5/17 Response

            Meintjes claims that all White South African fans of Graceland embrace the record because it allows them “to legitimate their own identity as local” (p. 51).  The issue of White South Africans listening to the traditional influences on Graceland and casting them as belonging to an overarching national identity interests me.  Colonization began long ago, and by now generations upon generations of white people have grown up in South Africa.  While their heritage is European, if all they’ve ever known is South Africa, I can understand the desire to identify as South African rather than perpetually remaining cultural outsiders in their homeland.  However, I wonder where these people stood on apartheid.  Were they mainly for or against it?  Or was opinion split?  It seems to me that if you’re trying to buy in to a system with one unifying notion of South African culture (a South African culture that includes you), it would be extremely hypocritical to support a social structure based on racial segregation and inequality.

            On page 69, Meintjes mentions that some people sought to analyze Graceland on a purely aesthetic level, ignoring the social implications and focusing only on the artistic value.  Evaluating art in a vacuum seems somewhat problematic to me.  You can strip away the context of art and analyze it on its own, but I don’t think that that necessarily gives you the pure, essential core of the piece.  While the strictly musical merits of a song are worth considering, ignoring context entirely can put blinders on you and cause you to miss something important.  An understanding of context goes a long way in elucidating an artist’s motivation/message, which often makes a piece much more powerful and compelling.  When thinking about my position on this, I was reminded of the movie High Noon.  High Noon is a Western from the 1950s that I saw on the shelf at a video store this summer and decided to watch.  It was a decent viewing experience, but I wasn’t bowled over.  Then I looked the movie up online and read that it was culturally significant because of its allegorical criticisms of the Red Scare and the HUAC, which was a highly controversial thing to come out against back in the 50s.  Knowing this context absolutely makes High Noon a better movie, and it seems to me that if you analyze High Noon without considering that context, you are, at least to some degree, missing the point.