Nothing was going well for Paul Simon after his 1975 Album of the Year Still Crazy After All These Years: his movie and the accompanying soundtrack One Trick Pony did not have the reception he was hoping for, his up and down relationship with Carrie Fisher hit an all time low, and, in 1983, he released Hearts and Bones that flopped as well. All of these things were special to Simon personally. One Trick Pony is a tale about an aging rocker who continues to self-sabotage his relationships and career. Hearts and Bones was, as Dan Shewey of Rolling Stone Magazine put it, “all about heart versus mind, thinking versus feeling, and how these dichotomies get in the way of making music or love” (Shewey). Simon was at an all time low in his career and personal life. Three years later in 1986, Graceland was released and it was rightly touted as Simon’s masterpiece as he was inspired by and recorded with South African musicians. To understand the heights Simon reached with his second Grammy winning Album of the Year, it is important to understand the depth of the lows he sunk to beforehand.
Paul Simon has not only been a part of popular culture, but at the forefront for so many of the nearly six decades since Simon & Garfunkel joined together in 1956. His popularity as a vocalist and lyricist only grew more and more. Even after going solo with his music in 1972, he arose to creative heights over and over again with his control of melody and tune. He was never afraid to take creative risks. For example, one of his lead singles for his 1972 self-titled solo album, “Mother and Child”, was one of the first reggae songs written and performed by a non-Jamaican. It was recorded in Jamaica with Jamaican musicians (Moskowitz). Simon frequently had South American musicians on his tracks and borrowed from many different styles of music all over the world. “Everybody’s lifting all the time… that’s the way music grows and is shaped,” he later rationalized (Kruth).
Hearts and Bones, lyrically, is prime Paul Simon with tunes such as the titular track, “Think Too Much”, “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War”, and “The Late Great Johnny Ace.” Most of the album was recorded by Simon and his former partner, Art Garfunkel while the two were on a wildly successful cash-grab reunion tour. For one reason, or many, Simon cut Garfunkel out and released the album as a solo project when fans were expecting a reunion project. Perhaps, Simon felt that it was too personal of a project to be touted as a joint effort. He and Carrie Fisher always had a widely reported up and down relationship. “I like the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much,” Fisher disclosed to Rolling Stone Magazine (Greene). She explained a bit further in her memoir, “If you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you, do it, because he is so brilliant at it” (Fisher). This is where the “brilliant” track “Hearts and Bones” comes in- a beautiful and bitterless story song enriched with how the “arc of a love affair” rises and falls. Still, people were not buying the album despite everything done right and well. “I was beginning to understand about writing on that album. How to do it, when to use ordinary language and when to use enriched language,” Simon later recalled (Zollo).
Through one avenue or another, a tape, Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, had landed in Simon’s possession from one of his friends’, Lorne Michaels, employees. The sound was so new and strange with peculiar rhythms, bass lines, accordions, and so much more. It was Mbaqanga music, a traditional style of South African music with Zulu roots. John Kruth of The Observer wrote that Simon “experienced the same charge of inspiration from Mbaqanga music (better known on the streets of Soweto as “Township Jive”) as he once gleaned from street corner Doo-wop. Simon later said that upon first hearing he felt “a strange familiarity” with the music, an “almost mystical affection.” But no matter how it stirred his soul, playing Mbaqanga, for a white American musician at the time, was “forbidden fruit” (Kruth).
So once again, Simon proceeded to make music. This led to a career resurgence for Simon as he introduced the world to the music of South Africa in Graceland and so many more stories of the “roots of rhythm” and how the “roots of rhythm remain.” It was unintentionally highly controversial due to a variety of political factors because of South Africa’s Apartheid. The Guardian’s Robin Denselow explained a few concerns in his feature “Paul Simon's Graceland: the Acclaim and the Outrage.” One, many artists from the west had made a stand of solidarity against apartheid by agreeing not to perform there. Harry Belafonte, legendary entertainer and civil rights campaigner later said it was the first time that he had dealt with someone “not going to perform but to bring back the music” (Denselow). Journalists, including Denselow, were invited by Warner Brothers to interview Simon about the project and as Denselow noted, “This is when the [public relations staff] must have become worried, for the questions gradually switched from the flattering to the political.”
Simon’s response was a rare frustrated outburst in which he said, “I’m with the artists… And to tell you the truth, I have a feeling that when there are radical transfers of power on either the left or the right, the artists always get screwed. The guys with the guns say, ‘This is important’, and the guys with guitars don’t have a chance” (Denselow). With Graceland, Simon not only gave “the guys with guitars'' a chance, but also, an entire group of people who were being oppressed and silenced and, most importantly, himself.
Works Cited
Caribbean Popular Music: an Encyclopedia of Reggae, Mento, Ska, Rock Steady, and Dancehall, by David Moskowitz, Conn, 2006, pp. 139–139.
Denselow, Robin. “Paul Simon's Graceland: the Acclaim and the Outrage.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Apr. 2012, www.theguardian.com/music/2012/apr/19/paul-simon-graceland-acclaim-outrage.
Fisher, Carrie. Wishful Drinking. Clipper, 2009.
Greene, Andy. “The Last Word: Carrie Fisher on LSD, Death and Sex With Han Solo.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018, www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/the-last-word-carrie-fisher-on-lsd-death-and-sex-with-han-solo-117225/.
Kruth, John. “How Paul Simon Introduced American Pop to World Music With 'Graceland'.” Observer, Observer, 25 Aug. 2016, observer.com/2016/08/how-paul-simon-introduced-american-pop-to-world-music-with-graceland/.
Shewey, Don. “Hearts and Bones.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/hearts-and-bones-101192/.
Zollo, Paul. Songwriters on Songwriting. Hatchette Books, 1991.
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