Meintjes Critical Review #9

Mientjes addresses the interesting case of collaboration in Paul Simon's Graceland, addressing lots of political issues despite the record itself being largely apolitical/politically ambiguous. She correctly states that this does not absolve the record from having political issues associated with its production. She goes a bit to far in my opinion in writing off the "bourgeois" notion of treating an album as an independent entity; it seems like a threatening line of thought that could undermine her whole point.

She does a thorough job of explaining the spectrum of collaboration on the individual tracks, as well as the complex crossindexing that occurs when two musical worlds that have influenced each other for a long time are explicitly combined.

She also carefully stepped through various involved parties and the different interpretations of the record within those parties. One of her most interesting points was the rhetoric behind a vaguely-pronoun "we," and how different groups used that for their own political and social purposes.

While the depth and breadth of her examination are both impressive, I can't help but think that this whole article can be summed up by simply saying. "Graceland meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people."