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| Paul Simon in Under African Skies. |
Sounds of defiance
By Ed Rampell
Joe Berlinger’s complicated two-hour
documentary Under African Skies has,
on the one hand, a sonorous soundtrack featuring Paul Simon and his African Graceland band. On the other hand, the
doc deals with a complex issue: The role of art and politics. When the better
half of Simon and Garfunkel flew to Johannesburg to record tracks for an album
mixing American pop and the South African sound, he ran afoul of a cultural
boycott supported by the U.N. and African National Congress against the
tyrannical apartheid regime, enforced in those gloomy days before Nelson
Mandela was released from prison.
Twenty five years later Simon reunites with
his onetime African bandmates and the doc examines the controversial role Simon
played then and its resonance today. In crucial scenes the aging Simon meets
one of the ANC revolutionaries who condemned the musician in the 1980s for
breaking a boycott intended to strangle the segregationist state. Simon
continues to decry the way politicians use artists and insists on the right of
talents to express themselves. Who’s right? Having triumphed over apartheid,
the ANC activist can afford to be magnanimous.
In any case, the music, featuring Miriam
Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Simon, etc., is extraordinary,
and creates a musical mélange that’s the dialectical opposite of
apartheid.
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