Nina Simone's Insistent Blackness

Critic William C. Anderson on Nina Simone's enduring legacy and how she "commands her listeners as a Black woman."
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"To me we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world…Black people. I mean that in every sense."

— Nina Simone

The first time I heard Nina Simone sing "Do I Move You", I was entranced within seconds. After asking the initial question for which the song is titled, she’d warned me "the answer better be yes." She decided for me, my ears, and my soul. She made clear one does not have the option of denying her magnificence. As an artist, icon, and activist Nina Simone’s insistent Blackness has guided and blessed generations. However, something that sets Nina Simone apart is how she uniquely commands her listeners as a Black woman.

-=-=-=-Nina Simone’s Blackness is important for many reasons. Being Black in the United States often forces people to come to terms with some things that are difficult. The fear that comes with realizing one’s humanity is criminalized, threatening, and expendable often drives many Black people into a subdued existence. Non-confrontational Blackness is seen as a much easier human existence for the descendants of chattel slavery. This is encapsulated in the Malcolm versus Martin debate—do you turn the other cheek or do you retaliate? Nina Simone’s music is a retaliation, if not a full fledged rebellion. "I am not nonviolent" is what she is said to have once proclaimed to Dr. Martin Luther King upon making his acquaintance. Within her songs, her music carries a spirit of defiance.

Simone’s "Mississippi Goddam" is the quintessential example of how she was unbound by any standards or rules. One of her many musical contributions to the civil rights movement, it was laced with a direct and confrontational chorus. Her Black power is in every note, every forceful breath and pause—because not only is she saying what others wouldn’t, but she was saying it using profanity at a time that was unheard of. She was cursing out those still enforcing Jim Crow, but also an America that was betraying its own people. Dick Gregory said "not one black man would dare say ‘Mississippi Goddam.’"

In this, it is the sheer temerity of the Black womanhood of Nina Simone that defies much more than she is still ever given credit for. Her free expression and personality carry liberation for all Black people, via her insistence that Blackness was something to be proud of. But it would do her a disservice to divorce Simone from the importance of her gendered existence. She had to be better than everyone else—exceptional—first as a Black classically trained pianist and then be better again on top of that because she was a Black woman. She battled White supremacist society and chauvinist mistreatment throughout the entirety of her life. Even now, as racially tense times and a new biographic documentary give rise to a Nina Simone renaissance, her legacy has to compete; What Happened, Miss Simone? is given narrative arc through the words of her abusive ex-husband, who was her original manager. Despite this, we still can recognize the real story of a woman who was ahead of her time, and the burdens that came with being an artist that resisted all the world sought to lay on her.

The labor that was put into Simone’s bold persona along with her unique vocals place her music in an almost afro-futuristic setting. Though the thematic elements she played with were not always as whimsical as some of her lesser known contemporaries like Sun Ra or Alice Coltrane, she played herself into another realm. That place that she entered was a Black future. Her prophetic lyrics hold relevance today because she was innovative enough to make them carry the weight of time. For example, Nina Simone’s cover of "Baltimore" made several rounds on social media this year during the Baltimore uprising against police brutality. The lyrics fit perfectly into the pervasive mood of frustration and fury:

"Oh, Baltimore/ Man, it's hard just to live/ Oh, Baltimore/ Man, it's hard just to live, just to live"

She sings bluntly about a dying city, 30 years before the murder of Freddie Gray. Simone’s prophetic instance here and other places in her catalog such as songs like "Revolution (Pts. 1 and 2)", and "Ain't Got No-I Got Life" show us her continual relevance. These examples could have been foresight, though part of their potency is their sheer necessity. We need songs that illuminate the scope of racism and the plight of Black people in America, the stagnancy of Black progress with its application to everyday Black life. Simone is one who dispenses to Black people a mandatory musical medicine, the efficacy of which continues to transcend her lived time and space.

Posthumously, Nina Simone injects herself into the lifeblood of Black America whenever we need her music. Her famous friend, author James Baldwin, wrote the prophetic The Fire Next Time, and Simone’s music maintains relevance for that inferno. It’s been crucial to the Black experience to have our existence reflected by Black artists, to reinforce our humanity, to communicate and insist on our personhood beyond our own communities. Black music provides an anchor in and of itself for us. Simone’s songs like "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black", (written for author Lorraine Hansberry) or her rendition of Miriam Makeba’s "West Wind" salve and deliver those in need of love, kinship, and empathy.

Simone’s life, these days, has often been remembered by the struggles that marked it, but that’s not exactly fair. Nina Simone is so much more than what she went through to make the music she made for us. She’s a cultural icon and what she did for Black America ultimately feeds everyone else because Black people provide so much American cultural capital. We often think of artists in a historic context solely regarding what they did for us, but the way we celebrate her should move beyond this frame, beyond her superhuman ability to endure and transmogrify her pain into music that moves us.

Nina Simone expressed a solemn duty to Black people, and the impact it had on her career was palpable. That was decades ago. Now, in an era where things are purported to be significantly more equal, one might be hard pressed to find performers as bold as she was throughout her life. She inspires to this day with her famous words about an artist's "duty to reflect the times."

Beyond the fact that she was one of the greatest musicians of her era, Nina Simone was in charge of herself. As a dark skinned Black woman, with a wide nose, and big lips— she represents the beauty of Blackness that society has often tried to make us despise. One of her greatest songs, "Four Women", speaks to different Black women’s experiences in this regard. From her thoughts to her voice, she often carried the antithesis of what society wants from Black women. She was not quiet and easily broken. There’s a difference in just wanting to be liked as opposed to wanting to do whatever one pleases and liking it.

This is what makes Nina Simone timeless. Her relevance remains because one of her primary concerns was the culture, because her songs were a ferocious and undeniable argument. When someone makes it their goal to inspire a cultural movement or a racial awakening they have to insert themselves into a place of extreme vulnerability. That risk puts someone in a position where they are capable of losing their freedom, family, and peace of mind. The sacrifices made just being Black and a woman on a daily basis are far beyond what many can imagine. Simone was a cultural kamikaze, willing to destroy her career and the freedom that it brought her, in order to share the truth—in order to put the truth into the light and make it undeniable. Nina Simone carried the burden of that responsibility and it’s important to hold her in that proper historic light.

Throughout the 2005 remix of "Backlash Blues" you can hear Nina Simone speaking candidly to a live audience as she performs. She details conversations she had with Langston Hughes, who wrote the song, before he died. She closes the song out by singing:

"When Langston Hughes died, when he died, he told me many months before, he said 'Nina, keep on working til’ they open up the door, one of these days when you made it and the doors are open wide, make sure you tell em’ exactly where it’s at so they’ll have no place to hide.'"

Nina’s still working to help us open up the doors and if we listen closely enough, we’ll come to realize that the Black womanhood she embodied is the key to unlock.