got older and absorbed more and more music history, the more impressive Graceland became. I’m not sure it’s an indictment of those first impressions. Not exactly. Maybe more a roundabout compliment to Simon’s ability to couch deeply human themes about loneliness, losing your sense of place in the world, and ultimately finding your way in moments and locales you least expected to. For example, I used to think “You Can Call Me Al” was a breezy, easily dismissable farce. Now I hear lines like, “He sees angels in the architecture/Spinning in infinity, he says, ‘Amen,’ and, ‘Hallelujah,’” and I hear a man who’s finally had that lightning bolt moment.

If you wind the clocks back to 1984, Simon needed one such moment, too. His most recent LP to that point, the previous year’s Hearts and Bones, initially intended as a joint project with Art Garfunkel, had sold poorly and, combined with a collapsing marriage, had sent him into a depression. Suddenly, he was 43 years old with a solo career that plenty of pundits thought had reached the end of the road. According to his detractors, Simon’s signature sound had nowhere else to go and, based on where he went next, maybe they were right. The lightning-bolt moment that sets the Graceland story in motion was a cassette tape that arrived through an SNL connection: musician Heidi Berg. She had been a member of the house band when Simon was a regular, and was the one who turned Simon on to mbaqanga, Black African street music tied to Johannesburg’s Soweto township. Berg had acquired a bootleg mixtape of obscure songs in this style and lent it to Simon, who quickly became obsessed.

”I never would have gotten into this whole thing if I hadn’t vigorously pursued the origins of a copy of a copy of a cassette,” Simon explained to Rolling Stone two years later. He tracked down the musicians and flew to Johannesburg with his longtime engineer Roy Halee. Crucially, he brought no songs with him to the studio there. The sessions in South Africa yielded rhythm tracks and grooves recorded with Kumalo, Phiri, drummer Isaac Mtshali, the Boyoyo Boys, Joseph Shabalala, the a cappella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and several others. He also recorded material for Graceland in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Lafayette, Louisiana, with a cast that included (but is not limited to) Linda Ronstadt, Los Lobos, the Everly Brothers, and Senegalese percussionist Youssou N’Dour. “I didn’t want it to be just an African album,” he told the magazine. ”I wanted to say, ‘Look, don’t look upon this as something so strange and different. It actually relates to our world.’”

So, look, I’ve never thought that Simon’s intentions were anything but positive and even noble to a certain degree. When asked if the songs on Graceland were political, he said that the furthest thing from his mind was using his platform to whitewash their plight. He described his mentality simply: “They play their best, I’m gonna play my best.” While all that may be true, the fact remains that Simon traveled to South Africa in 1985 during the UN’s cultural boycott of the apartheid regime. He did not consult the African National Congress (ANC) and acted only on a green light from the South African Black musicians union. To his credit, he’s discussed this aspect of the album’s backstory ad naseum over the years and has never deflected. He says he paid the Johannesburg session participants three times New York union rates, credited co-writers, and ultimately gave South African artists a global platform they arguably wouldn’t have been able to access under apartheid. It’s a legit counter-argument. But legit is also how I’d describe the consistent criticism that he made those decisions for himself, on a timeline that suited his creative instincts rather than the political strategy of people fighting for their survival. I’m not here to tell you how to think or feel about that. I only want to be real about both sides of the narrative.

Let’s return to the music and ask the easy question: What makes it so compelling, 40 years later? In many ways, they invert what had been a reliable Simon formula, which meant starting from the lyrics and moving outward. The arrangements were built to serve the words, but here, it was the other way around. More often than not, the rhythm was locked in before Simon knew what the song was even about. That inversion invited a different, almost experimental kind of songwriting, one that’s far more fragmented and imagistic, and way less linear. There’s still a lot of personal material to sift through, but where those ideas would’ve previously manifested as confessions, they instead become characters in motion, obliquely gesturing at the emotional undercurrents rather than taking your hand, pointing at the mirror, and spelling everything out for you. In a previous life, a track like “The Boy in the Bubble” is pitched at a much different tenor and I’d argue it’d be worse off. Simon rattles through cable news items in a way that sounds like a CNN fever dream: a bomb in a baby carriage, lasers in the jungle, and so forth. “These are the days of miracle and wonder,” the chorus insists, even as you sit there with an open head wound.

“Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” pushes even us further out of Simon’s comfort zone. Ladysmith Black Mambazo opens a cappella in Zulu for a full minute before Simon enters, his voice playfully bouncing off of an arrangement that draws from doo-wop, gospel, and mbube simultaneously and without sounding like a mismatch. If you sit and listen to it with the purpose of breaking it into as many little sonic fragments as you can in real time, it’s astounding how well everything holds together. The quieter, subtler moments are exceptional, too. “Under African Skies” paints on this dreamy, expansive canvas, to the point where you can close your eyes and picture yourself lying there, under the eponymous starry night. “Homeless” is another stunner, using powerful vocal harmonies to stand with the dispossessed, all but forgotten as collateral damage during apartheid. The title track, a contender for this album’s best, closes the narrative circuit. The line that still carries weight is the one that’s careful not to overpromise: “I have reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.”

Per my research, it doesn’t seem like anybody expected much when Graceland arrived in August 1986, including Simon himself. It climbed slowly on album-oriented radio and word of mouth, eventually reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in March 1987, a chart where it stayed for 101 weeks. It won multiple Grammys, including the biggies for Album of the Year and Record of the Year for the title track, making Simon one of only three artists to have won Album of the Year three times. To date, Graceland has sold over 14 million copies worldwide, making it Simon’s biggest success by a country mile. Even the ANC later acknowledged that the LP had increased global awareness of South African music and its artists. Shortly after, the UN removed Simon from its boycott violators list, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo became international figures thanks to the exposure this album provided. Its fingerprints are still audible downstream, in everything from Vampire Weekend’s debut to Burna Boy’s global crossover.

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What’s your favorite Paul Simon song? Shout it out in the comments.