My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (5) Graceland - Paul Simon

[This is the sixth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Paul Simon followed up Hearts and Bones – the biggest flop of his career - with Graceland, which catapulted his star beyond even the heights he experienced as Art Garfunkel's secret mustache. The album was recorded in apartheid-era South Africa in an act of apolitical musical outreach; it nonetheless drew the ire of the UN and ANC, each of whom condemned Simon's breach of the prevailing cultural embargo. The album's mythology is subsumed by its political context, to which the virtual entirety of the official making-of documentary Under African Skies is devoted. As usual, this unfortunately glosses over what made the album truly special to begin with. Graceland was not only the original mainstream world fusion album, it remains unsurpassed 3 decades later in pure vitality. Paul Simon emerged from his messy divorce from Carrie Fisher with a remarkable, incisive set of lyrics, delivered in some of the best performances of his career. The music, meanwhile, was carefully edited down (mostly) from studio jams directed by Simon himself. These infuse the proceedings with a palpable feeling of discovery: that of an already accomplished artist being exposed, in real time, to an entirely fresh musical vocabulary. And indeed, many of the album's most magical moments are borne of instruments alone, from the storied accordion-and-drums opening bars to the ethereal coda of "Under African Skies." (It helps that he found musicians to perform with so uniformly outstanding as Ladysmith Black Mambazo and bassist Bakithi Kumalo.) Graceland remains touching at such a remove from the collapse of apartheid because it's simultaneously a man's lonely journey through personal turmoil and his being opened up to new, reinvigorating worlds of experience. It remains not only the pinnacle of Paul Simon's career, but an enduring testament to our shared humanity.