The Magnificent Seven: Graceland
This is the second in a series of articles that looks at seven albums the authors appreciate. In terms of criteria: they must be albums listened to only in their entirety… content and form together like houses in motion. They also must have enormous personal relevance: they are corner stones. They may not be cool, but they are us.
#2
Graceland, Paul Simon
Do you have music where listening to it is like breathing? It's been there since you were born, an album cover with the shape of the record showing through like a bark rubbing, then a cassette tape, dusty and rattling around the bottom of the car, then it slips into the back of your mind, never letting go, until one day, it surfaces again, when you’re thousands of miles away from home and it washes over you like a wave.
Graceland is one of those albums. Learned in utero, played throughout my childhood, the lyrics live in my mind, well worn paths that I can follow with my eyes closed. I love its juxtapositions, songs about the Mississippi delta with Zulu and zydeco backbeats, reminding us that there really isn’t a difference between all these sounds, this is the story of how we begin to remember…
Graceland conjures up incredible faces and times, it is an album that has connected me to surprising people, introduced me to some of my best friends and reinforced foundations.
I was volunteering in South Africa, after taking a year off from high school, living in a small town in the Western Cape with an older woman and her sister. We just couldn’t connect. She tried to teach me Afrikaans, laughed at my pronunciation, made me liver and butter sandwiches, told me I was getting fat and didn’t ever say much about herself, until one day a few weeks before I left, “I want to show you Mandela’s house and the place that I stood on the road when I watched him walk free.” What do you say to that?
We drove through Paarl, winding along tree-lined streets. She showed me the house her family had lived in before they had been forced to move. As we pulled away from it, she put on Graceland. This isn’t some great post-Apartheid story of truth and reconciliation, I know nothing is simple about the process and politics of Paul Simon recording that album, but to me, this music has always been about coming together; the combination of disparate traditions and ideas, finding yourself on a trip, being in a new place, seeing angels in the architecture, discovering the myth of finger prints…all that shit. It’s also about being away, the complicated mix of feeling at home in a place you’ll never belong, whether that is under African skies or in your own bed.
Graceland is a lodestone, an album constantly in my orbit. I can’t imagine life without it.
Key Tracks: Graceland, Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes, Crazy Love, Vol.II
Emma Impink appreciates being your long lost pal.