Should Paul Simon have defied a UN boycott to make Graceland in South Africa under apartheid? – Telegraph Blogs

Friday 28 August 2015 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Lucy Jones



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Music and politics. Now there's a thorny relationship. Just yesterday, an Israeli orchestra announced its decision to break the boycott against Wagner’s works that's existed since 1938 at a concert in June. You may remember the Prom that was pulled last year after a Palestinian protest against the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Now a new film about Paul Simon's Graceland has unearthed that slightly absurd question: does music transcend politics?

The album was released 25 years ago and to mark it, filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost) has made a documentary that follows Paul Simon’s adventure to South Africa to reunite with the musicians, groups and singers that he worked with in 1986. Fans of the album will enjoy footage of Simon and collaborators writing and playing at the time. The film also presents interesting details. We are told how Simon couldn't get the word 'Graceland' out of his head, despite it being at cultural odds with the South African theme. So he took off to the home of Elvis, saw the 'Mississipi Delta shining like a national guitar' and eventually decided to just go with it.

The most interesting part of the documentary, though, is the controversy that surrounded the making of Graceland in South Africa during apartheid. After a piece of music by the Boyoyo Boys (that later became Gumboots) captured his attention, Simon was invited to South Africa to play with the musicians he was hearing. He soon became the ‘Boy in The Trouble’, as one newspaper headline put it at the time, in the middle of a heated diplomatic row. He was criticised for breaking the UN cultural boycott which decreed that no artist would work or present their work in South Africa as part of the fight against racial segregation. The ANC condemned him for not asking them if he could be there, as did Artists Against Apartheid. Protesters on the streets waved posters bearing slogans such as "Yankee Go Home" and "Go Back Simon". Eventually he returned to New York, followed by the musicians he was working with, hurt by the crisis but sticking to his guns that the purity of his art was above the political situation.

The current of the film is a conversation between Dali Tambo, founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of the late African National Congress (ANC) president Oliver Tambo, and Paul Simon. Berlinger presents both sides of the story, with Tambo speaking honestly about what many saw as a white man violating and pillaging South African culture for his own gain. In Tambo's words: "At that moment in time, it was not helpful. We were fighting for our land, for our identity. We had a job to do, and it was a serious job. And we saw Paul Simon coming as a threat because it was not sanctioned by the liberation movement."

The film shows how bewitched Simon was with the sounds he was hearing in South Africa. At one point one of the musicians he works with says “music is the closest thing to religion” and it seems like Simon was uncontrollably intoxicated by it. The way he worked with the different musicians to create something phenomenal resembles a romance.

So it's hard to blame him for the desire to bring world music to the West and make a mainstream success of it – Graceland tops best album lists all the time. Simon also makes the point that the songs were pop, not political. They were about “girls wearing short skirts and how great that was”.

But, if we try and forget the cultural significance and brilliance of Graceland, should Paul Simon have been in South Africa during its most vicious time? Was he right to put his music before the anti-apartheid cause? And wasn’t his position political anyway despite closing his eyes to the situation and focussing on the music?

Music-lovers will find it difficult not to take his side, as Philip Glass, Paul McCartney, David Byrne and Oprah do in the film. It is said that he put a “human face on apartheid” and raised awareness about what was happening in South Africa. It is said that without his chutzpah Ladysmith Black Mambazo and other musicians wouldn't have had so much global success. It is even said that without Graceland, there would be no hiphop.

The most compelling argument for me is Simon’s steely belief that artists shouldn’t be treated as if they work for politicians. To the ANC’s stance of: “You went to South Africa but you didn't ask us. You need to ask the ANC" Simon kicks out with “So that’s the kind of government you're going to be? Check our lyrics? F— the artists like all kinds of governments have done in the past?” It will always be distasteful when politicians co-opt musicians to their cause, wining and dining them at the White House or Downing Street to lend credence to their wiles. Simon abhors that. He asks again and again what the musicians think about the boycott and what they want to be doing.

The last scene in the film sees Simon and Tambo apologise to each other and hug it out. Simon makes it clear where he stands to the end, saying “the power of art lasts. The political dispute has gone, but the music still lasts.”

Clearly, art cannot exist in a vacuum, in some sealed-off Arcadia in the clouds. But then… how I adore Graceland. I remember exactly where I first heard it, sitting on the floor of a friend’s room in my first year of university, drinking cheap red wine. There’s a moment in the film where the drummer breaks into a grin at the riff of You Can Call Me Al. Perhaps we should just be glad it exists – but even more so that apartheid is over.


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