My Favourite Album by The Guardian

Author:The Guardian [Guardian, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music recommendations, music blog, Guardian, favourite music, music, rock, albums
ISBN: 9780852652800
Publisher: Guardian Books

Graceland by Paul Simon

From childhood car journeys to sticky nightclub dancefloors, Paul Simon’s mid-80s masterpiece has soundtracked every stage of Hermione Hoby’s life

I was two when Paul Simon’s career-apexing, quintuple-platinum Graceland came out but I might as well have been 10, 12 or 21: it’s an album that soundtracked childhood car journeys and has gone on to soundtrack each chunk of my life since.

Graceland resuscitated Simon’s career and it sounds like he knew he had a triumph on his hands. First those indelible, idiosyncratic lyrics that you just can’t help singing along to. Have you heard a finer insult than “roly-poly little bat-faced girl”? Was there ever a more brilliant union of west coast vibes with east coast urbanity than in the rhyming of “sunlight” with “Fulbright”? For some reason the tongue-tripping “incidents and accidents, hints and allegations” always makes me think, rhythmically at least, of TS Eliot’s “decisions and revisions/ That a minute will reverse”, only Simon’s words, of course, are a lot more fun to sing.

It’s also the type of music that requires you to dance, and to dance like a child. There’s no way you can do anything sexy or cool to all those shamelessly funky chords, or that outrageously bad-ass bass solo on You Can Call Me Al. And nor did he: whenever I hear that song, I see Chevy Chase (6ft 4in) and Simon (5ft 3in) doing a rhythmic line dance while pretending to play sax and trumpet. It’s better than Morecambe and Wise.

But though occasionally silly, many of the album’s irrepressible flourishes are the result of Simon’s musical excavations. American roots music such as zydeco is represented, as well as the traditional South African music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who were brought to a western audience by this album. Most important was the fact that recording and performing with black South African musicians made the album a political gesture, which anticipated the end of a racially segregated South Africa. Not, it’s fair to say, something I was giving too much thought to while kicking with my apple juice in the back seat aged six. But I did, in a hazy childlike way, know that my dad had left South Africa for the UK as a young man. He’d been told by officials that if he stayed his anti-apartheid activism would get him shot within the year. It meant that in my head there was something heroic, serious and noble to this music, which made its joyfulness more appealing.

In my first year of university I made friends with a girl whose dad was Zimbabwean and she too had grown up on the “roots n rhythm” of Graceland. Still young enough for “getting ready” to be a significant portion of the evening itself, we’d play the album from start to finish while doing our makeup. It was a damp and chilly little Cambridge room choked with hairspray, but Paul Simon made it feel a little closer to the “stars of the southern hemisphere”.

A few years later

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