Simon’s Graceland 25th Anniversary “Journey…”

…Revives and Puts to Rest Controversies As the Art Withstands the Test of Time

My local public televsision station, tpt, was airing as part of the American Masters series the 2012 documentary film “Journey Under African Skies” on the 25th Anniversary of Paul Simon’s ground-shifting masterpiece album Graceland and his return in 2011 for a reunion concert with his South African collaborators.  Coming on the heels of the passing of the late great Nelson Mandela, it serves as a potent reminder of the long since forgotten controversey over the project’s apparent technical violation of the then existing artistic boycott, a controverseyI would add, which only started to take root after the phenomenal success, both artistically and commercially, of the project.

While I am very sympathetic to the ANC’s union-like argument for the need for solidarity and 100% compliance, both for social and labor movements to prevail, but sometimes you have to bend the rules of a boycott to achieve the desired effect much akin to strategically losing a battle to win a war.  I think the evidence is clearly in, in this case at least, that Simson’s Graceland project with its resulting world tour including the much criticized stop and concert in South Africa, led by example with its power of music to unite people and was not somehow co-opted by the then apartheid government. 

Like most Americans, my introduction to South African music came on a performance of SNL where Simon, his band of mostly South African musicians and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo performed “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” , which performance  blew me (as well as the rest of the country)  away.  The only thing that can compare for me musically was hearing the Beatles for the first time circa 1964, that’s how utterly innovative South African music with its poly rhythyms and syncopation, along with the infectious joy displayed by the performers, was to this first time listener. 

So while I credit Steven Van Zandt’s project Artists United Against Apartheid and song “Not Gonna Play Sun City”, circa roughly  the same time , as bringing the artistic boycott to the attention of the world and the the role that it along with the more powerful economic divestiture which organizations like MPIRG (Minnesota Public Interest Research Group) helped spearhead, credit must also go to the work of Simon and his many South African collaborators, boycott or no boycott.  Ironically it was Van Zandt and Springsteen’s show in East Berlin on July 19, 1988 that many East Berliners attribute to putting the beginning cracks in the Berlin wall, which cracks eventually led to the wall’s tumbling down.  So too,  I would assume, the majority of South Africans would feel about Mr. Simon’s Graceland project.