Graceland (And Its Controversies) At 25

Twenty-five years ago Paul Simon released his album Graceland, an album that not only became a worldwide hit, but massively expanded the audience of his collaborators, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and simultaneously provided exposure to South African music to millions around the globe. A new documentary (which I have as of yet been unable to see) explores not only the making of the album, but also some of the controversy surrounding it.

It might seem nearly impossible to imagine now, but while Graceland emerged as something of a feel-good album, for many it was anything but. In order to utilize Ladysmith Black Mambazo Simon essentially violated the cultural boycott that the South African government and other organizations in South Africa and across the globe advocated in an attempt further to isolate the Apartheid government, which in 1986 was perhaps at its most draconian.

At minimum, Simon displayed a great deal of naivete and consequently not a bit of arrogance in dealing with the maelstrom that surrounded Graceland. Some thought he was using Ladysmith Black Mambazo for his own purposes while others simply found his unwillingness to recognize why the cultural boycott was in place to be galling.

Graceland pretty perfectly embodies a grey area surrounding the cultural boycott. The most obvious violators engaged in egregious behaviors — for example willfully ignoring the boycott to play “Sin City” and then self-servingly claiming that their music was beyond politics when it was anything but, especially for the white regime that had enforced segregation in entertainment and sport as in every other element of South African life under apartheids both petty and grand. And perhaps the boycott was cast in too broad strokes, was too blunt an instrument that did not allow for fine differentiation or case-by-case assessments. And to be sure, Ladysmith Black Mambazo deserved to have its own agency in choosing how to address the injustices of its own country, and that getting its own music out was in itself utterly worthwhile.

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about these questions, especially as they have become historical questions. But at a minimum one hopes that Simon (and perhaps other artists who skirted the line) has become more thoughtful and more reflective about those times and what his work meant and did not mean in a time when the opposition to apartheid used blunt instruments because blunt instruments were what they had at their disposal.