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What Happened, Miss Simone?. Alan Light
Читать онлайн.Название What Happened, Miss Simone?
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118732
Автор произведения Alan Light
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Even after her best performing days had passed, though, Simone’s influence endured. “To me, she was the quintessential woman: strong, unafraid, brutally honest, genuine, vulnerable, soulful and passionate,” Alicia Keys wrote. “She made me want to practice the piano twenty hours a day until my skill was as great as hers. She made me want to live life, learn and experience it earnestly and use my voice to say SOMETHING!! Say something that could ring true in the spirit of the people.”
Other wildly successful artists also took cues from Simone. At 1994’s American Music Awards, on the heels of her performance in The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston—then arguably the biggest pop star in the world—constructed a medley that cemented her own place within American musical history’s lineage, while paying homage to the honored position Nina held there. For the performance’s opening, Houston chose Simone’s very first single and highest-charting song in the United States, “I Loves You, Porgy,” belting the George and Ira Gershwin song Nina had made famous before launching into “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” the show-stopping climax from the musical Dreamgirls. Houston concluded the appearance by tearing into a wrenching version of The Bodyguard’s “I Have Nothing,” seamlessly fusing multiple decades of black female passion and strength in ten minutes. And when the night ended, Whitney walked away with eight AMAs, the most trophies ever awarded to a female performer in a single night.
That same year, Jeff Buckley included his achingly emotional version of “Lilac Wine”—a song Simone recorded in 1966—on Grace, the one and only album he released in his short lifetime, a record that influenced everyone from Radiohead to Coldplay to Miley Cyrus, who released her own cover of “Lilac Wine” in 2014. In 1996, Lauryn Hill name-checked Simone on “Ready or Not,” the first single from the Fugees’ Grammy-winning, six-times platinum album The Score. (“While you’re imitating Al Capone / I’ll be Nina Simone / Defecating on your microphone,” L. Boogie rhymed.)
Simone’s own music maintained a steady cultural presence. Her brassy “Feeling Good” continues to pop up in numerous TV shows (including the cultural sensation Sex and the City) and singing competitions, a swaggering jolt of old-school girl power. It’s a Nina standard that’s been covered by George Michael, Michael Bublé, and the rock band Muse. In 2008, during his historic presidential campaign, Barack Obama revealed that he too was a Nina Simone fan. On a list of his top ten songs, he put her 1965 recording of “Sinnerman”—a song she had learned in her childhood at revival meetings led by her mother—at number 5, in between the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “Touch the Sky” by rapper Kanye West. (Toward the end of his tenure, Obama may have signaled a change in his own mood by including “Feeling Good” as his Simone selection on a playlist for Spotify.)
West, in fact, introduced Simone’s work to still more listeners, sampling her recordings numerous times on productions for other artists and on his own albums—most controversially, using a segment of her chillingly matter-of-fact version of “Strange Fruit” for his 2013 “Blood on the Leaves,” an appropriation leading many to question the incorporation of a groundbreaking composition written to protest the lynching of southern black men into a song that most listeners assumed was only about a breakup, groupies, and drugs.
More recently, though, interest in Simone has escalated dramatically. A feature film project has spent years in limbo; though Mary J. Blige was initially cast in the starring role, the part eventually went to Zoe Saldana, sparking ongoing protest that Nina Simone, writer of “Four Women,” should not be portrayed by a lighter-skinned actress. After lengthy delays, the movie was scheduled for release in December 2015.
In the meantime, the spirit of Simone figured prominently in 2014’s acclaimed Beyond the Lights, which starred Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the rising, ambitious R&B star Noni Jean. “Nina Simone, she’s sort of like the ghost throughout the movie,” said Mbatha-Raw. “Artists like Nina Simone and India. Arie represented the more soulful side of where Noni wants to be, even though she is in this sort of packaged persona.”
By February 2015, mentions of Simone were spiking in connection with major events in music. In the week leading up to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Bob Dylan was honored by the MusiCares charity. Following performances of his songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Jack White, Dylan unexpectedly stole the show with a lengthy, freewheeling speech looking back over his own history, influences, and inspirations.
“Nina Simone, I used to cross paths with her in New York City in the Village Gate nightclub,” said Dylan. “She was an artist I definitely looked up to. She recorded some of my songs that she learned directly from me, sitting in a dressing room. She was an overwhelming artist, piano player, and singer. Very strong woman, very outspoken and dynamite to see perform. That she was recording my songs validated everything that I was about. Nina was the kind of artist that I loved and admired.”
Also in February, John Legend and Common won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Glory,” their theme to Ava DuVernay’s film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 voting rights march led by Martin Luther King Jr. Legend—who had included “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” written by Dr. Billy Taylor but popularized by Simone, on his 2008 collaboration with the Roots, Wake Up!—began his acceptance speech by stating that “Nina Simone said it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live. We wrote this song for a film that was based on events that were fifty years ago, but we say Selma is now, because the struggle for justice is right now.”
And that same month, Grammy-winning singer/bass player Meshell Ndegeocello, who has worked with such artists as Madonna, John Mellencamp, and the Rolling Stones, played a tribute show to Simone as part of the Lincoln Center American Songbook series; she had previously released an album in 2012 titled Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone. Asked about her ability to inhabit the songs of another artist, Ndegeocello noted that this was precisely the inspiration she took from Simone.
“Nina [was] great at that,” she said. “Look at her version of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’ I think [the Animals] have sold more records, but hers is the quintessential version. Her ability to take a Leonard Cohen song (‘Suzanne’) and make it her own is a testament of her improvisational ability and greatness, and that’s definitely the one thing I try to celebrate with her, is that she’s the one who inspired me to look at songs just as songs and try to put your own character inside of them.”
Why was there such a sudden burst of attention for an artist who had been dead for a dozen years? How had public consciousness remained so high for someone who had only grazed the pop charts a few times and who had no songs that had penetrated mass nostalgia sufficiently to stay in circulation on oldies radio?
“Fifty years after her prominence, Nina Simone is now reaching her peak,” wrote Salamishah Tillet in the New York Times. “Today Simone’s multitudinous identity captures the mood of young people yearning to bring together our modern movements for racial, gender and sexual equality.”
Maybe in the months of Ferguson and Baltimore (following the death of Freddie Gray, her 1978 recording of Randy Newman’s song “Baltimore”—“Oh, Baltimore / Ain’t it hard just to live”—was being widely shared on social media), and the resurgence of protest by and for black Americans, Nina Simone’s music, image, and history had a new resonance. Writing in The Nation, Syreeta McFadden asserted that “at this critical moment in our national life, Simone’s voice has once again reached an urgent pitch, her music and activism has captured our cultural imagination again.” Or maybe the majesty, purity, and distinctiveness of her work mean that it’s always there, waiting for those who will discover and appreciate its power on its own terms.
Simone presumably would have welcomed the ongoing vitality of her music; she was certainly never shy about expressing her disappointment that she was underappreciated. “I really thought that this planet