Critical Noir

Finding Forever, Finding Nina

Posted 08/09/2007 at 12:12 PM  |  2 comment/s

Though Nina Simone died little more than four years ago and is 40 years removed from her commercial peak, her music—and spirit—continues to be recalled and resurrected in the music of the hip-hop generation. The most recent occasion is Common’s just released Finding Forever, where his “Misunderstood” (with brilliant production from Devo Springsteen) is framed by a live version of Ms. Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Understood”. It is arguably the most arresting (though “Driving Me Wild” with Lily Allen comes close) tune on Finding Forever. And such is the case in virtually every popular instance that the hip-hop generation summons Ms. Simone’s essence.

More than a decade ago it was Lauryn Hill who referenced Ms. Simone in a bid to attach some relevance to her presence in an industry largely tailored to young men with little motivation to be creative. “I could do what you do, EASY!” Hill told her peers, “so while you imitatin' Al Capone/I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone.” There are those of us who wonder what the world might be like if El Hajj Malik El Shabazz or Ella Baker would have circulated through American culture to the extent that second-rate rappers and NFL players on paid administrative leave do so now. Hill’s lyrics were a reminder that when Ms. Simone had the mic in her hand and indeed had the attention of the nation, she made real, real.

With the exception of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit," Ms. Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” ranks as one of the most incendiary songs every recorded by a black artist in the United States (though if thinking across the Afropolitan landscape, we’d of course have to mention Fela Kuti and Robert Nesta Marley). And not to discount the work of artists like Chuck D or Paris, but neither was going to be physically lynched or murdered for recording “Welcome to the Terrordome” or “Bush Killa.” The threats to Ms. Simone’s body, spirit and livelihood were real as she told the American public that “I hope you die, die like flies” in response to their failure to come to grips with the so-called race question.

Many of the recent tributes to Nina Simone seem to gloss over the fact that Ms. Simone was known to have a personality that could be best described as ornery. Ms. Simone’s bitterness was likely the product of the social, artistic and political expectations singularly placed on her, given the reality of the centrality of her music to social movement across the globe. And as a women performer who likely toured with far too few other women in her entourage and far too few people who understood the realities of black female celebrity—and we could include the late Esther Phillips and Phyllis Hyman to the equation for the sake of argument—Ms. Simone likely had little recourse other than to embrace caricatures of her that suggested that she was “difficult.” Ironically, Ms. Simone is probably more relevant to understanding Ms. Hill’s current legacy than she was a decade ago.

Part of what Nina Simone gave voice to were the losses. One of her signature tunes, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was written in tribute to her friend, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (author of A Raisin in the Sun), who died prematurely of cancer. By the time she recorded “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” shortly after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.'s (“will the murders never cease?”) the losses were mounting. In a live concert recorded shortly after King’s death, Ms. Simone quietly recalls the immediate losses—Langston Hughes, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, literally within months of each other—as she ask “do you realize how many we have lost?” And this is not to forget the nameless and faceless masses who regularly sacrificed limb, sanity and life for the movement.

For the hip-hop generation, the losses have been indexed in the literal tremors of Mary J. Blige’s voice. As the late Sekou Sundiata said so eloquently about Blige “so… she sings in and out of key/your voice shakes too when the truth comes due.” Thus it was so fitting when Blige and Ms. Simone finally had the opportunity to sit down and digitally break bread courtesy of will.i.am on Blige’s “About You.” When Blige echoes Simone’s “You know how I feel” on the song’s chorus a real cross-generation connection is made between the singular voices of the Civil Rights and hip-hop generations.

Of course it was Talib Kweli, son of a literary critic and scholar, who really brought Nina Simone into the hip-hop generation’s gaze. Inspired by the late Weldon Irvine, Jr, Ms. Simone’s longtime musical director, Kweli’s “For Women” (from Reflection Eternal) was a brilliant update on Ms. Simone “Four Women.” As Michael Eric Dyson wrote at the time, “By baptizing Simone’s sentiments in a hip-hop rhetorical form, Kweli raises new questions about the relation between history and contemporary social practice, and fuses the generational ambitions of two gifted artists.” As Common’s “Misunderstood” suggest, the hip-hop generation continues to drink from the waters of Nina Simone and the music of that generation is all the better for it.

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