{"id":42680,"date":"2012-06-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/graceland-25th-anniversary-edition\/"},"modified":"2012-06-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T00:00:00","slug":"graceland-25th-anniversary-edition","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/graceland-25th-anniversary-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Graceland (25th Anniversary Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty six years after the original release, Sony has released a 25th<\/sup> anniversary version of Paul Simon\u2019s Graceland<\/i>.\u00a0 But not only that, they gave true album lovers something they often desire from favorite artists: context.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Up until the 1980s, Paul Simon had a decent career.\u00a0 Certainly his work with Art Garfunkel was more memorable, but a string of \u201870s hit kept his profile up.\u00a0 The \u201880s hadn\u2019t been so nice for him, as his 1980 film One Trick Pony<\/i> suggests, it was a tough era for folk singers to compete in an age of disco and then increasingly electronically infused music.\u00a0 His 1983 album Hearts And Bones<\/i> pretty much bombed, so things heading into the mid \u201880s were not looking up.<\/p>\n

But somewhere in the intervening years, Paul Simon received and fell in love with cassette tape of South African music.\u00a0 So much was his enchantment that he had his record company track down the musicians and he headed to South Africa to play with them.\u00a0 And with that, the biggest selling album of Simon\u2019s career (with over 14 million copies sold) was born.<\/p>\n

The substance of the Graceland<\/i> album doesn\u2019t need to be rehashed here.\u00a0 It is an excellent album by itself.\u00a0 In an early mainstream example of sampling, Simon went to South Africa, defying the cultural ban that had been put in place by the UN due to apartheid, and played with black South African musicians.\u00a0 He directed them to basically do the music they usually played, changing things here and there, and creating rhythm and backing tracks over a short span of a few days.\u00a0 He then brought those tracks back to the US, where engineers edited and moved them around to marry them with lyrics that Simon was hastily writing to fit them.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

After sessions in Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and New York, Graceland<\/i> provided a gloriously eclectic dish of world music that could be gobbled up by nearly anyone.\u00a0 The entire album, with the exception of Ladysmith Black Mambazo\u2019s a cappella \u201cHomeless,\u201d is intensely rhythmic.\u00a0 I always knew this intrinsically, but the production is such that the rhythm and fantastic music are just there, with a frosting of dazzling Simon lyrics that paint incredible pictures and put you in the story, almost without realizing that the song is taking you there.\u00a0 But when I popped my review copy of the album into my car\u2019s CD player and headed down the road, I kept looking in the rearview mirror at each track change and watched my 18 month old son start moving his head back and forth to the music, or side to side for the fast numbers.\u00a0 This is a boy who takes rhythm seriously, and nearly every song made that kid move.<\/p>\n

The CD rerelease carries all of the original tunes with the addition of early and demo versions of \u201cHomeless,\u201d \u201cDiamond on the Soles of Her Shoes,\u201d \u201cAll Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints,\u201d \u201cYou Can Call Me Al,\u201d and \u201cCrazy Love.\u201d\u00a0 Plus, the final track is a verbal explanation of how the song \u201cGraceland\u201d came to be.\u00a0 But the real cream of this rerelease is a full length documentary of the evolution, production, and reaction to the album.<\/p>\n

When Graceland<\/i> was released I was three years old, so by the time I \u201cdiscovered\u201d Paul Simon\u2019s solo catalog as a teenager I just listened to the album for what it was.\u00a0 The DVD documentary \u201cUnder African Skies\u201d reminds those around at the time, and educates new fan about the terrible issues surrounding the treatment of blacks in South Africa under the apartheid regime, and the discomfort that Simon created for some by traveling to South Africa to record with black musicians.\u00a0 The documentary uses archival footage to show how the South African tracks were recorded, how Simon created the songs after returning to the US, and how the album was criticized for breaking the \u201ccultural boycott\u201d imposed on South Africa at the time in response to apartheid.\u00a0 The documentary is really a vindication of Simon\u2019s decision to go to South Africa, and the modern-day interviews of those who had opposed Simon\u2019s trip in the \u201880s still show the futility of the position they took against the project.\u00a0 Essentially, the documentary makes the case that Simon\u2019s use of black South African musicians for Graceland<\/i> did more than any UN resolution could, because it introduced the beauty of their culture to the world. \u00a0Those who opposed his decision were not punishing the white regime, but actually the black musicians who wanted to work and were given an audience far wider than they could ever have imagined.\u00a0 They would in effect be punished twice; once for having to live under apartheid, and then for not being allowed to play with Simon in the name of a boycott.\u00a0 It is clear on which side the documentary comes down.<\/p>\n

The 25th<\/sup> anniversary package is worthwhile.\u00a0 The album is superb, but the documentary is eye opening.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not just your throwaway bonus DVD disc that gets packaged for box sets.\u00a0 It is a legitimate full-length movie that does its homework.\u00a0 If Graceland<\/i> could get better, this is the way to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":30998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5719],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-42680","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-paul-simon","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42680"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}