Charles O’Brien’s “At Ease in Azania” was originally printed 20 years ago in an obscure (and now defunct) journal. It will be reprinted this fall in the next volume of “First of the Year”. O’Brien’s piece begins with Paul Simon’s “Graceland” but it rock and rolls back to the 60s before returning to the Motherland to show how pop music may “exist in its time justly.”
When Bongani Madondo – South Africa’s liveliest pop writer – heard we were thinking of reprinting it in “First of the Year”, he testified in favor:
I made 50 photocopies of O’Brien’s piece and distributed ‘em to this informal arts and politics journalism course/workshop I often run for young guns on the come in this field I toil in. And they all go bonkers about his analysis and knowledge of music. To read in a book form will be quite cool.
While “At Ease in Azania” got more play in South Africa than back in the USA, influential American music writers picked up on O’Brien’s insights. You can detect the essay’s effect in writing done over the last generation on bebop, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, and the Rolling Stones. But it’s past time for O’Brien’s piece – the first he ever published – to openly shape discourse about pop life and politics.
“Politics in a work of a literature is like a pistol-shot at a concert, something loud and vulgar, yet a thing to which it is impossible to refuse one’s attention.”– Stendhal
Elvis Presley, sole originary proprietor of the Graceland of history, once interrupted his own performance of “Milkcow Blues Boogie:” “Hold it, boys…That don’t move me! Let’s get real real gone for a change” (and then he hit it). Paul Simon’s Graceland is change of a kind, but it would appear the boy never did get gone.
First, let’s be fair. Graceland, which was released to tremendous critical acclaim and has enjoyed great commercial and popular success has its detractors. The main kick against the record, although the most eloquent disparagement of it has been the least articulate, has not done it justice: Graceland is Paul Simon in South Africa. There are separate issues here. Paul Simon an sich is a matter of taste. South Africa, or more specifically, Simon’s place there, is a question of political judgment.
Paul Simon is not a dishonorable man. Forget Simon and Garfunkel. Simon’s first two solo albums are among the more memorable of the early 70’s. For Simon’s many anti-fans, he is an abomination, a combination of wimp and whore. But Simon has had the wit to put his weaknesses to good use. If his sensibilities appear too delicate, neuroses talking themselves out, he produced, in his first solo album, what seems to me the best account in pop music (along with Scritti Politti’s Songs to Remember) of a clinical depression. If Simon does not have a vocal instrument to compare with, say, Solomon Burke’s (or for that matter even Art Garfunkel’s), why does he need it, where would he put it? With him, music and voice are, more for better than not, well suited to each other. If Simon seems too much the model citizen of Koch’s New York, he is at least not particularly a hypocrite about it (also not too clear about it). He is a pop star and talks about what he knows. He might justify himself by quoting Lukacs: “Zola? No, Balzac!” If Simon has not produced all that much compelling music since he first went solo, still, his music has retained its own integrity and provided its pleasures. And he has, throughout, had exceptional taste in musicians, avoiding the obvious, and allowing them both room to perform and credit for doing so.
Which brings us to South Africa. Simon has been attacked for recording there. He has been attacked for a kind of imperial junketeering. Ray Phiri, in this view, becomes the Elgin Marbles plus guitar. Simon is suspected of tickling jaded palates (and advancing, a stalled career) with exotica and also of stealing other people’s music. But Simon is guilty of no such things. Southern African music, the root of most of Graceland, is the most naturally mellifluous, least exotic of African musics to North American ears. Where, for instance, Pigmy music or Ethiopian pop might have presented an insuperable strangeness both to mass acceptance here and to integration into Simon’s own music, Simon is right to speak in his liner notes of this music’s familiarity. Nor has Simon played the thief. He has gone out of his way to give his African collaborators – no innuendo – publicity and writing credits too, and has apparently tried to pay them adequately. Moreover, the music on the record is not a straight transcription (i.e., rip-off) of South African pop (perhaps unfortunately: I prefer Malcolm McLaren’s note-for-note appropriation of Zulu jive on Duck Rock).[1]
There is some marvelous stuff on this record. In Ray Phiri on guitar, Vusi Khumalo on drums, and above all Baghiti Khumalo on bass, Simon has introduced America to one of the great rhythm sections, on a par with Booker T. & the MG’s, the Meters, and Hi Rhythm. There are many excellent performances on the record: I would single out Morris Goldberg’s whistle on “You Can Call Me Al.” The opening of “The Boy in the Bubble” is as good as Graceland is supposed to be. An accordion2 introduces the song, broken into by as effective a single drumbeat (Vusi Khumalo) as I have heard in years: I jumped, and not just the first time. Baghiti Khumalo’s fretless bass joins to drive the song on. Simon starts to sing about “soldiers by the side of the road.”
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
This is admirable. “Bright light” cannot help but remind, in this context, of the nuclear testing attributed to South Africa in the late 70’s. The bomb here echoes the opening drum-shot, and we are left in doubt as to whether there was anybody in that baby carriage. The last line is clear about the radio as a weapon of war. “These are days of miracle and wonder,” Simon goes on,
and don’t cry baby, don’t cry
evoking the time between too-late and “He shall wipe the tear from each eye.” What’s here does not sound like exploitation to me. Rather, that it took so long for musicians of this caliber to be heard here is a reproach to the provincialism afflicting Western pop.
Simon’s right to record with these musicians would seem unassailable. But there remains the boycott question. Simon recorded most of this music in South Africa. He is accused of crossing some sort of international picket-line, such as surrounds Sun City. But Simon seems to have acted in good faith. He is said to have solicited the opinions of prominent black American musicians before going to South Africa. If Graceland does violate a boycott, and it may, it is a boycott that had better learn to speak its name. Is any industrial product of South Africa subject to boycott, including music, like Graceland, recorded in its studios? Is The (recommended) Indestructible Beat of Soweto to be avoided? Is gold? Boycotts are a political weapon. They should present a bright line. Boycott the Bullet, for instance, or Sun City. Anything murkier betrays the furtherance of emancipation. A boycott that cannot explain itself, announce itself, simply merits only deliberate violation. Simon did the right thing by recording this music.
But let’s be just.
Graceland’s title track aspires to major significance. “Graceland” refers most obviously to Elvis Presley, but it refers to Presley both verbally and by quoting a guitar figure from “Mystery Train,” and uses the Everly Brothers as vocalists; it means to do more than merely refer to early rock-n-roll, it means to be a reconstitution of it. The song is also about roots and seeks to embody rootedness. The opening lines invoke Delta Blues, and the band is African. The Nigerian Demola Adepaju’s steel guitar is important here; it is an apparent coup to feature an African playing so white-by-association (read redneck) an instrument. In fact, there is a slight displacement from Elvis here. Elvis’s early music (and more generally, rockabilly) was an intentional blend of black and white musical traditions. The line, attributed to Sam Phillips about finding “a white man with a Negro feel and a Negro sound” gives something of the idea. Simon has cut this creole baby in half. “Graceland” is both blacker and whiter than Elvis’s music. This is an African record. At the same time, its specific evocations of Elvis actually evoke a pre-Elvis white American South: the Everly Brothers always lacked Elvis’s rebellious edge, playing a whiter, more purely country music than Presley, just as the steel guitar was never an instrument particularly associated with Presley.
Simon’s contradictions, in other words, cover such a range. But to what end? Mark Twain once said that Wagner’s music wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Graceland isn’t as good as it sounds. What, for instance, does this obviously thoughtful, curious package of a title song come to? Abraham Lincoln delayed issuing the Emancipation Proclamation until the Union had won a significant military victory, at horrific cost, at Antietam. To have issued it without a major victory, he said would have made it seem not that Ethiopia was crying out to America, but that America was crying out to Ethiopia. It is easy to be unimpressed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The cynical and the naïve may join in observing that it ends slavery precisely where Federal writ does not run and preserves it where Federal arms may enforce that preservation. But Lincoln, Marx’s “single-minded son of the working class,” was about more than an ineffectual executive order. His proclamation worked the economic ruin of an entire class, the landed “aristocracy” of the South. It was perceived there as the basest racial treason. Lincoln had extended diplomatic recognition to a new generation of Nat Turners and Denmark Veseys, a recognition that would now forever elude the Confederacy. He had justified himself in open letters to the “Workingmen of London” and of Manchester. Karl Korsch, in fact, was to identify the American Civil War as the event that led to the formation of the First International in 1864. And Lincoln had done all this in the course of a war that he would prosecute “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
Now, Paul Simon is not to be specially faulted if his last record matters less than the elimination of chattel slavery on this continent. But where does Simon leave us, and how does he get us there? More immediately than his evocations of our civil war and our fractured race relations, this music has the creeping apocalypse of the South African revolution as its pedal point. We know that a contest is underway between the specter of nuclear holocaust and the more intimate fragrance of those burnt alive in “necklaces,” the physical abuse of jailed schoolchildren separating courses at this feast for the senses. Simon leaps over all this. He has “reason to believe/ we all will be received/ in Graceland/ in Memphis, Tennessee.” (Jerry Lee Lewis really should to an answer record to this.) Graceland is not the Memphis of Elvis’s rock-n-roll apotheosis; it is, under the banner of redemption, the scene of his embalming.
Graceland has aroused so much controversy because, presenting itself against the backdrop of ongoing bloodshed in Southern Africa, it implicates and even seeks to appropriate questions of race and revolution, questions that have not loomed very large in recent pop culture. But Simon raises these questions only “to disappear” them. Graceland lacks three qualities that a work of such ambition requires. First it lacks clarity. For all the thought and labor so obviously lavished on it, Graceland never ends up making sense. It is a muddle. Second, it lacks memory. Adornian memory, the memory even of that which has yet to happen, a sense of the dead hand with which the past thrusts into the future. This is music that cannot acknowledge the agonies of history’s unfolding. Third, it lacks anger. PIL’s “Rise,” a song about South African resistance, according to John Lydon, has this refrain: “Anger is an energy.” The song is not a particularly angry one. But the song does move – the fiddles are especially effective – and it does suggest the rush that accompanies social breakdown. Not an angry song, but energized by anger. Graceland could have used such anger. As it is, when Simon opens his mouth, you never worry that he will bite.
A failure to see things through characterizes this record. Punches are pulled. On “I Know What I Know,” Simon asks, “Who am I to blow against the wind?” The idiom, I believe, is piss against the wind.” Simon can talk as he pleases, but what is the point of euphemism (if not auto-bowdlerization), particularly, in the days of PMRC? One can conceive of a great work of art that conforms in every particular to the Hays Code, says Adorno, but not in a world where a Hays Code exists. “Homeless” is virtuosic. But what does music this painless have to do with the victims of South Africa’s homeland system or with the people sleeping in cardboard boxes that have lent such an interesting ancien regime flavor to the stew that New York City is today? This stuff is too pretty for the armories.
Following “Homeless,” Simon tells us, “I don’t want no part of this crazy love.” For a record that pretends to reclaim rock-n-roll verities, this is an odd stance. The celebration of crazy love, the crazier the better, has been at the heart of the music. To surrender such nutsiness may be the merest prudence, but it is untrue to the deepest impulses of the music Simon has laid claim to here. It is ironic, too, that Simon has been praised for his “surreal” lyrics: it was precisely l’amour fou that the Surrealists regarded as a supreme good. (Cf. also, from Foucault’s conclusion to Madness and Civilization: “The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible for what it is.” I don’t think Graceland works that way.)
Graceland’s last two cuts leave Africa behind. “That Was Your Mother” was recorded with a zydeco band. It is not an interesting sample of the genre. The album ends with “All Around the World.” This conclusion is particularly disappointing, on two counts. First, although it features Los Lobos; it misuses them. Nothing of their range and power comes across. They should be heard on their own. Second, there is the album’s closing line: “That’s why we must learn to live alone.” If that is the lesson we leave with, we were better off staying at home. The very project of Graceland should have been to discredit the notion that “living alone” was a real option. All Simon’s prodigies, crossing continents, braving boycotts, “bringing it all back home,” challenging “The King,” end here – with the denial of solidarity.
Despite some febrile talk that got talked a long time ago, rock-n-roll and the Revolution are not natural allies. Popular music is free to respond to the specter of revolution however it pleases. (The Who’s thoroughly, expressly counter-revolutionary “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” for example, is also probably their strongest record.) But it is not free to ignore that specter when it appears. And Simon, cultivating his garden, is not free to pretend that the Old Mole has not yet again disturbed the earth.
I remember, twenty years ago, hearing Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man” for the first time, late at night, through an earplug hooked up to a cheap transistor radio. Here was the real deal. The record still sounds the same way to me. I can also recall a DJ, twenty years ago, responding to a request, playing “Respect” five times in a row. It sounded better each time. The album I Never Loved a Man, even on my twenty-year old scratched mono copy, still startles. What comes across particularly today is how alive to its time it is, how immersed in its social context, how fully it conveys the moment of its moment. The lyrics, for the most part, do not go far beyond baby-baby/oh-yeah/baby-please, that kind of thing, and nothing wrong with that. They certainly don’t indulge in closely reasoned political analysis. Yet this music’s effortless engagement with history shines through. In a song released about a year after this album, “Think,” we get to the bridge, and Aretha sings the word “freedom!” Now, up to this point, the lyric has said essentially, Don’t play with my love, think about what you’re doing. This cry for freedom doesn’t seem to follow. But it is not the song, “Think,” subject to copyright, somebody’s private property, that engenders this cry. Rather, the song’s (and Aretha’s) historical setting does that. Where she might, less exceptionally, have filled that bridge with an oo-whee!, Aretha felt it just as natural to sing of freedom, as if oo-whee! and freedom were interchangeable words, hitting on the truth that they probably are.
Consider also the song with which Aretha closes I Never Loved a Man. Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” Cooke’s original, released posthumously in 1965 (not too inappropriately as the B-side of “Shake”), was far more gospel-inflected than the majority of his work. Yet Cooke took great pains to distinguish what he was up to here from the gospel roots that first brought him fame. He sings:
It’s been too hard living
But I’m afraid to die
I might not be
If I knew what was up there
Beyond the sky.
The match of such churchy music with such fiercely secular lyrics is deliberate. Cooke won’t look beyond the stars for a reason to be glad. “Right here, right now!” Notice this disparity. The choruses rehearse the singer’s travails: “born in a little tent”; “don’t hang around”; “back down on my bended knees”; “I thought I couldn’t last for long.” How can the singer move from such depths to the very top of the mountain? Surely, he can be certain of a New World because he finds in himself a New Man. The rules of the game are changed because there is a new player at the table. Cooke refuses the role of stranger in an unkind land. Thoroughly modern, urban, unafraid, he will insist on what is his. Cooke admired Malcolm X, who planned to raise the plight of black America before the United Nations. Cooke’s song might have been used there as evidence both of what that plight entailed and of what might ensue were that plight addressed.
Aretha ends her album singing, “It’s been a long, uphill journey all the way,” in a voice filled with the most unbounded optimism. There is more going on here than a celebration of the purely personal. Remember that this music was the soundtrack for what went on in America’s black streets in the summer of ‘67. That summer, now as then touted as the Summer of Love, was the Longest, Hottest Summer of all. In Detroit, ‘Ree’s hometown, the home of the Motown sound/the sound of young America, the riots of the 60’s reached their apex and began to transform themselves into conventional military actions.
Think of the song we started with, “I Never Loved a Man.” It begins, unforgettably:
You’re no good
Heartbreaker
You’re a liar
and you’re a cheat
and I don’t know why
I let you do these things to me.
These words, on their face, are nothing out of the ordinary, the classic stuff of the blues. But there were other ears that heard differently. They didn’t know why either, and the consequence was that they laid military siege to police stations in Detroit.
Take another moment of recent history: 1968. The year stands, for those who lived it and do not now simply deplore it, as the high point of radical aspiration and revolutionary hope of this time, our 1848. It should be recalled that pop music mattered more to people in the 60’s. Pop stars came to be regarded, quite literally, as prophets. They were expected to be several steps ahead of actual events, to prepare us for our futures. The Weather Underground, with its cult of Bob Dylan, and Charles Manson, seeking revelations in the Beatles’ White album, were loopy aberrations, but not entirely divorced from a more generally held mind-set. The Rolling Stones were usually very good at staying on top of things. But occasionally they were surprised. Sgt. Pepper surprised them. The Beatles had laid claims to an unprecedented seriousness, in claiming it, creating it. The Rolling Stones responded twice. First Flowers -anthologized singles, out-takes, miscellaneous stuff, all in a homely jacket; the anti-Pepper. They were not about to be impressed. Then they releasedHer Satanic Majesty Requests with music that out-psychedelicized the Beatles and had a more expensive jacket. That it didn’t sound very good didn’t matter much, least of all to them. They had risen to the occasion.
For the Stones, Sgt. Pepper was the great crisis of 1967. 1968 was the great crisis of 1968, and on into 1969. Revolution, which has been said to devour its own children, surely would have known how to devour those who entertained its children. The Stones responded with “Street Fighting Man.” They jumped on the bandwagon without jumping on the barricades. Simon Frith has a clever discussion of this song in his essay on the Stones in Stranded (ed. Greil Marcus). He catches nicely their distancing themselves from insurrectionary fervors abroad at the time. If the beach lies underneath the paving stones, these guys remain aware of how those stones will have to be disposed of. Listen to the cynical glee with which Jagger attacks the words “compromise solution,” as the bridegroom might embrace the maid of honor, and/or (who’s keeping track?) the best man. Jagger here plays the seducer, who thinks enough of the stuff he chases to chase it, but who doesn’t value it beyond the moment. So Frith is right: Jagger doesn’t believe in this stuff; you can hear it in the music. But the really interesting thing is that the record goes to great lengths to disguise its conclusions. The song has to be read in a Stanley Fish-y way. The refrain is, “There’s just no place for a street fighting man,” i.e. no revo. The title is simply “Street Fighting Man,” i.e. Avanti! And where is there no place for our hypothetical enrage? In sleepy London town, so don’t blame us! We’d love to, but…Jagger sings, “I’ll kill the king.” But there is no King. The Sex Pistols, by contrast, sang about the Queen in her jubilee year, and in recompense were attacked by thugs in parking lots, and in Parliament, and in the English gutter press. “Street Fighting Man” is profoundly “pre-revolutionary,” to use Frith’s word. But it covers all its bets and keeps mixing its signals. At the high watermark of radical aspiration and revolutionary hope, the Stones are willing to write the marching songs for Zion, even if they don’t believe the place exists.
Baghiti Khumalo, bass player on most of Graceland (and the best thing on it), also belongs to a group called Thetha. They can be heard on a 2-lp anthology, Sounds of Soweto. This music is not Zulu jive. It has none of the rootsy attractiveness, the primal rock-n-roll feeling that evidently appealed to Simon, of a record like The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. Sounds of Soweto is basically disco. Its sound is, even more narrowly, Euro-disco. But once you get used to the music, you begin to recognize that it could only come from Africa. Simon presents South African pop as an affair of accordions, acoustic guitars, and a cappella choruses. And it is that. But it is also what is heard on Sounds of Soweto; dance tracks with synthesizer. What actually gets played on synthesizer often sounds very like an accordion, and these songs are constantly breaking into rich group vocals. In other words, this music, which would not be out of place in a club here, is as fully African, as fully South African, as the return-to-Eden stuff on which Simon has drawn.
Thetha has one song on Sounds of Soweto, “Dark Street, Bad Night.” Like most of the album, it is fluff, but serious fluff. The song opens with electronic keyboards, disco whistles, and unison flutes. The singer begins, singing in English, in an accent not obviously African. He could easily be mistaken for black British. The song begins like a stereotype of Euro-disco. But it soon heats up, at its own speed. The lyrics are something like those of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The guy doesn’t want to leave, except that it’s hot outside: you could get yourself killed out there. The refrain is:
Dark street, bad night…
You can hear them,
You can see them hiding in the shadows,
Dark street, bad night
It just don’t feel right
Look out baby, time is running out
The more prudent course would be to slip away when the opportunity presented itself. But no. As the street gets darker and darker and the night worse, the bassman takes one solo after another, the song goes on and on. Baby, that is rock and roll.
That is also how pop exists in its time justly. Thetha’s mindless boogie is nevertheless clear; time is really running out. This party, where it’s too late to stop now, yet cannot fend off the day of reckoning. Thetha, like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones, are pre-revolutionary artists. The last thing they are about is a call to arms. But each, in their respective moments, acknowledges that the call to arms has been made. In times of upheaval, the best pop has also been good seismology, and I would suggest better seismology for being such good pop. Simon is not to be criticized for not being, say, Linton Kwesi Johnson or the Gang of Four (although LKJ and Go4 are to be praised for not being Simon). Graceland was free to say anything it liked about what it engaged except what it did say: nothing.
About ten years ago, Hugh Masekela recorded an album with a group of mostly Nigerian musicians, worth getting if you can find it. It was called I Am Not Afraid, and its front cover showed Masekela resting comfortably on a patch of grass, with an elephant’s foot pressing on his head. The back cover shows Masekela on top of the same elephant: it was a stuffed elephant all along. Attractive as the cover of Graceland is, Simon might have done better to pose with that elephant and call the album I Am Not Afraid, Too. But maybe he should be.
Notes
1 Graceland has been extravagantly praised as a “fusion” of African music with, I suppose, something closer to home. I wonder where I have been. The Western Hemisphere is hardly devoid of musicians playing pretty directly African music. Listen, for example, to salsa or to Brazilian music, which do not announce themselves as “fusion” but at their best certainly sound as such. Or what else is African pop? It is played largely on instruments of Western manufacture (electronic instruments, brass and reed instruments) and assimilates Western influences easily. This music is full of cross-pollination. Congolese music draws heavily on Cuban music, that Cuban music which is most obviously African-derived. The electric guitar, which figures so deliciously, in Congolese music (as in other African musics) is itself, apparently, a descendant of African string instruments. Graceland should not astonish. If you want fusion, listen to Songs the Swahili Sing(Original Music). The records collected there meld various African styles, along with various Western influences. But they also draw heavily on Arab musical forms and on the music from Indian movies. The sound is quite unexpected, although it should not have been, and makes perfect sense. Those who think they have found a brave new world in Graceland should listen to this record.
2 The abundance of accordion on Graceland is one of the pleasanter things about it. Simon deserves praise for appreciating the instrument so (he’s used it in the past, too). Cousin to the melodica and the harmonica, the accordion is little understood and much despised. But it is important in many different musics, African, cajun/zydeco, Chicano/nortena, Irish, tango, among others, and a particular favorite, Dominican country music. Granted, the instrument has nothing of the range of a state-of-the-art synth or one of the more baroque Wurlitzer-type theater organs, but its tootle has a reedy sincerity all its own. And if its bass lacks the resonance commanded by a cathedral organ, yet its lower register wheezes like man unredeemed.
A scene from Barbet Schroeder’s film. Idi Amin Dada: Auto-portrait comes to mind here. Schroeder’s documentary shows Amin turning up unexpectedly at a rural dance hall. Those in attendance are properly (prudently) deferential. The band has stopped playing. Amin picks up an accordion and proceeds to rock the house.
3 There is an appealing Henry Jamesian cadence to this line.