I’ll never forget hearing Paul Simon’s album Graceland for the first time. As a kid growing up in West Texas surrounded by country music and perpetually drowning in the blood of Christ, the South African musicians on that record blew my world apart. At the same time, Paul Simon’s songwriting pulled my world together. I find every song on the album to be worthy of discussion. (Except “Crazy Love,” which obviously sucks. Fight me.) But I’d like to spend some time exploring the song that made me want to be a songwriter: “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.”
Before I get started, let’s address the elephant in the room: at worst, Paul Simon possibly-maybe exploited the South African musicians who played on the album, and at best, he was incredibly insensitive to the detrimental effect his presence and money might have on the ongoing attempts to end apartheid. Go read about it, should that interest you.
But the reason I chose to pursue music theory instead of musicology in grad school was that, for all my fascination with culture, I want to feel free to look at the music itself and not think too much about its extra-musical context. I mean, FFS, I love Wagner’s music, okay? Of course, extracting music from its context is extraordinarily complicated and problematic, blah blah blah. But this isn’t grad school, it’s my blog, and I can ignore whatever I want. So consider me disclaimed. On to the song!
“Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” is the fifth song on Graceland, a 1986 album that Paul Simon recorded mostly in South Africa with South African musicians. It was released as a single, but as far as I can tell, “Diamonds” is not most people’s favorite. For me, though, it represents a pretty major songwriting accomplishment for Paul Simon. I find it to be complex and meaningful in its musical conception. Far beyond just the lyrics, the entirety of the song represents a successful attempt to create a work of magical realism in music. Let’s see if I can convince you that I have a point!
In the a capella opening, Ladysmith Black Mambazo builds a rich bed for Paul Simon’s light, youthful voice, creating a striking juxtaposition right away.
Crucially, LBM’s harmonies begin by sounding consonant and unsurprising, even comforting, which lets us enter the song without friction. But when PS repeats the line “empty as a pocket,” LBM sings a sliding harmony that doesn’t exist in Western music. We become hyper-aware that we’re in a world that’s not scary, but also not familiar. That world is made all the stranger by Paul Simon’s boyish, doo-wop style singing, with two phrases repeating: “ta na na,” sung in unison with an incredible, bleating LBM voice, and “diamonds on the soles of her shoes,” which means something in English, but is a phrase you’ve likely never heard before and whose meaning is elusive.
So the intro that prepares you for something, but the first time you hear it, you can’t imagine what that thing is. We can never recapture the first listen. It’s the only time when we have no idea what’s coming, and when we forge our bond with the musical world being built. That’s why the juxtaposition of the familiar and the surprising in the “Diamonds” intro is a great and unusual moment in songwriting: because they’re so well-placed and unusual, the musical elements themselves perform the introductory, first-time magic every time we hear them. To me, it has a similar effect to the first line of 100 Years of Solitude:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Even when you’ve read the novel five times, the opening line still casts a spell that opens our eyes to the non-linear nature of time, and of the blending of the everyday with the impossible.
Of course, the novel goes on to create a web of possible and impossible things mixing together in a soup, since dubbed magical realism. And as I’ll try to lay out below, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these introductions are aesthetically related. In fact, I consider “Diamonds” and much of Graceland to be swimming in the same waters as Marquez and Borges, albeit in a simpler way. But the reason the firing squad line specifically reminds me of the “Diamonds” intro is that it simultaneously narrows and widens our expectations for the novel. It tells us something about the story, but also lets us know that we’re in for something different, although we can’t predict what that will be.
In much the same way, the familiar musical elements of the “Diamonds” intro tell us that we’re going to be in a world that we feel generally safe in, but at the same time, that we should anticipate surprises. And that state, my friends, is a best-case scenario for getting a song underway. It’s a state where we’re comfortable, engaged, curious, and anticipating what comes next. In fact, the ending and pause that wraps up the introduction gives us a precious gift: time to live in that glorious, rare state of anticipation. It’s a common musical trick, and for good reason. What wonderful thing is coming from the brief silence?
Which, of course, in the case of “Diamonds,” is one of the most delightful guitar riffs that has ever been riffed, quickly supported by a band who is doing something markedly different from the typical superstar music of the era.
This could have easily been a moment of failure — it’s incredibly difficult to introduce new sounds to fans, who have notoriously specific expectations of their favorite artists — but instead, it’s a moment of true, unadulterated delight. And while Paul Simon deserves his accolades for creating the basic elements of the song and the form, which gives us that delightful juxtaposition between the intro and the instrumental opening of the first verse, the real heroes here are the musicians.
I’m not here to go into musical detail on the groove introduced before the lead vocals come in, but I’d invite you to take a very close listen to the timing of these musicians. Are we swinging or not swinging? Does that concept even have a place in this music? How does the UNBELIEVABLE, INCREDIBLE bass line complement the guitar riff? Can they even exist without each other??? There are theory papers galore in here, many of which have already been written. But almost no one reading this would know wtf the papers are talking about, and I’m honestly never planning to write another theory paper, so let’s be content with listening to this groove over and over for as long as we wish:
And then, little Paulie starts singing the verse. The initial world-building is complete, and we have ourselves a real, bona fide song.
And right from his entrance, his boyish, flippant melody and delivery are at odds with both the exuberance of the music, and with the strangeness of what he’s saying. Forgetting about the diamonds on the soles of her shoes for just a moment…wtf does “physically forgotten” even mean? Forgetting is mental, not physical! And “she slipped into my pocket with my car keys?” What is this, a pocket for ANTS??? Is this the empty pocket from the intro?? These are decidedly not doo-wop lyrics.
Let’s go back to magical realism for a minute to try to make sense of this language. While much ink has been spilled over exactly what magical realism is, let’s keep it simple here: it’s the presentation of the impossible in a realistic, matter-of-fact way. So, inserting magical, impossible bits into a realistic setting to create some sort of effect: being physically forgotten and slipping into someone’s pocket are impossible things, but the song in general is set in a normal world, where men and women go out dancing, stay out late, and question each other’s motives.
But lest we forget, we’re not talking about literature or poetry here. We’re talking about a song. And what makes a song a song is the way the music and the lyrics pull at each other. During the constant juxtaposition of strange imagery with totally normal human stuff throughout this song, we’re living inside a world that is, for a Western listener in the 80s, simultaneously incredibly familiar and so “other” that we could barely imagine how it worked. (Especially if we were 5 and in
West Texas at the time of first hearing.)
The feeling of familiarity is simple: Western pop music, from Appalachia to Tin Pan Alley to LA studios, sprung from African music. Western classical music barely raises its voice in the conversation. Of course, the relationship grows more complex the closer you look at it, and if we were unfortunate enough to be writing a scholarly paper about this, we’d have to dig into some specifics to tease out what’s going on with this music:
- Who were these musicians in South Africa? What kind of music did they make when they weren’t hired by Paul Simon?
- What sorts of music had they heard that influenced what they played?
- How traditional to their cultural music(s) are the sounds they made on Graceland?
There are knowable answers to these questions, but let’s stick with our flight of fancy and leave the digging to the scholars!
If you’re a non-South African person listening to this song, I doubt I have to explain the feeling of other-ness the band brings to “Diamonds.” Unfamiliar singing styles in an unfamiliar language, treatment of harmony we’re not used to, styles of playing instruments we haven’t heard, and rhythmic idiosyncrasies we can’t imitate — all of these elements combine to evoke a world we don’t know about. Let’s leave it to the social scientists to tell us about what that all means, but for our purposes, it means that this band ain’t from around here.
But what about Paul Simon’s voice itself? If you were familiar with Paul Simon and/or Simon & Garfunkel music before you heard Graceland, the sound of his voice is immediately recognizable. His greatest asset as a singer, beyond his musicality, is the timbre of his voice: mostly pebble-smooth, but with a bit of nasal edge that gives it a unique personality, like a scar on an otherwise perfect-looking face. But the way he’s using his voice on the Graceland album, and this song in particular, shows a mature awareness of situation that I don’t hear in his previous work.
By situation, I mean the musical situation we’ve been describing: a familiar conceptual environment (a pop song) has been taken over by voices and sounds that are eerily both familiar and unfamiliar, or uncanny. So what is a familiar voice to do in that situation?
I think Simon chose to use his voice as a knowing foil to the uncanny, as a literal embodiment of the humdrum and familiar. Compare his singing to how he sounded on his previous album, Hearts and Bones. His approach to vocal delivery on that album is straightforward, even on the arguably-ridiculous songs “Allergies” and “When Numbers Get Serious.” On the entirety of Graceland, I hear a self-aware quality to the delivery that’s new. Think about the sound of the line, “And I could say, ‘Woo oo oo, and everyone here would know what I was talking about’.”
His singing is studiously behind the beat, and he swings more than the band, even veering into triplet territory (again, a staple of doo-wop singing). He vocalizes the “everyone here” line differently at different times, but it’s always sing-songy (which, hilariously, in the context of a song, means that it sounds like he’s talking more than singing). This is the delivery of somebody who isn’t singing from the heart, but from the mind. So again, we have opposites pulling on each other: the band sounds like pure, bottled joy, while the singer is perpetually clever, both in his lyrics and his musical choices. Magic + realism, right? I mean, everybody here knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Since this post is already getting kind of long, I’m going to skip over a lot of great details in this song, but I do want to talk about the bit that single-handedly turned me into a songwriter. I mean the verse that starts like this:
She makes the sign of a teaspoon, he makes the sign of a wave.
My tiny, buzzing, 5-year-old brain exploded when I heard this line. What could it possibly mean? I knew these words and I understood the syntax, but put together in this way, they formed a concept that seemed both pregnant and impregnable. I KNEW they meant something, but I couldn’t figure out what that was. And this, my friend, is why I consider Paul Simon to be a person who occasionally touches Great Art. This line leaves galaxies worth of space for the listener to consider deep, personal, soul-touching meaning.
I have to think that Paul Simon and his band knew that this was a particularly great line, because it’s introduced by the best electric bass fill/solo ever to be played by human hands. Revel in it for a second, or let it loop for a couple of minutes if you have the time and inclination:
In fact, I still think about what the about the teaspoon and the wave mean with great regularity. They have come to assume a permanent place in my personal metaphorical/mythological logic. To me, they represent no less than the relationship between simple, practical, day-to-day, rational thinking (the teaspoon), and the powerful, deep, and strangely-moving unconscious mind (the wave). Sure, you can hold a few drops of water in a teaspoon, but you sure as hell can’t hold back a wave with one. Not to mention the title: the diamonds, of course, are the deep, magic well that springs from the practical reality of shoes, turning them into something meaningful.
Gloriously, there are lots of other great interpretations of this line out there, and the Good News is that they’re all correct for someone. But the reason that my interpretation resonates so much for me is that it’s perfectly reflected in the music. In fact, I think the music makes the statement even more clearly than the lyrics.
The humdrum, day-to-day singer ironically croons about a rich girl he likes who has some strange and symbolic footwear. He sails across the surface of a giant sea of musical forces that put us in a strange, uncanny state of joy. We’re in a world we know, but new possibilities have arisen.
Each of the musicians involved in this album was a musical powerhouse, and a huge part of the magic of the music exists because the managed to form a whole that was more than the sum of their parts. This is a best-case scenario in an ensemble: a group of players who can each work a room on their own, coming together to weave a complex tapestry that both showcases the richness of each musician, and expresses itself as a whole with complete clarity. To achieve that in the format of a pop song, and to successfully add in such complex lyrical content, is quite a feat.
While the album version is 150% the canonical version of this song musically, I invite you to watch this footage of the original band performing live in 1987, a year after Graceland was released. These musicians are a joy to watch, and while you watch, you can ponder just how they go about splitting the atom of magic and realism.