He vigorously defended his right to say what he wished while on air and regularly offended listeners from all walks of life.
Explorers 1985 song all around the world free#
The job was risky because there was no free speech in South Africa. His job as a talk show host was to engender opinions, instil debate and communicate. John Berks was active while Paul Simon was doing his South African project. The topic of passbooks was newsworthy for many months, especially on talk radio. The situation changed on Jwhen the South African government lifted the requirement to carry passbooks. Without a passbook you could be arrested and sent back to your homeland. It was an identity document with photograph, fingerprints and other information. A black man was always obliged to carry his passbook with him. One of the cornerstone apartheid laws related to the passbook. The Myth of Fingerprints immediately suggests a political song with an anti-apartheid theme. For South Africans, the word associations arising from ‘fingerprints’ are typically police, passbooks and apartheid. There was a boycott against South Africa because of apartheid. Paul Simon was in South Africa during 19. But that it shouldn't stop us asking questions and doing what we can to improve matters, even if we must, eventually, "learn to live alone". It opines that this is human nature and that we must, to some extent, learn to live with it. So this is a song about how conflict and oppression are built on emphasizing small differences between people. We notice it - "somebody says what's a better thing to do" - but do nothing. The lyrics about the sun rising and falling ("bloody" - another conflict motif) and "all around the world" suggest this has been going on essentially forever. "Black pit town," could be a mining town, or also a mining town populated by people of colour. "Watermelon" is a common racist motif in the US. This is all over other repeated structures in the song. Racism is founded on differences - the myth of fingerprints. It's worth remembering that this is the closing track on an album which features critiques of racism as a major theme. Its inhabitants were forcibly removed by the US navy prior to building the base. There is also only one US army base in the Indian Ocean - Diego Garcia. There is, however, hope that we might learn. The previous verse becomes interesting in this context:Īrmies are required because we fight over our differences: it's what "the old army post was for". It's interesting that the subject of the song is a talk show host, someone who makes a living interviewing the rich and famous and thus focussing on what makes them "different" from everyday people. The myth of fingerprints condemns us to live alone - as atomised, quarrelsome individuals - when we could instead enjoy the fruits of living in harmony. While our differences are stressed by the final verse: I have seen them all, and man, they're all the same It's also a literal myth: fingerprints are highly differential but they are not unique.Īs user very helpfully observed in the comments, our commonality is emphasised by this line, where "they" is fingerprints: The "myth of fingerprints" is that by focusing on trivial aspects of ourselves, we appear to be very different when in fact we have much more in common with one another.
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