Paul Simon, Graceland, & A Pre-Internet World
My thoughts on "Graceland," a fantastic Paul Simon album that creates a deluge of questions about cultural appropriation.
Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland remains one of my favorite albums, but it opens a whole box of uncomfortable questions about cultural appropriation—especially in the modern world 30 years after its release. In a 2016 interview with Tshepo Mokoena in Vice, it was clear Simon himself, doesn't think cultural appropriation is a valid argument:
If you tell me, ‘You took our culture,’ I would say, ‘It looks like it’s still there. Where did I take it? What did you lose? What happened?’ Nothing.”
“Here’s what my friend [renowned jazz trumpeter] Wynton Marsalis told me, which his father told him: ‘Music is not a competition. It’s an idea.’ So you can’t steal someone’s idea, it’s out there. Everyone participates in the idea, you can enhance that idea, you can look at it from another angle, people may say ‘I prefer the way you look at it’, ‘No I don’t like the way you look at it’… But the idea is there. This discussion about ‘You stole this or that’ is a waste of time, it’s not true. Either you collaborate in a way that makes something people like, something that’s enjoyable, or you don’t.”1
Simon, like the Beatles who potentially appropriated Indian music in the same way, is from a generation of musicians who asked fewer questions as they created whatever they liked.
Stranger to me is that the album was a collaboration with African singers and songwriters, made in South Africa, giving credit to South Africans. Huge names in African music delighted in performing with Paul Simon. It seems to tick every box progressive gatekeepers would like to see of white artists, short of not making the album because it isn't "his to make."
All this in 1986, long before Twitter happened. Today, it’s tough to say how social media would excoriate such a project and cancel him.
Tribalism and Creativity
Tribalism works explicitly: most people are more comfortable when a member of their tribe presents "foreign" concepts and ideas. It’s why Panda Express remains more popular than the authentic Chinese place up the street, and is one reason Benny Goodman was popular among white jazz lovers in the ‘30s.
Though this is changing among educated, moneyed Americans, often, the best “authentic” creators can hope is that albums like Graceland spark an interest in their genre and help popular audiences discover them.
Sometimes it happens. Graceland, while a fantastic album on its own merits, brought African music to the attention of people who would never have considered it in the late ‘80s. It returned Miriam Makeba to the spotlight. She got a new album and book deal out of it.
Would it be nice if huge numbers of Americans saw the value of Miriam Makeba without Paul Simon and demanded a new album of her? Sure. It just isn’t how tribes think. It's not as though cancelling Paul Simon would have given us more African music by authentic artists. It would only have guaranteed that we would not have had Graceland.
I remember playing latin and afrocuban compositions in high school and college jazz bands. Was it cultural appropriation that we played music that incorporated other elements, or did a white appalachian kid get exposure to a wider world through music education? Maybe it’s not comparable because we students were not receiving lots of money and acclaim. But I do believe that both playing and hearing a variety of music made me seek out and celebrate a diverse group of artists, and that’s true even when the artist was an American or other Westerner exploring other cultures in good faith. Check out Béla Fleck’s albums Tabula Rasa and Throw Down Your Heart for some Indian, Chinese, and African exploration by a celebrated American banjo player.