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Carrie Courogen. Start typing to see results or hit ESC to close. See all results. Privacy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Strictly Necessary Cookies Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. He seems to be talking about both geography and the civil war he's in with his marriage ending. No Replies Log in to reply. General Comment Actually, Simon has said the song really has nothing to do with Elvis, which is why he was hesitant about naming the album and even the song Graceland.
It's a pilgrimage of sorts And the journey has something to do with redemption, at least he hopes. The people travelling with him "ghosts and empty sockets" also look like they need to be redeemed. So it's about turmoil, and how it leads us to flee and seek something to make it better. That's what it is to me. General Comment Okay, let's clear up the whole Graceland issue Maybe it was just a word he read in a newspaper, or an offhand decision of that nature.
I'd like to believe that it wasn't, because that really cheapens the whole thing doesn't it? Plus the whole idea of Graceland was a fantasy destination - a place that represented the flashy artifice of American culture in a particular period of history.
General Comment my favorite line is, "she comes back to tell me she is gone, as if i didn't know that, as if i didn't know my own bed, as if i never noticed, how she brushed her hair from her forehead. First and foremost, he is mad and makes fun of her, as most people make fun of their ex, But then the next line he softens his voice and basically says he still loves her.
He nails the feeling of loving her and hating her at the same time. General Comment I am a completely devoted fan of Paul Simon, and within several of his biographies, "Graceland" is noted as a "fill word. Fill words? Pilgrims are referenced in the song, and it's well known that Graceland is a popular destination for people on a "pilgrimage" of sorts to see the grave of Elvis. We were going to Graceland, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. We were going home. I was six and my sister was twelve.
We were both still single and life was great. I have not come here to complain about time but to make the point that dues have been paid. Graceland at 25 has reached the echelon that boasts only the most rarified classics. When he sat down to record the album Simon was struggling creatively.
Hearts and Bones , released three years earlier, had been welcomed to the sound of popular and critical crickets.
A few years before officially beginning work on it someone had sent him a cassette of umbaquanga music a genre of South African music with Zulu roots. He had played the tape in his car, been thrilled by it, and subsequently fascinated by the rhythms and culture he heard in the music.
Simon has often said that American popular music of the s was where he found his original inspiration and in the liner notes of Graceland he observes that in umbaquanga he heard rhythms and a musical sensibility that recalled for him that boyhood soundtrack. As soon as the album was released Simon was back on top. In the first few months and even years after Graceland established its place on the charts, it provoked controversy and accusations of colonialism. Some of its recording sessions — the ones that took place in Johannesburg — violated the cultural boycott of the South African apartheid regime.
The violation was tempered by the fact that the album did afford the African musicians on it unprecedented exposure in the West. While Simon claimed he was careful to give credit where it was due to his collaborators, rumors circulated that he was a song stealer, and would pick up riffs he heard African musicians working over in the studio and incorporate them into his compositions. Whether this constitutes stealing per se, however, is open to interpretation.
Like some of the best songwriters — from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Jay-Z — Simon is a master of musical collage, adept at taking what he hears in a cultural vernacular and incorporating it into his work.
Regardless, the album has been identified as breaking the dam for the world music trend, now responsible for the Putamayo CDs sold at your corner Starbucks. In the title song, the place of Graceland is never reached. Context and time do sometimes matter. The Simon who is soft in the middle or at least feels an affinity for men who happen to be , however, the one who reminds young women of money, who has been divorced and has a kid to prove it, and who has the means to catch a cab uptown and take it all the way downtown talking dispassionately while doing so about the comings and goings of breakdowns, that Simon belongs to us as much as he does to our folks because he is our folks.
Not our folks the way they were before we were born, but the way they were when we first knew them, as they were losing their edge and feeling maybe a little insecure about that loss; our folks as we knew them when we ourselves were entering that era of childhood which finally allowed for reflection and the retention of memory and for the level of awareness that clued us into the fact that a baby with a baboon heart was something to wonder at and to then distantly — vaguely — mourn when she died three weeks after her baboon heart first beat inside her body; this was our folks the way they were when they were trying to raise us right: to say please and thank you and to only send food back under dire circumstances; the way they were when we really saw them for the first time.
At least, in retrospect. We also recognize not just our parents in the words of those songs, but ourselves and our own impending midlives that loiter like shortening shadows on the horizon. Likewise, I have a hunch the album means what it does to our parents because it captures who they were at that moment in time. Here was that young man all grown up and growing older still, struggling with a career slump and aging and still exploring this stuff of life by funneling it into words and music.
He is a startlingly intelligent and creative Schmo of sorts, and that, to me, is perhaps his most interesting aspect. Stardom implies a certain panache that Simon has never had because the man is a nerd. That he became famous at all is a testament to the fact that sometimes cream really does rise to the top and that is a small reassuring piece of information for the world.
It highlights a vulnerability that comes across in the lyrics of the album. Which highlights another merit of the album: that it is proof of life after the bloom of youth, proof that there is as much life in middle age as there is at any age, which has always been and will be one of the most difficult ideas for young people themselves to grasp. Here is Simon proving that he could be divorced and soft in the middle and still make an album that put him back on the playing field, and as a center forward.
In a article for the NYT magazine about Graceland , Ron Rosenbaum observed that the turning point from kitsch icon into just plain icon seems to have come around the time Paul Simon wrote a song about making a pilgrimage to the place and then named the album after it.
My sister and I could have chosen any number of places to be the single detour we took off the highway on the way home, neither of us young anymore but not quite middle-aged either. She looked awful, she said. Pale, bald, and hiding her baldness beneath a head scarf. I am a consummate documenter. And so I did sneak one picture.
I snapped it in the mirrored wall of the living room at Graceland and, in doing so, captured the three of us: me and my sister, partially obscured in the reflection by a large plant, and then Elvis, eyeballing us from inside his picture-framed perch, a not-so-holy trinity, but a trinity nonetheless, a family of sorts. I never noticed before, but looking at the photograph now I see that in the left-hand corner, on a shelf below the painting of Elvis, is a small black and white studio shot of a couple I somehow assume are the two people who got together and gave us — not just the two of us but all of us — Elvis.
My point is that there are now two Gracelands. There are now two of these touchstones, which somehow contain the grace of our internal and external geographies.
What they share — what their shared name signals they share — is that within them both is a dark hint flecked with light of that third Graceland: that place inside us where all roads eventually lead. Nell Boeschenstein is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about Trio. You can find her website here , and she twitters here. Great stuff. I think I love this even more than your piece about Linda, Dolly, and Emmylou, and I loved that one a lot.
Didn't like the album when it was new and still don't. It's a contrived recording, full of overly wordy and too -clever- by -half- lyrics, supported by thin melodies, barely propped up by excellent musicianship. One of the least interesting things done in the eighties. Love this article, it really hits home for me. I once went on a poorly planned camping trip with a friend, both of us children of hippies-turned-yuppies who grew up with our parents listening to that album.
Leaving Graceland 's merits aside for the moment, what does "Christgau would have done better to stick to critiquing what he was paid to" even mean? What Christgau was paid to do was write about music, which is exactly what he did, and did at least as well as anyone else who's ever tried. He was, however, far too kind to this album, which has always sounded like the work of someone who believes he can use his reasonably fluent lyrics to paper over a near-complete lack of actual songs.
Looking forward to hearing his new music. Great article about a fantastic album. Starkly brilliant, emotional vocals accompanied by a banjo. You must seek it out. I thought I maybe able to fly up from Australia with the kids and jump on her in Times Square or something.
Name Optional. January 25, Skip to content Paul Simon.
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