![]() ![]() ![]() Graceland derived much of its buoyancy from the jumping township jive that Simon adopted, with relatively little revision, as its musical heart and soul. Simon has taken the primitive, religious roots of this music as inspiration for a song cycle that examines with visionary beauty and brooding intensity the viability of faith in a corrupt, heartless and sometimes merely predictable world. The idioms that drive the new record are the guitar stylings of West African pop and the ritual rhythms of candomblé, a syncretic Afro-Brazilian cult that formed in South America when West Africans were displaced there during the diaspora. The Rhythm of the Saints, Simon’s first collection of new material in four years, extends his reach not only further into the riches of world-beat music but further into the realm of the spiritual. Lifted to higher ground by the force of that album’s lively South African grooves, the notorious pop fatalist found himself singing, “I’ve reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.” The feeling of transcendence was tangible. But on Graceland, he showed a willingness to explore a world of ideas and feelings outside the labyrinthine complexity of his own psyche. Simon had dutifully paraded his tangled emotions on the epics of despair Paul Simon and Still Crazy After All These Years, as well as on the slightly less constrained There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and Hearts and Bones. the singer-songwriter was “looking for a shot of redemption.” Over the course of his brilliant solo career to that point. On Graceland, Paul Simon‘s spirited, cross-cultural masterpiece. ![]()
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