25 years on, Simons’ Graceland album still a musical masterpiece

If every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, Paul Simon has been twice anointed, first as a 1960s folk-rock icon, then as world music emissary with Graceland, the landmark album he released 25 years ago this month.

Stung by a second failed marriage and looking for a way to boost his flagging career, the singer-songwriter holed up at home on Long Island and was contemplating a new direction when a friend gave him a tape of South African “township jive”.

A smitten Mr Simon ventured to South Africa to catch up with the musicians, spending weeks recording with them as a global movement gelled against the racial segregation system known as apartheid.

Then in August, 1986 he stunned the world with what is universally considered his solo masterpiece: 11 eclectic tracks of autobiographical pop, soulful American R&B, Louisiana zydeco and Chicano rock layered with gorgeous African rhythms and harmonies that catapulted him back into the limelight.

It became the soundtrack to the lives of countless Americans and Europeans, selling 14 million copies, winning album of the year and song of the year Grammy Awards, turning a capella South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo into superstars and bringing African music in general to a wider world.

It pre-dated today’s musical mash-ups, and with the album coming as it did at the dawn of compact discs, and on the cusp of the mobile phone and internet revolutions, its opening track The Boy in the Bubble foretold the future with its hi-tech imagery.

“These are the days of lasers in the jungle,” Mr Simon sang.

In a way, Graceland was the first 21st century album. “It sounds like it could have been made yesterday,” author Marc Eliot, whose biography of Mr Simon came out last year, said.

“If he had done nothing else but that album, he’d be in the pantheon of the greats.”

Mr Simon, who turns 70 in October, is among just a handful of artists to make hit records in seven decades, from the late 1950s with friend Art Garfunkel to this year’s album So Beautiful or So What.

In the 1970s, Mr Simon produced soulful and sentimental rock and made forays into Latin beats and reggae.

But by the early 1980s his new work was largely ignored. Slip-sliding into irrelevance, he took a chance few major artists would have, said Mr Eliot, by seeking out rock’s roots and traveling to Africa.

Mr Simon didn’t look nostalgically at the continent as a source of musical influence, however – he was embracing Africa’s current of creativity, and in the process challenging a backward political system five years before Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

“For me, Graceland still remains the greatest album ever produced by any outside composer representing South African music,” said Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, the South African musician who took Simon to Johannesburg’s Soweto township in 1985 and suggested musicians the American could work with.