The year of 1986 doesn’t resonate like, maybe, 1977 or 1966 or 1957 as a classic year for pop music. But a look at the year’s album releases proves it pisses all over 1985 and worries the ass of 1987. Amongst a list of casually accepted ‘classic’ albums, though, Graceland by the pugnacious Paul Simon sits, slightly uncomfortable, like a racist uncle doing his best not to say anything racist at a family wedding between two young people with different skin shades.
What you won’t see, and what I say you should see in a list of classics, is the collaboration between New York City rapper Just-Ice and producer Kurtis Mantronik, known to their mums as Joseph Williams Junior and Graham el Khaleel, respectively, the album called Back To The Old School.
What?! What ‘old school’? I hear you saying. It’s 198fuckin6, it was still the future, when Casio watches could be radios (or lighters - honestly!) Which particular old school would they be going back to? 1986 saw the release of Run DMC’s Raisin’ Hell and Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill, so we’re still essentially at the point where hiphop is just about being called Hip Hop instead of ‘rap’.
It shows just how much that cultural time has slowed down that in 1986 there was already an ‘old school’, a nostalgia for straight-talking Hip Hop - street-level, not hanging about with stadium rockers - and just seven years after Rapper’s Delight first took an otherwise obscure genre out of the Bronx and on to the Tony Blackburn show.
Set to the hardest, unfussy beats Just-Ice does indeed sound like he’s just looked up from a game of craps on a sunny sidewalk and decided to focus on your mother for a few choice moments. if Hip Hop was ever real, this is it at its realest. But there is something also inherently musical to the sparse arrangements.
The voice and beats join like the right jigsaw pieces and create an image of a lost New York, before irony and hand-held cameras in cop shows, when Spiderman existed best in your imagination because the likelihood of a boy from NYC in tights doing anything other than wake up at noon, smoke a big spliff, eat a yoghurt, do his make up and head to the Limelight at 2AM is just preposterous.
Graceland, however, sums up a particular, mullet-headed version of the American 1980s by accident. A time when Bonos and Bruces were seriously seen as the People’s Spokespeople and the arrogance of platinum record sales danced with the plastic gilt flaking from the Trump Tower.
That Paul Simon could make a record, in South Africa, during the white heat of apartheid’s desperate dying days, as school children and students were killed and tortured and in the face of the Black South African’s plea for the world to boycott their country is breathtaking enough. That he would then compound this by defending it, by accepting the (considerable) royalties and, as with Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood this week, try to say the very act of musicians working together on a commercial recording creates circumstances where boycotts should be ignored, that, somehow, equality will happen as a result of musical collaborations… well, there are some things hard to forgive and Simon remains in a very dark place as far as I am concerned.
He’s never apologised. And, even though the Black South Africans who worked on the album with him are still grateful for the exposure and the fees, Graceland remains unwelcome in Black South African homes.
It’s a battle of two worlds. One, from street-level, celebrating its own survival instincts and the other, from a floor way above the streets, celebrating its clever dollars that always seem to end up in white, culturally expropriating musician’s pockets.
