RECORDS
There are probably all sorts of ways (50?) to justify avoiding this album, but the one that first occurred to me was this: it appeared that the yuppie chronicler of life between the wars had, in pursuit of a much needed change of pace, taken a musicological approach to that trendiest of tragedies, South Africa.
RECORDS
Richard C. Walls
by
OUT OF AFRICA
PAUL SIMON Graceland (Warner Bros.)
There are probably all sorts of ways (50?) to justify avoiding this album, but the one that first occurred to me was this: it appeared that the yuppie chronicler of life between the wars had, in pursuit of a much needed change of pace, taken a musicological approach to that trendiest of tragedies, South Africa. Hearing that Simon had collaborated with several S.A. musicians and singers, I imagined a song cycle of exquisitely clever navelgazing, well-meaningly punctuated by inappropriate stretches of contrasting “primitiveness” and exotic color. And I was wrong. Though there are times when the musical pastiche seems too obviously patchwork and others where Simon’s lyric sensibility seems on automatic, still, this is his best album since There Goes Rhymin ' Simon—and that was a long, long time ago.