Yeah, but who would win in a fight?Peter Gabriel would tell Paul Simon that he refuses to do violence. Simon would agree.
There's a lot of this sort of detached entitlement out there. It's certainly not unique to music, but listening to music is such a universal experience, and as crafts go music-making such a common outlet, that it's that much more visible when "I want content generated to my tastes" collides with "I'm making something with my bare hands" in such a way that the folks in the more passive former camp feel somehow totally comfortable asserting the high ground on the people in the latter.To which I'd like to add some thoughts on this so-called "musical colonialism".
Personal taste is personal taste and everybody's got a right to it; criticism is useful, at least when it's useful. Beyond that, though, there's a lot of Why Am I Not Being Correctly Entertained out there in the world that manages to get off the leash for no good reason, and from the doing-the-work, learning-the-craft, making-the-content side of things that does get awful tiring.
I think Rhythm of the Saints and Hearts and Bones were great work. I also followed the Ladysmith Black Mombazo thing pretty closely and have revisited it in lots of discussions through an ethnomusicology/colonialism lens, and though it was certainly complex I don't agree that it was exploitive, and it has certainly changed that group's trajectory as well as music history [some stuff here about LBM's subsequent successes attributable to their exposure on Graceland].There's some kind of strange irony in that it's generally the same sectors of people who want an end to sample licensing, critique the music business, advocate open source everything, opine about cross-cultural influence, appropriation and collaboration in the development of every single musical form of the last two centuries, and support free culture for most art forms are eager to take up the "Colonial" torch against Simon for one album out of an entire career, - no, wait, an entire musical genre - built on nothing other than borrowing and building on what's been borrowed. It's a broken-down bandwagon. Isn't it time, 25 years later, for a bit of a wider perspective on this issue?
In addition, this musical-borrowing mode is one Simon had experimented with in his work with the Dixie Hummingbirds on "Loves Me Like a Rock," in producing "Mother & Child Reunion" with members of Jimmy Cliff's band and Toots and the Maytals, or the use of the Afro-Cuban drumming pattern mozambique on Late in the Evening. Or even just the free draw he and Garfunkel took so early on from New York street-corner singing, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly, or a little later from Dylan and the Beatles.
I go to bat in a pretty serious way for the ability of musicians and other creative artists to exchange, borrow, '"steal," reuse, and redevelop music as freely as possible, in recorded contexts just as they do in vernacular contexts, and it would be hypocritical of me to take this one instance and argue that it was wrong and should never have happened. It's not that it happened, but the way it happened - with poor communication and mismatched expectations, I suspect - that's problematic. And there ended up being some strong money involved, which always complicates issues of authorship and ownership.
...
I mean, I'm sympathetic, but it looks like what happened with "The Myth of Fingerprints" is sort of ambiguous. It seems to come down to the basic issue of a writing credit (and the concomitant residuals). Wikipedia gives this response from Simon:
"I just said at this stage I don't care whether the album comes out without Los Lobos on it. I was getting really tired of it—I don't want to get into a public slanging match over this, but this thing keeps coming up. So we finished the recordings. And three months passed, and there was no mention of 'joint writing.' The album came out and we heard nothing. Then six months passed and Graceland had become a hit and the first thing I heard about the problem was when my manager got a lawyer's letter. I was shocked. They sent this thing to my manager, not me. If there was a problem, they could have contacted me direct. They've got my home number; we talked a lot. If you ask me, it was a lawyer's idea. You know, 'The record's a hit, and there's $100,000 in it.' They had nine months from the recordings to talk to me about all this, but I heard nothing. And it's still not sorted out, because they still keep bringing it up—I heard they'd done this interview for you. I don't want to get into a public slanging match with them, because I really like their music." [3]
Is Paul Simon, in person, an asshole? Probably. He's been famous since he was a teenager and probably has a very overinflated sense of his own importance - there seems to be plenty of evidence for that. Did he make a lot of mistakes in the way he coordinated the production of Graceland? Yeah, I would say so. But the type of project he was doing was totally unprecedented. Certainly, David Byrne and Ry Cooder and T Bone Burnett and everyone else who followed in these footsteps did it better and more wisely. I think that Simon kind of clomps around like a gorilla, focused on the product and not really sensitive to the nuances of collaboration, especially cross-cultural collaboration. Music producers have come a long way in this regard - paternalism hasn't been at all a stranger to the development of a world music scene, recording, folk festivals, or any other place where mixing occurred until pretty recent times. I've seen it evolve even in the last twelve years at a folk and indigenous sea music festival I've helped coordinate. Others have learned from this and done better. But there is not enough here to convince me to disparage Simon's entire catalogue or his overall contribution to the development of Western pop music. Like any artist with a 40-year career - and that's a small club - he has won some and lost some in terms of overall project quality, sure. But I think as far as evaluating all of his collaborative work, its successes and failures, that the story is pretty complex, has a larger context that takes in widespread concerns about collaboration and borrowing and the invention of creative work, and is probably not easily reducible to "Simon stole."
Great line, yes, but the Mississippi Delta (the region south of Memphis) was settled almost entirely after the Civil War.
The rest of the latter half of that decade I think I spent listening to old Steely Dan records.
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posted by davebush at 12:41 PM on April 12, 2011 [3 favorites]