Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Nina Simone: The Revolutionary High Priestess of Soul

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Dec 29, 2019 On this episode of Rev Left Radio, Zoe Samudzi returns to the show to reflect on the life, art, politics, and legacy of the one and only Nina Simone. Check out Zoe and her work here: http://www.zoesamudzi.com/ Follow Zoe on Twitter @ztsamudzi Listen to Zoe's other appearances on Rev Left here: - https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/critical-race-theory-and-black-liberation-w-zo-samudzi - https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/black-feminism-and-queer-theory-w-zoe-samudzi   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Well, what's free to you mean? What's free to me? Same thing it is to you, you tell me. No, you tell me. No, no. Because I have to talk me for such a long... It's just a feeling. It's just a feeling.

It's like, how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love, how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can't tell them, but you know it when it happens. That's what I mean by free. I've had a couple of times on stage when I really felt free. And that's something else.

That's really something else. Like all, like, I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. I mean, really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life, no fear. Nina Simone fought through bipolar disorder and Jim Crowe laws to become one of the most iconic black singers of the 20th century. This is the evolution of Nina Simone.

Before she became friends with civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Eunice Kathleen Wayman was mastering the keys to success. She was born February 21st, 1933, in Tri-On North Carolina, the sixth of eight children. She began playing piano at the age of three in the church where her mother, who also worked as a housemaid, was a Methodist preacher. At seven years old, she was performing as a pianist in a recital with her church's choir at a local theater when two white women in the crowd were struck by her talent. One was her mother's boss, and the other was a local music teacher. It was at that moment that they decided that Eunice's talent needed to be nurtured with lessons. For five years, this music teacher taught her tirelessly, which left Eunice isolated from other children.

She was being trained with the intention of becoming the first black classical pianist. Donations were collected at each of her performances to support her further education, and in 1950 that money sent her to the Juilliard School in New York City. She was there for little more than a year when the money ran out and she was forced to stop her studies. She applied for a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but was denied despite her advanced skills because she was brought. her large family had moved to Philly to be near her and faced with the need to help support them financially

Eunice found a job playing the piano at a bar in Atlantic City the owner made it clear that her playing was not enough to entertain his customers she'd need to sing as well if she wanted to keep her job never having sung before Eunice just let the music pour out of her and as it turned out she was quite good the only problem was her mother Eunice didn't want her preacher mother to find out she was singing and playing secular music so she took up a stage name

Nina was derived from the Spanish word Nina, a nickname from a boyfriend at the time. Simone came from her fondness for the French actress Simone Signore. She was now known as Nina Simone, and the growing popularity of her voice was destined to make her the soundtrack of a growing movement. Nina met Andy Strout through a mutual friend after a performance at a nightclub in March of 1961. He was infatuated with her, and the two were quickly married. Andy retired from his career as an NYC police sergeant to manage Nina's career full-time. They bought a house in Mount Vernon, and their daughter, Lisa Simone Weyman Stroud, was born September 12, 1962. Nina began making appearances on the Billboard charts.

She even performed on Hugh Heffner's TV show Playboy's Penthouse. But it was the relationship she forged with civil rights activists such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali, that buoyed her notoriety and gave her close proximity to the happenings of the movement. She even lived next door to Malcolm X and his wife, Betty Shabazz, allowing their children to become life. long friends. In June of 1963, Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran, Mississippi Field Secretary for the NAACP, and prominent civil rights activist, was fatally shot on his own front lawn. Three months later, four black girls, the youngest of which was only 11 years old, died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan. These tragedies let a match in Nina Simone's heart, and she channeled that blazing rage into Mississippi Got Damn.

to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi God That's it! The song was revered within the black community

For its honesty, but ostracized by the music industry. Nina was banned from certain airwaves and boxes of the record would be returned to cinder, broken in tune. In 1965, Nina Simone recorded a haunting version

of strange fruit, which was originally a poem written by Abel Mirapole and sung by Billy Holiday in 1939. While Strange Fruit wasn't her original work, the way Nina's voice wraps around such a powerful and illustrative depiction of lynchings of black people made an impression that has captivated for decades. Blood on the leaves, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.

Songs such as 1965's Feeling Good, manifested positivity, on 1966's four women acknowledged the lasting effects of slavery on black lineage. Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun and Godmother to Nina Simone's daughter, penned a play titled To Be Young, Gifted in Black in 1968. Nina was so moved by its empowering message that she was inspired to adapt the play into a song. In the peripheral of her fame, Nina Simone's personal life was unraveling at the seams. Nina felt overworked and began to lash out at those around her.

She grew to resent her husband, especially as he became increasingly physically violent towards her. Her behavior was erratic and minor irritations would incite violent fits of rage. One day, she left her wedding ring and a note for Andy and left the continent. Unstable, unpredictable, and unsatisfied, Nina would circle the globe to find out she was only battling herself. Nina Simone traveled to London, Switzerland, and the Netherlands to perform in clubs. Upon returning to the United States, she found out that the observation. IRS had issued a warrant for her arrest because she'd stopped paying her taxes to protest the Vietnam War. She fled the United States again, this time for Barbados, and had an affair with

the country's prime minister at the time. From there, she made Liberia her home and sent for her now estranged 13-year-old daughter. Nina's temperament hadn't improved, and her daughter Lisa received the brunt of the physical and verbal abuse. When Lisa started entertaining thoughts of suicide, she gathered the strength to leave her mother and returned to NYC to be raised by her father. Nina Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder shortly after relocating to France. Without Andy to manage her income, she began performing at small venues for minimal pay, unworthy of the notoriety she'd garnered. It took the fellowship of fellow musicians and friends in the area

to make sure she was taking her medication and help her book performances that celebrated her amazing voice and skill. On April 21, 2003, Nina Simone passed away and Carrie Le Ruay friends, reportedly due to complications from breast cancer. Nina Simone's deep haunting vocals continue to serve as not only a source of encouragement but also a capsule to the past for the civic leaders of today

looking to evoke change for the black community and the world overall. Songs pinned by the High Priestess of Soul have also been sampled by hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z, Kanye West, 50 Cent, and the late prodigy of Mobb Deep, innovations that have brought fans back to the roots of rap and unified many through the nuances

of the black experience. The best way to face the heartbreaking details of Nina Simone's personal life is with deep appreciation for the fearlessness with which she approached life, the music that flowed from her fingers, and the voice that uplifted millions in song and spirit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Brett O'Shea. On today's episode, we have Zoe Samuzy back on the show, this time to discuss the art and life and legacy of the one

only Nina Simone. So I really hope people enjoy this episode throughout. You're going to hear clips of Nina Simone in her own words being interviewed. And even more than that, you'll hear songs that we discuss played in the show. So after we discuss a certain song, you'll likely hear that song play. So you can sort of hear our understanding and analysis of it and then actually just hear the song itself. Because I thought it was very important to not just have two people talk about Nina, but to allow Nina's voice into the show itself. in a myriad of different ways. So in that sense, it's a little different than what we do. When we do historical episodes, we usually put in historical clips, but this time it's really

going to be full of, or really dominated by Nina's music. So it's going to be sort of an aesthetic experience as well, hopefully, as an intellectually invigorating one. So having said all that, here is my conversation with Zoe Samuzy on the life, art, and legacy of Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul. So my name is Zoe Samudzi. I am a writer, PhD candidate in sociology, and a big fan of Nina Simone. Absolutely. Well, I think this is the third time you've been on the show, and we're really excited to have you back.

I knew that when I was going to do a Nina Simone episode, your name. just kept coming to my mind over and over again is if there was no other option but you to tackle Nina Simone with me. So I'm so happy to have you back on the show. Let's go ahead and dive into her life. We're not going to do like an extensive like, you know, from birth to death sort of biography. There's plenty of resources and material out there, including her own words where she wrote her own autobiography. If you want to really learn about the details of her life, we're going to really reflect on her art and her as a human being and her music. And that's what this show is going to be about. Okay, so to start off this conversation, basically what was your favorite anecdote from

like her autobiography and her life? What's the story that really stuck out to you that you want to sort of talk about and get out to more people? I think that my favorite anecdote about her is when she rolled up on her record company dude, I think in Switzerland and tried to kill him because he was trying to take her money or he was playing around with like royalties or something like that and he didn't want to pay her so she like came into a restaurant with like a knife and a gun or something and it didn't work and then she like went back to the US but I was like yeah yeah that makes sense it's a little vigilante just to see but at the same time when you think about how she'd been treated in the industry when you think about how you know she'd wanted to be a

classical pianist and because of racism was kind of forced in to the kind of traditional modes of cultural production for black folks like jazz and the blues and so on all of that like why wouldn't she be mad yeah and the industry i think in her book she talks about like you know over at least over a million dollars stolen from her by the by the music industry and its representatives over her lifetime so she certainly had been robbed you know from day one and her talent was really you know used to profit other people instead of herself at many points in her life, you know. Totally. One of the things that stuck out to me from her book was, and it's sort of similar because it shows the same side of her that your story does, was her reaction to the

assassination of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that, you know, infamously killed those four precious, innocent children, those little girls in the church basement. And when she had heard of those two things, in her book she talks about she went out to her garage and she assembled a bunch of tools to basically make what she called a zip gun, a sort of you can make a little gun out of basic materials that could do something to somebody hurt them. And she said she wanted to go out and sort of kill the first person that she could identify as being in the way of her people getting justice, you know, as she puts it for 300 years. And then as she's on the ground sort of rummaging through these tools to try to build a gun to go fight back,

you know, her husband walks in and, you know, basically says you don't know anything about killing people. all the only thing that you've got that you can use in this struggle is music and um that that's that's the day that she wrote mississippi goddam she you know and she said it just sort of fell out of her and it just flowed out and within the an hour or so she had the entire song written up and you know that just stood out to me because it shows her tenacity and it shows just how deeply moved she was by the struggles of her people and the injustices they faced and she was really willing to do anything um to fight back against it even if it was sort of reckless in that way you know Alabama's got me so upset

Tennessee made me losing my rest Everybody knows about Mississippi God damn Alabama's got me so upset Lurleen Wallace has made me lose my rest Everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn Can't you see it

I know you can feel it. It's all in the air. You can't stand the pressure much longer. Somebody say a prayer. Alabama has got me so upset and Memphis has made me lose my rest. Everybody knows about this. They go to prayer.

I'm dogs on my trail Little school children sitting in jail Black cat crossed my path I think every day's gonna be my last Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time Because I don't belong here I don't belong there

I've even stopped believing in prayer Don't tell me I'll tell you Me and my people just about I've been there So I know We keep on saying to go slow Well that's the trouble

Who's going to wash in the windows Whoop cotton nothing but rotten do so do damn lazy thinking's crazy where am I going

what am I doing I don't know I don't know just try to do my very best stand up he count with all the rest because everybody knows about this

Now you heard him, he's one of you. If you have been moved at all, and you know my songs are tall, for God's sakes join me. Don't sit back there. The time is too day now. Good God, you know. the king is dead the king of love is dead

I ain't about to be non-violent honey oh oh picking nice smooth boycotts they're proud to say it's a communist pot but all I want is equality for myself

My sister, my brother, my people, and me. And I loved him because he believed it. He lived by him. But you lied to me all the years. You told me to wash and clean my ears. and talk real fine just like a lady and you stopped calling my mama and Sadie but my country is full of lives,

we all gonna die and die like flies but I don't trust nobody anymore Keep on saying go slow That's just the trouble To slow Desegregation To slow Math participation

Unification Too slow Two things gradually To bring more tragedy Why don't you see it Why don't you feel it? I don't know I don't know

You don't have to live Next to me Just give me my Equality Because everybody knows About Mexico Everybody knows about Alabama

Everybody knows about Mississippi Oh damn That's right she also suffered from like mental illness and severe and often for most of her life untreated and also thing that surprised me reading her autobiography was that she was the victim of of domestic violence in her marriage with andy like really brutal brutal domestic violence

and also sexual assault within her own marriage so she was not only a black woman radical and faced all the obstacles of being that you know but but she was also a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault. And I had no clue that she went through that much shit in her life. It was really heartbreaking. And when you think about her mental illness in that context, you know, it's not just about whatever bipolar diagnosis she had. I think that there was so much of this other aggregated PTSD

from her experiences with the industry, from these experiences with abuse, from so many other things. Being a black woman, being a black woman, artist, musician. being a black woman in the thick of the civil rights struggle that she was a part of, like is all incredibly crazy making. And I think that when we talk about her mental illness and we talk about her being erratic and we talk about all of these things, like I think that we cannot divorce that from the context that she was trying to move through and trying to fight through. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a great point. It's not just like a personal, like,

purely biological, you know, sort of issue in her brain. It really was the context in which she had to exist. and all the shit that she had to deal with on a daily basis just to survive. How could that not take a mental and emotional toll over time, you know? And when I think about, you know, her rendition of I wish I knew how it would feel to be free, like I don't just think about it as this like anthemic like summary of the whole civil rights struggle. Like I think about it in the context of her own struggle with her own personal demons with like the capitalist fuckery that she. she's dealing with and taking her money and all of, you know, and, and it feels as much as a song for, you know, the people and the culture as it is like this kind of personal wish and this

really personal kind of plea. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. The next question I want to ask, and this is sort of a almost philosophical question, but I think it's important because Nina really was this artist revolutionary, you know, two things in one. So what does Nina teach us, in your opinion, about the relationship between art and politics, because oftentimes, depending on who you're talking to, they can either downplay the role of art in politics or over-emphasize it. So what are your thoughts on that? There's a quote that I'm thinking of. It's by Tony Kade Bambara. It's a really well-known quote. And she says, you know, the role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. And that, that's what I feel in Nina Simone's music. I feel this. This.

hurt and I feel this anguish and I feel this anger and I feel this this articulation of like of a collective desire of this like individual hunger. I feel an exhaustion. I feel sometimes a joy, a catharsis. I feel all of those things. And I think that sometimes in our politics, especially in the way that our politics are often so oriented around these like masculinist expressions of freedom and liberation. I think that our politics or our leftist revolutionary politics, whatever, can get, can start to feel quite cold and calculated. And we're doing this because it is rational to be anti-capitalist, because, you know, and it becomes unfeeling. And my favorite revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral have always centered the role of culture and revolution and the role of

liberation and the role of music and the role of art. And I, I can't fathom an understanding of freedom that forces me to be disconnected from my sense of, like, free and creative self. And, you know, when I think about kind of black social movements and black kind of social and political orientations, I think that the way that black people have existed, it's been out of this context of, like, you know, mutual aid has been necessary. and we talk about the abolition of the family and having these flexible kinship structures where you take care of each other's children has been necessary. And so there is so much black radical thought

that is deeply intellectual, but so much of it has been lived prior to its articulation that it seems like there are so many more avenues for understanding freedom and for understanding liberation. And music has always been such, like, a central part of like black sociality. And I can't imagine, you know, not to like think about that like fabricated Emma Goldman quote where it's like, I don't want a revolution if it doesn't

have dancing. But I don't want a revolution that like doesn't have dancing and doesn't have these spaces for like creative care and for eroticism and for pleasure and for and for all of these things that aren't so calculated. Right. I don't have space for. an understanding of liberation that denies me of the things that are necessary to make me feel like I'm human and I'm culturally whole because whiteness is a void of culture. And we see that with Nina, you know, she wanted to be like a classical pianist and they're like, no, you got to do jazz. And whiteness has only this, this use for an appreciation of culture in a way that it can be commodified and to have our politics foreground the importance

of music, of visual arts, of dance, of all of these things. For me, they're one and the same. They have to be. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true. Our painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. It's what I'm concerned is their choice. But I choose to reflect

the times and the situations in which I find myself, that to me is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That's why the white is so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don't think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the time? that to me is a definition of an honest yeah I wonder you know she's she's very obviously like whenever I listen to her I'm deeply

emotionally moved like even I listen to the same song like you know 15 20 times and still it can bring tears to my eyes but there is also this very deeply like erotic sort of strain in you know her life and her music and I do wonder about not only pushing forward a sort of black militancy but underneath it is this sort of eroticism coming from a black woman is really sort of, I don't know, I can't see white culture really abiding by that as much as it did with Nina Simone in a sense. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that erotic strain in her art? I absolutely agree. You know, I think about Tony Morrison as well and someone, and I just remember reading something where they asked her about like, what keeps you together and how do you

keep doing this? And she was like sex, you know, and I think what has been so important to me about black feminism and womanism is this recognition that, you know, when I was first learning about feminism, I mean, I grew up in the Midwest and what I had, I did not have access to black folks and this was kind of pre-tumblerish, but what I had access to was second-wave feminism. And second-way feminism seems to be this like dissociation of the politics from the body. That is to say, what I was, I mean, if you just read the, like, the second wave, like, sex wars, or even if you read Audra Lourdes, the eroticist power, which I love, she's, like, anti-porn and anti-sex

work. So even as they're trying to have these politics of, like, erotics from that particular time, there's almost this, like, shying away from, I don't know, I don't know how to describe it. Like, we're for sexual liberation, but there's still this kind of conservative relation to sex and almost this limitedness to like female sexual agency. And when I listen to Nina Simone, like, her music is sexy. It's, it's smart as hell and it's so sexy. And she knows what she's doing with the way that she moves. She's like purring into a microphone when she's singing like, do I move you?

Like, I, it's really hypnotic. And I can't even imagine what it's like to hear her. singing this like live and seeing her on the piano and just seeing her like it's this way of being sexy that has nothing to do with the way that you look it's this it's this way of tapping into a sexuality that does not depend on this aesthetic presentation because by all definitions of beauty standards like you know she's like a dark-skinned woman and then people that's not what we understand as being our ideal picture of of black beauty and still she was so like she fucking did it like she just yeah i don't even know what to say no i really really agree

with that and i think i think you put it really well as like i actually i actually do find find her to be like a beautiful attractive woman but her eroticism and her sexiness uh it sort of does transcend just the sort of physical appearance. It's like eroticism and sexuality on like a transcendental level. And yeah, it's hypnotic in that way. Absolutely. I think that that really gets at something core here. I don't know. Very few other people can replicate that. I've almost nobody, at least in my mind, immediately jumps to mind that can really match that level of sort of transcendent eroticism and beauty and sort of sublimity that Nina Simone's music can really, you know, put into me. It's just really fascinating. I'm thinking about the way that Audra Lord, and again, you know, she being like anti-porn,

anti-BDSM, whatever, but she talks about the erotic and she's like, the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we've experienced it, we know we can aspire for having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power and honor and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves. And then the other part that she says in here, the very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects,

born of chaos and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women, of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge, and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. And I really appreciate the way that she talks about how Eros was born of chaos. If we think about like the creation and kind of assemblage of like deities and gods, like Eros

followed the creation of chaos. And I think about her particular brand of eroticism, which was so fucking chaotic. Like the way that she laughs off talking about killing somebody or trying to kill somebody she's like yeah I did it I did it because I had to he was taking my money yeah it's this way of of self-actualizing that she very chaotically you know exemplifies absolutely yeah yeah well said fascinating fascinating so moving on because we talked a little bit about her mental illness and you know in her autobiography Nina talks about her deteriorating mental and emotional well-being after years in the business, running herself into the ground, the enormous stress she was under,

and ultimately, you know, her mental illness, her bipolar disorder, she was eventually diagnosed with that. But I specifically wonder about the connections between her mental and emotional suffering and her position as a representative of the black community, because we often see black celebrities like Dave Chappelle and Lauren Hill suffer through actually similar struggles in their lives. Many times these black artists even retreat to Africa, specifically like Nina did, during these moments of crisis or suffering. So what are your thoughts on all of this and what unique mental and emotional pressures are black celebrities, especially those who are seen as conscious representatives of their

community forced to operate under? I think that there is this fine line that people have to walk between, you know, offering a commentary and maintaining a platform. So they have to, you know, they need to produce this content for the movement, for the people, for the culture, whatever, but they also can't do it in a way that is too alienating, to record execs, and to their bosses and whatever.

And I think that, you know, with the case of Dave Chappelle, I mean, unfortunately, he has become what he has become, but, you know, he was talking about how there came a point where he couldn't tell if the people were laughing at him or laughing with him. You mentioned a moment ago that you felt that there were some things that weren't socially responsible. Like what?

Like, there's this one sketch that we did that was about this pixie that would appear whenever racist things happens. Whenever someone make you feel like they calling you that N-word, but don't say it. And it was funny. And the premise of the sketch was that every race

had this like pixie, this like racial complex. But the pixie was in black, Now, black face is a very difficult image, but the reason I had chosen black face at the time was because this was going to be the visual personification of the inward. Right. It was a good spiritual intention behind it. But what I didn't consider is how many people watch a show and how the way people use television is subjective. I completely understand.

Yeah. Finish, because I have a story to tell you. So then when I'm on the set and we're finally taping the sketch, somebody on the set that was why I laughed in such a way, I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me. And it was the first time I'd ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with. Not just uncomfortable, but like, should I fire this person? And at the same time, I'm just,

just not a naturally assertive person. What was it about the laugh? I know all these people would be watching TV, that there's a lot of people who will understand exactly what I'm doing. Then there's another group of people who are just fans like the people that, the kind of people that scream, I'm Rick James, be at my concerts. Yeah. That there's a long for a different kind of celebrity worship rat.

They're going to get something completely different. Completely different. Yeah. They're concerned. Yeah. I don't want, I mean, I don't want black people to be disappointed in me for putting that out there. No, you don't want to be disappointed in yourself. You know what?

You're right. And so it becomes a matter of, like, who is your audience? It becomes a matter of, like, who are you producing and creating this content for? Because being an artist is about commodifying yourself, right? Like, how are you commodifying yourself and what kind of, you? self are you presenting to the public? And that's hard. And I think that some people who don't actually have the super radical politics, like don't really struggle with, or at least don't outwardly struggle with this idea of quote unquote selling out or commodifying themselves or

pandering or trying to be not alienating to white people or whatever. And some people genuinely do, like Nina, like Dave Chappelle, I guess, did when he also went to South Africa. And I think that Part of the reason that people go to Africa or go to the continent, wherever they go, is because I think a big part of what black Americans are experiencing, especially if they're very political, you know, if they're reading about slavery and they're talking a lot about slavery, it's this, it's the stolen indigenity. It's this stolen sense of self and home. And it's a place that a lot of people want to figure out how to return to because there's this understanding. that being able to return might initiate some kind of healing, some kind of stability of the identity crisis that comes from being a stolen people on stolen land. And a big part of the social death of black people is this natal alienation,

is this very deliberate cutting of ties to the continent of the way that Orlando Patterson talks about, the identity of enslaved Africans being tethered solely to the community that is created by their slave masters. Obviously, they make community with one another, but that dissociation from home, it cuts you off from a past and to some extent from a future outside of what whiteness will permit for you.

And so it seems like there's very much this idea of whether or not it's, sometimes it's deeply a historical and it is colonial and it is fucked up as well. But it's the sense of if I can go back to the continent, I can kind of figure out, I can like recalibrate myself and I can be with my people either in an abstract or more concrete sense I can be with my people. I can be on this piece of land that I came from and I can try to figure myself out. Being first generation American and knowing where I come from and having conversations with folks that are sometimes deeply a historical, I don't fault them.

I get frustrated with the way that these things get articulated sometimes, but I really don't fault people who do feel like that at all. I can't begin to understand the trauma of like the descendancy of enslavement and I cannot begin to understand what it feels like to be constantly looking for that far past that you were experienced. So, you know, it makes sense that in this time when also there was a much larger sense of internationalism in black movements because this is the era where all of these countries on the continent are gaining independence. So you've got a much greater pan-African thread going through all of these black liberation politics. And so you have like Kwame Ture and the Panthers and Malcolm X and everybody going to the

and you know, and Kwame marries Miriam Akeba and like everybody's going to the continent and everybody is having these really incredible exchanges and interactions and it's not just the sense of individual like longing as black Americans, there's also this sense of like we are all Afro-descendant people and we have to understand that our liberation as black people in the diaspora is intimately linked to this relation to the continent. And I think that that's a part of it as well in addition to this maybe therapeutic or whatever sense that comes from going back. Yeah. And it's certainly true that that white celebrities, they don't have the burden of sort of representing their community in the same way that black celebrities do.

We can look at the difference even between a Colin Kaepernick and a Tom Brady, what's expected of them, you know, how their behavior is sort of viewed by the population at large. And you can just tell that a lot of white celebrities, they don't have any sort of sense of like I need to represent something or I need to speak for a sort of oppressed people or anything like that. And that allows them to, you know, maybe navigate the troubled waters of fame and wealth like anybody that has to deal with that has to, but it doesn't have the huge sort of burden that I think black celebrities specifically in the United States

have to deal with in regards to that. Do you think that's more or less on point? Yeah, I think that white people have, I don't like the word privilege or whatever, but have the privilege of individuality. And so when Tom Brady's little MAGA hat was found in his locker room, that did not become an indictment of white football players.

That didn't even necessarily become an indictment of him personally. Right. But if there were a black athlete to have like, Louis Farrakhan cap in his locker room, then it would become this whole thing, again, about, like, the new anti-Semitism from black people because of this subscription of, like, more power and influence than that Farrakhan actually has on black communities anymore. But it would just, it would turn into a whole thing in a way that, yeah, black, certain kinds of black celebrities, you become like a de facto spokesperson. And so in addition to navigating all of these other

pressures around the way you commodify and present yourself and make your work and do whatever. Like, you're, you constantly have to like play representative of black people to white folks. And then there's this way that you also have to respond to. And I think that you should necessarily respond and be responsible to black people as someone who has the platform to potentially share emancipatory politics to a far greater audience. And I can imagine that if you're doing this responsibly and you actually have a radical message to share, it can get incredibly overbearing and overwhelming. Absolutely. You mentioned earlier the phrase that the social death of black people. I have not heard that phrase. Would you mind just sort of

explaining that a tad for our listeners and myself? Yeah. So social death, it's this condition where people are not accepted as being fully human. And so in the context of black people, you have the way that kind of Western modernity is shaped by chattel slavery and that the 13th Amendment did not abolish chattel slavery. It merely allowed it to mutate and to change into the prison system. You know, Orlando Patterson wrote this book in 1982 called Slavery and Social Death which is this kind of like global comparative study of slavery and he defines slavery as, you know, he talks about it as the most or one of the most extreme kinds of domination. which, you know, and I quote,

approaches the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master and total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave. And we see social death in the context of so many other peoples outside of black folks. We see it, for example, in the context of, like, sex workers

and these really paternalistic takes on, like, what sex workers ought to need to have and ought to advocate for. We see all of these, like, for example, like serial killers who deliberately target sex workers, workers because they know that no one cares about sex workers. And I think that is an example of a

kind of social death of this not full humanity and the non-conference of like full personhood. And, you know, Alexander Wellier talks about this really important way of understanding that like whiteness is an assemblage that organizes people into full humans, like kind of like a semi-human and the non-human and understands kind of race as as existing and kind of that spectrum of humanity. I think social death, it talks about like racial exclusion, gender exclusion, apartheid. It talks about like the institutionalization and stigmatization of people like Nina who had mental illnesses.

And so you have this whole period of people being forcibly institutionalized. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Nina Simone, her sort of position on the black liberation left was, you know, the sort of classic position that black people. are a colonized people within the U.S. and that they constitute a sort of oppressed nation within a nation, right? What are your thoughts on that sort of perspective of black people in the U.S. and how that is sort of theoretically cashed out? Do you agree or disagree with that general

Marxist position? Yeah, I'm just really curious of your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think the idea of them being like a stolen, colonized people on stolen land completely checks out to me. I'm a little hesitant to think about people in terms of a nation because black and African American are not synonymous fully. And I think that like when we start talking about like immigrant communities that have been like thrown into this mix of anti-blackness, I think that it's a little bit more dynamic to say than to say like a nation within a nation. But yeah, the idea of of a colonized and internally colonized people like absolutely checks out. For sure. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for that.

That just thought that came up as you were talking in sort of the relation of like black folks in a white supremacist society. Like how do you get out of that? And how do you get out of it save kind of the destruction of the colony? Because I don't believe that the answer has to be like the creation of a black nation within the nation. That's the reason that I'm kind of pushing back on this idea of a nation within a nation because there are certain kind of strains of black nationalist thought where the solution to this is to kind of create some kind of black state within the United States. And I don't like that because I think that it kind of implicitly reifies the legitimacy of the United States as a state, as a nation, as a nation state. And I also don't believe that, you know,

there are in some of these proposals that have included, like, you know, we create this black nation out of the former Confederate states, like there are a lot of like southern indigenous communities whose own sovereignties would be kind of completely plowed over in the creation of this nation inside the nation. And I don't believe in the kind of destruction of one people's sovereignty in order for there to be the assertion of another. So that's why I push back against the nation within the nation because the problem is the settler state. Well, at least for me, the kind of first and foremost problem is the like continued existence of the settler state prior to thinking about how we see a reparation and the creation of a new state while the

existing settler state and its ongoing dispossession of indigenous communities continues. Okay, yeah, fascinating. Thank you for that. That's really interesting. And it really helps clarify my own thoughts on that issue, which is something I've been thinking about a lot in the last several months. But let's go ahead and shift over to talking a little bit more about her music and maybe even her legacy a little bit.

And one question I really wanted to include in this was talking about her music, right? heard one of her songs. So Nina made so many amazing songs, but let's talk about our favorites. So which song or two or even three, you know, stand out to you as personal favorites and why? I have two favorite songs. My first favorite song is four women. And I think one of the times we talked, we talked about black feminism and we talked about like controlling images and tropes and all of that. And the thing that I love about four women is, is that it's basically this really efficient summarization of black womanhood as kind of defined by slavery and the ways that womanhood gets kind of performed and thought through. So I'm going to go through it and read some of the lyrics because I think that that's important.

So there are four women in the song. There's Aunt Sarah, Sophronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches. And it's this kind of like genealogy of these women out of slavery. The first one, she says, my skin is black, my arms are long, my hair is woolly, my back is strong, strong enough to take the pain, inflicted again and again. So she's talking about this like presumably like darker skinned, woolly haired, black woman who is an enslaved woman and she's kind of talking about labor. She's talking about this condition of forced servitude where she is compelled to take.

this pain again and again because there's no agency. Well, this is the condition, right? Like this is the material condition of enslavement. So this is Aunt Sarah. The second woman, she says, you know, my skin is yellow. My hair is long. Between two worlds, I do belong. But my father was rich and white. He forced my mother late one night. This is Sophronia. This mixed-race woman who is kind of straddling blackness and whiteness. If sophronia is light enough, sophronia can pass as white. And also with passing comes the risk of someone finding out that you are actually black and the danger that comes with that. And that sophronia is a product of this like gendered violence, this gendered sexual violence. So then, okay, so you have

schizophrenia. Then you have, my skin is tan, my hair is fine, my hips invite you, my mouth like wine, whose little girl am I, anyone who has money to buy? And this is sweet thing. And sweet thing is a sex worker. And she talks about being able to, to be, not to belong to anyone, but to be a companion to anyone who whoever has the money but also because she you know she has fine hair so she has a particular kind of like phenotypical presentation that is more acceptable to more people outside of just black folks and obviously also because she's a sex worker so that's the third woman sweet thing the fourth woman you know she she says my skin is brown my manner is tough I'll kill the first mother I see

my life has been rough I'm awfully bitter these days because my parents were slaves what do they call me my name is peaches and at this point and this very last line as the verse goes on

it's like building and building in this kind of intensity and this last line she shes like she sing shouts my name is peaches and it feels like this it's this weight right it's this interd generational anger and weight and heaviness and frustration and theory that that just feels like

you're at the brim like you're constantly at the verge of like bubbling over and it feels so deeply relatable and it feels so like you know being a black woman sometimes like you're always on this verge of just wanting to to to pop and it's it's incredible incredible. She talks about in her autobiography, I think, yeah, she mentions four women. And I think she even mentions that obviously it pissed off like white people, but she said it even had a sort of impact on black men, some of which like some like black male DJs and stuff wouldn't play it or something like that. And she's like she didn't really, she felt like they didn't fully get it or like, you know, the black man weren't ready to face up to their own situation with regards to to women. What are your thoughts on, on that? And why would some segment of, of black men even not like this song or sort of not understand it. Yeah, I, you know, when I first heard the song, it took me a couple of listens to really figure out

what was going on, but like, it struck me as being something that was incredibly powerful. Like, it felt like she was articulating this, like, lineage of black womanhood. It felt like it was a, it was a genealogical kind of a tribute to black womanhood, like from enslavement to this present. And I was kind of surprised, but also not surprised to find out that there are people who didn't like it and DJs who banned it because they thought that it was drawing on stereotypes.

And I think that, you know, you miss the way that actually drawing on stereotypes as a means of kind of creating possibility outside of those stereotypes is like something that black feminism and black art has done. If you look at, like, Betty Tsar, like her, she does so much work with the figure of Aunt Jemima, but on Jemima, like, holding a rifle and, and like a taking on and a using of the Mamie in a way that seeks to offer more possibility to the character of the Mamie outside of the way that she has been kind of flattened by white supremacy. And I think that people who got pissed off about it, you know, didn't know her work. very well and also weren't paying a whole lot of attention to black women whose material conditions have reflected these realities and they have sought to emancipate women both in the

present and historically so to kind of do this like retroactive conversation and and black feminism is so beautiful for me because it goes in so many temporal directions it speaks to the present as well as the past and future and that can be challenging. That can be challenging for a lot of people. That can be challenging for feminine, for for non-black feminists who want to think about a future and a present and don't want to think about race and don't want to think about the fact that we have a lot to say about our treatment of what are understood as stereotypes and controlling images because they have been such an influential part of the creation of our psyche in the present. And in order to move forward, like we have to undo that. And we have to do the

work of thinking about what it means that my black womanhood has been indelibly shaped by enslavement and and I think the people who didn't like it like they didn't want to do that and and it's challenging and fine whatever um yeah but it's important work it's an important historical work to do nonetheless yeah beautifully said absolutely My skin is black My arms are long My hair is woolly My back is strong

Strong enough to take the Pain Inflicted again and again What do they call me My name is Aunt Sarah My name is Aunt Sarah Aunt Sarah My skin is yellow

My hair is long Between two worlds I do belong My father was rich and white he forced my mother late one night what do they call me my name is Saffronia

my name is Saphronia My skin is tan My hair is tan My hair is fine My hips invite you My mouth like wine Whose little girl am I Anyone who has money to buy

What do they call me My name is sweet thing. My name is sweet thing. My skin is brown My manner is tough I'll kill the first mother I see My life has been rough I'm awfully bitter these days

Because my parents were slaves What do they call me? My name is Peaches So that was the first song with Four Women. You have another one? Yes. My other favorite song is actually a song that I've found relatively recently. It's called Consumation.

It's on her album Silk and Soul from 1967, which is also the one that has, I wish how I knew. I wish I knew how it feel to be free. It also has, turn me on. It also has the look of love. Like, it's got bops. And I was listening to it actually on the bus the other day. crying on my way to work. So it's really short. And I'll read the lyrics again. And now we are one. Let my soul rest in peace. At last it is done. My soul has been released. For thousands of years,

my soul has roamed the earth in search of you so that someday I could give birth. To know joy, joy, joy, joy and peace is mine, peace divine. And now we give things. give thanks for each other at peace forever for it is done at peace forever for we are one right and the tune is to um it's it's set to the melody of a song that she had recorded in the 50s called for all we know it feels like I'm probably going to start crying so you're just going to have to bear with me it feels like this um not like like a response um it's obviously a love song but it feels like you know it's the last track on the album it's a love song it feels like a love song to death it feels like um i think when i

tweeted about it i think i said that it feels like it feels like the song that you would hear in a movie as a character is taking their last breath it feels like it feels like the song that you would hear in a movie as a character is taking their last breath. It feels like finality, but not a finality that is like a resigned one. It feels like, you know, if this were going to be in a film, like, you've done, maybe you weren't successful, but you did everything that you thought that you needed to do and you really tried to do it and you did it the best that you could and you have nothing, you have no regrets. and and like when the song and like I feel like I'm holding my breath and because the song it builds and it builds and then the last two lines are like at peace forever for we are one and it is like it is this like declaration of love for someone else that is just like this is all that I need and and I have it and I'm okay just as I as I feel like it's talking to death.

And it's like, I'm not afraid of it. And for me, that's what I think freedom feels like. And she even says this, you know, freedom is living with no fear, not of the material conditions in which you live and also not of dying. And she lived this like fearlessness that, and she lived this struggle. and she had this tumultuous life and when you hear in her music when she has these glimmers of

of calm and comfort and peace you feel so glad for her because you're just like she does black women all deserve it but she really deserves it you know and that's why yeah that's why that song for me feels like such like someone one like put their hand, like my heart stopped and someone has like plunged their hand into my chest and is like squeezing my heart manually to keep it going. Like it just, it feels, I don't

know, let me not get all mushy, but it, yeah, I love that song. Yeah, no, I mean, perfectly said, just hearing you talk brought tears to my eyes. Um, I absolutely adore you and I, I love that answer. It's a, it's a beautiful song, absolutely. Um, I, I just want to throw out a couple of, of mine. I definitely like the ones that just sort of hit me there's so many i could say i could put so many songs in this answer but um ones that just hit me for various reasons i put a spell on you it gets me not only like there's a sort of haunting sense of like deep heartbreak and and like this desperate longing you know in the in the song but after you read her biography you know you realize how lonely she was and how deeply she wanted to be loved so badly her entire life and

really struggled deeply with trying to find the sort of love that she deserved, you know, and her pain and her fear and her sadness and her anger. It comes out so viscerally in that song. It's one of the most emotionally moving songs for me. And when her voice, it almost breaks down and it stops talking in language and it's just sort of these sounds that are coming out of her soul, you know, it's almost like it transcends language and still the visceral emotion only intensifies even in lieu. of language and like sort of a linear structure to the message that she's putting out.

So to be able to achieve that musically is just an accomplishment in the other self. You better stop the things you do. You better stop the things you do. I ain't lying. No, I ain't lying. You know, I can't stand it. You're running around. You know better that it.

I can't stand it because you put me down. Yeah, yeah. I put a spell on you. Because you're mine. You're mine. I love you. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you anyhow. And I don't care if you don't want me. I'm yours right now. Oh, you hear me. I put a spell on you. And then the other song that really sticks out to me is a backlash blues, you know, just an anti-imperialist, internationalist, black liberationist song is actually written or co-written by the black poet Langston Hughes, which I found out, you know, which is really interesting.

But I find that song, if I put a spell on you is like this emotive, introspective sort of her own feeling song, then Backlash Blues is like her militant, revolutionary side of things. And, you know, both of those songs move me deeply each time I listen to them.

The thing I love about both of those songs, thinking about I put a spell on you and the kind of musicality of it, and then also thinking about her collaboration with Lengths and Hughes on this is like, when classical music was a thing, like all of those little European countries had their own particular styles of doing classical music. The Germans were intense and the Russians were like doing whatever. And Nina Simone,

I think more than so many other people, really demonstrates how jazz is American classical music. And not just because she was this classically trained musician, but it's like She's collaborating with, like, one of the best American writers on this piece in protest of empire. And, you know, and I put a spell on you, she's, it's these vocals, it's the string arrangements. It's the, the sweeping highs and lows. Like, she really just puts a kind of, like, range and talent and a drawing of influences on display in her music that really is, really. stunning and kind of continues to be in my opinion like kind of unmatched totally yeah i mean absolutely like she literally like sort of puts a spell on you in the song the song is like that

level of hypnotic you know um at least that's how i engage with it what are your thoughts on her rendition of of strange fruit have you listened to that recently god god damn right i just can't really listen to that song in general too often but you know i always say with you know Nina simone with Aretha Franklin, if they cover your music, that song belongs to them now. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I don't want to put two black women into competition. You know, I can't, I'm not going to choose between her and Billy Holiday. I refuse to do that.

For sure. It's sort of stripped down musically, right? Yeah, and that makes it scarier and sadder and more powerful and more haunting. and as if the lyrics aren't horrifying enough. You know, her indition of it is tremendous. It's, yeah. Yeah. I love that of hers.

Totally. And I love Billy Holliday's version as well. I mean, both of them just powerful. I also love, what are my other, some of my other favorites. Speaking of things that belong to her fucking, here comes the sun. I hate the Beatles. Yeah. Also, I think she also did a cover.

of Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman. Is that, yeah, I haven't heard that one. I like it better. I think it's on the same album that here comes the song is, here comes the sun is on. Okay. I love her cover of Neme Kitepa is great. Yeah.

To be young, gifted in black also a bob. I don't know. It's a lot of bobs. For sure. We could talk all day. Like, just name all of her songs. Honestly, honestly, though. Feeling good is another one.

I mean, just the levels of like sublime aesthetic jubilation that I feel when listening to feeling good. It's like a deep churning in a positive way deep in my soul. And yeah, everything she just love when she gets to be, when I hear a semblance of happiness, joy, contentment, satisfaction. Right, right. Because God knows she fucking deserves it. Fucking deserved it. My God. So moving on, we have two more questions before we wrap up here.

And the first question is, what is Nina Simone's ultimate legacy, in your opinion? What do you think we should really keep in mind as radicals, revolutionaries in the 21st century? What can we pull out of her life and really apply it or just think about it or just be influenced by it? I think one of the biggest influences for me is the way that we can't understand as being separate from any kind of liberatory politic or to understand art as being a political. political, to put it another way, you know, to be like, oh, well, she was a brilliant musician. It's like, yes, she was. And also, like, you can't just listen to her music and not hear these kind of direct intervention, these kind of creative artistic interventions around issues of anti-blackness and slavery and imperialism and oppression and gender discrimination

and whatever else. And I think that it's really powerful to see her as this dynamic political artist as a black woman because of these ways that black women's dynamism is often so deliberately kind of denied to them. I think about the way that people talk about Maya Angelou as this like ancestor grandmotherly figure and I was just like Maya Angelou was like a loose woman. She was a sex worker and she was the kind of woman that in 2019 like y'all would be shitting on and yet you've been able to deify her because you have excised the parts of her life from her incredibly powerful literary work that you don't like. You've taken out of her life the parts of her that are messy. And Nina was incredibly fucking messy. But it is the recognition of this messiness that

really forces you to understand the full humanity of black women and the work that we put into movements that we put into our interpersonal relationships, into our friendships, into our whatever. And it is to embrace that messiness and to understand that messiness as looking at the different ways that you can be supportive of black women and not just watch them be messy and struggle from afar, but to really invest like care and resources into making sure black women, black, trans women, black sex workers, whatever, are okay. For me, the politicization of art, because what fascist art tried to do as much as possible is to turn kind of artistic expression into a pure aesthetic.

That's what kind of Walter Benjamin talks about with the kind of aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. Can you talk a little bit about that maybe like an example so people that struggle to understand that in the abstract can sort of grasp what you mean by? a good example would be um the way that gerbils had his whole little council of like german artists that produced germanness through their art you know the the uplifting of wagner as this like production of real aryanness it's a it's a politic in itself but it is this it is this transformation of this fascist understanding of self and other

And it is a translation of that fascism into music. And it is the use of the music as fascist expression. But to make it more palatable by just understanding the music as being this aesthetic purity, as opposed to understanding aesthetic purity as being this thing that is manufactured. I see. I see. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, no, definitely. It's a tough sort of thing to wrestle with if you haven't thought about it or been introduced to it.

But yeah, I think that definitely pushes people in the right direction to understand what we mean by that. Because I think it's really important. And we're starting to see versions of that in our own society as sort of these fascist and neo-fascist movements arise. So I think it's important to think about that and apply it to our own conditions as things develop. I think another good example real quick is Lenny Riefenstahl. And the way that Lenny Riefenstahl is still such kind of a fixture in film studies, even though she was a Nazi propaganda. And of course she's going to be able to pioneer these camera technologies when the Third Reich is literally throwing money at her to create these symphonic visions of like the Nuremberg conference or of the Germans at the Olympics. And the best example of this kind of pure aesthetic appreciation and the fact that I think that like most art is fascist to some extent is the fact that in the 1970, in the 1970,

she released this book called The Last of the Nuba. And she had spent a number of years in Sudan photographing the Nuba. And when the book was released, I think, in like May 1975 or something like that, the art world like shit the bed. And they were like, see, this is proof that she's not a Nazi. She's an artist and da-da-da-da-da-da. But when you look at the photographs, you know, she was a Nazi and she also was like colorblind to some extent.

she was like a Nazi asphete and when Olympia came out and there are all of these images of like Jesse Owens and all of his physical dominance you know people were like well you know she applied the same kind of gaze of appreciation and awe to Jesse Owens that she did to the Nazis

and I was like no that's because she's just the kind of fascist who can appreciate anything and so when you look at her books about Sudan because she made two of them it's these very tall dark-skinned people and a lot of the photographs that she takes are of them wrestling or it's this gaze that's trained on their naked bodies and I was like this is the same kind of fascist objectification and deification of like physical perfection that the Nazis did it's just the bodies happen to be black you know so there's my I she is my like bait and

are like she if i had like one thing to do for the rest of my career it would be to like destroy every last ounce of her legacy yeah interesting but yeah anyway is there is there a connection really quick between um the sort of fascist impulse you know an obsession with like purity and its opposite sort of degeneracy and the the the aestheticization of politics in the fascist in the fascist mindset absolutely that's why i think such an important part of the nazi propaganda the machine was this idea of degenerate art and one part of degenerate art was jazz because the Nazis saw it as this kind of this like Jewish Bolshevik control of like puppeteering of black people and so if you look at some of the images of degenerate art um specifically of jazz what you'll

see is like a monkey with a gold star on it um to represent the fact and it's like if you look at Nina Simone. And if you look at jazz, you know, strange fruit was written by a Jewish man. Yeah. There were so many, you know, Jewish songwriters that were, like, influential in, like, some of the biggest hits in jazz music and in Seoul. And the Nazis saw that as something to be specifically, like, targeted and eradicated. So, yeah, I absolutely think that this idea of being able to achieve these pure aesthetics, hence the kind of obsession with, like, Greco-Roman form.

Right. That's why, you know, the Italian fascists were trying to return to this Roman empire because they saw it as this politically and aesthetically perfect moment. And like, yeah, fascist even today, they'll like have in their like profiles like Greek or Roman all white statues, right? And that's sort of a... Never mind that these statues were actually colored. Right, right.

They were just painted. Yeah, and what the paint fell off over time? And but it's like when you, when they're like washed or when you like actually see them the way that they were created like they weren't white they were colored there's this concept that david bachel wrote in this book called chromophobia and he talks about this this this whitewashing as a negative hallucination this literal refusal to see the thing that is there damn yeah well that's a whole episode in and of itself yeah thank you for thank you for touching on those things i think that's really important i think a lot of people will find that really really helpful uh last question for

you before we wrap up and you know we've kind of talked about this but maybe just one last sort of answer to wrap everything up nicely what do you personally find most inspiring or influential about nina simone and her life i think that the thing that i find most inspiring is the thing that i find the kind of saddest and it's that she was always thinking about freedom and she was always thinking about, you know, what it means to be free personally and kind of collectively. And I think that her eye on this kind of collective is something that is a really important orientation for me to always ground myself in. When I'm doing my like work in academia and we've seen so many people be like, I'm going to do this work. And they get sucked into the kind of politics of being in the ivory tower that they forget.

why they started doing that work in the first place. And that's just like an introspection of hers. And she was always very candid. And she was always very honest, painfully so. And the honesty came out in her work. And that's, I think, what I really aspire to do in all of mine is to be as honest as I can with myself and with everyone who interacts with the work in service of this kind of collective struggle and this collective.

sense of like of liberation definitely yep perfectly said beautifully said i'm going to leave it on that thank you so much zoe for coming back on the show i really really really loved this episode and i love preparing for it and yeah you did not disappoint ever so thank you so much um before i let you go can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and your work online you can find my work all aggregated on my website, zoysamwoodsy.com. And I am too present on Twitter. My handle is ZT. Somewadzee. Yep. And I will link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you again, Zoe. It's absolute honor. Every time you come on, I love talking to you. So thank you so much. And absolutely, let's keep in touch and see if we can work together again because I really genuinely

love it. Ditto here. It's so great to talk to you, Brett. Baby, you understand me now If sometimes you see that I'm mad Don't you know no one alive can always be an angel When everything goes wrong you see some bad But I'm just a soul who's intent Intenters a good Oh Lord

Please don't let me Be misunderstood You know sometimes Baby I'm so carefree With a joy That's hard to hide And then sometimes Again it seems that all I have

is worried and then you're bound to see my other side but I'm just the soul's intentions are good oh Lord please don't let me

be misunderstood I see me edgy I want you to know I never need Take it out Only you Life heights problems And I get more than my share

But that's one thing I never mean Because I love you Oh Oh baby I'm just human Don't you know I have faults like anyone Sometimes a

find myself long regretting some little foolish thing some simple thing that I have done just a soul whose intentions

are good Oh Lord He don't let me be misunderstood Don't let me be misunderstood I'm going to read so hard so please don't let me be so much. I'm going to read just a segment of a chapter. Her book, her autobiography is entitled, I Put a Spell on You,

and it is about 11 chapters long, just under 200 pages. I'm just going to read just a segment of chapter 6, where she's talking about her involvement with the civil rights movement. So, you know, the past six chapters she spent from childhood talking about her life growing up, you know, how her career started, all this stuff. And so now she's talking about after her career sort of been started, her thinking about the civil rights movement and really joining it full-fledged and making her art, you know, really putting her art in the service of revolution and of civil rights, of militant revolutionary civil rights. Again, it's really important to remember that Nina Simone always and forever was very, very militant when it came to how to address the problem of white supremacy and black oppression and the brutality inflicted on black people. And she always had a very consciously, pretty much what I could consider a Marxist-Leninist or an anti-Revisionist Marxist-Leninist line when it came to things like black nationhood, when it came to nonviolence. You know, she really rejected some of the more left liberal approaches by people like King.

And, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King is a fucking hero. We all love and support him. And, you know, I think even she says in this book is like, after America killed Dr. King, like, they killed the one black leader who was actually trying to push love and understanding and compassion for blacks towards whites. Like, you know, even despite all this brutality we've been inflicted, we're still going to be nice and loving and compassionate and not fight back. And hopefully through just showing our fucking humanity, maybe they will fucking, you know, allow us to have our rights and our dignity as human beings. And after America, and that's how it should be put. It's not just one guy. That's what America wants you to believe.

Like one loose cannon shot Martin Luther King. And that's what happened. No, America killed Martin Luther King. America killed these leaders, Mediger Evers, Malcolm X, Emmett Till. You can say this individual white person did it, but that white person is just a stand-in for the American white supremacist system as a whole.

And the violence inflicted by the state on black people is a macrocosm of the violence inflicted by an individual fascist white supremacist on these black leaders. And I think thinking about it in those terms is important, and Nina certainly did. So let's go ahead and read a little bit from her book. let's see here

so page 86 on her autobiography I put a spell on you which is going to be about 10 pages going over just her radicalization and you know how she's thinking about it in the midst of her career really taking off at this point okay

so quoting Nina now I started to pay closer attention to what was happening in my country especially to the advances my own people were making with the civil rights movement I had not made a connection between the fights I had and any whiter struggle for justice because of how I was raised. The Wayman Way was to turn away from prejudice and to live your life as best you could,

as if acknowledging the existence of racism was in itself a kind of defeat. That was what I did after Curtis. I turned away from the disgrace I felt after being refused the scholarship and pursued my ambition from a different angle. Of course, I knew discrimination existed, but I didn't allow myself to admit it had any effect on me. Like anyone with half a brain, I had followed the development of the civil rights movement from his early days with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Watching the way the protest in Montgomery grew from one black woman's

determination to sit just once in the front of a public bus to a citywide black boycott of public services, a boycott which survived for well over a year in the face of brutal intimidation, I understood for the first time the power of collective action. But I didn't make the jump to thinking I had a part to play in what was happening. Through knowing black leaders, as friends right from my very early days in New York, I was always aware of what the vanguard of black artists and thinkers were concerned with, but I wasn't an activist in any sense. I heard the conversations flow around me at Langston Hughes or in the blue note with Jimmy Baldwin. I laughed at the political jokes at the village gate, and a political awareness

seeped into me without my having even to think about it. But I wasn't taking the trouble to educate myself in an organized way. Where would I find the time? It would take a special kind of friend, really, to pull me into the ideas of the black movement. and forced me to accept that I had to take politics seriously. That special friend was Lorraine Hansberry, the first black writer to have a hit Broadway play Raisin in the Sun in 1958, and the person who first took me out of myself and allowed me to see the bigger picture. I was introduced to Lorraine in the early 60s,

but I only got to know her well after I moved to Mount Vernon. Lorraine lived about 10 miles away in Quilton on the Hudson. We started to visit each other all the time and became firm friends. She was Lisa's godmother and gave her a beautiful silver Tiffany hairbrush and comb for her christening present. Although Lorraine was a girlfriend, a friend of my own, rather than one shared with Andy, her husband at the time, we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, and Revolution, real girls' talk. Lorraine was most definitely an intellectual and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle.

She understood that I felt separated from what was going on, but told me over and over that like it or not, I was involved in the struggle by the fact of being black. It made no difference whether I admitted it or not. The fact was still true. Lorraine was truly dedicated. Although she loved beautiful things, she denied them to herself because they would distract her from the struggle, which was her life. She wore no makeup except lipstick and had only five dresses. I'm pretty the way I am, she'd say. I don't need lots of clothes.

Lorraine started off my political education, and through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men. I realized I was ignorant and had had much to learn, but my teachers from Lorraine onwards were the cream of the movement, Stokely Carmichael, Godfrey Cambridge, and many, many others, most of whom I would never meet face-to-face but in their writings, speeches, or just in their actions. Like Rosa Parks when she sat in the front of that bus in Montgomery and refused to move no matter what, they pointed the way forward. Like so many people dedicated to the struggle for freedom in America, Lorraine died before her time. Cancer killed her when she was just 34, only a couple of years after Lisa's christening. When she was getting ready to die, she asked for me, and I went down to the hospital with a record player. I played in the evening by the moonlight for her, and she raised her hands in front of her face and said, Nina, I don't know what's happening to me.

They say I'm not going to get better, but I must get well. I must go down to the south. I've been a revolutionary all my life, but I've got to go down there to find out what kind of revolutionary I really am. She never got out of that hospital, and the next time I played in the evening by the moonlight was at her funeral service in New York. I didn't cry.

I was beyond crying by that time. Before she died, Lorraine had been working on a new play, to be young, gifted in black. I took the title and wrote a song around it in memory of Lorraine, and so many others to be young gifted in black oh what a lovely precious dream to be young gifted in black open your heart to what i mean in the whole world you know there are a billion boys and girls who are young gifted and black and that's a fact in early 1963 as i nursed lisa all that was still to come dr king's southern christian leadership conference was deep into another campaign in birmingham

Alabama, using the issue of desegregating the downtown lunch counters to politicize and educate the whole community. On Good Friday, Dr. King was arrested while praying in the streets of Birmingham. At the same time, I set out for Chicago to play a date at the Sutherland Lounge. Dr. King was writing his famous letter from Birmingham jail while I was on stage. When I got back to Mount Vernon, Lorraine called to point out the comparison and asked, what was I doing for the movement while its leaders were stuck in jail? Later, Dr. King was released, and soon afterwards the city of Birmingham gave in to the SCLC's demands. I thought an important victory had been won, and when a little while later

President Kennedy announced he was going to present a new civil rights bill to Congress, it seemed like another was on the way. The president's announcement was on June 11th. The very next night, while Kennedy was on TV talking about the moral crisis in America, Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of his home. I heard the news with disgust, but it seemed like just one more bitter news story at a time when they were already too many. At the trial of the white man accused of Medgar Evers' murder, the governor of Mississippi walked into the courthouse to shake hands with the man in the dock. I noted this at the time, but didn't react to it. I was still turning the other cheek.

What I didn't appreciate was that, while Medgar Evers' murder was not the final straw for me, it was the match that lit the fuse. In September, I started to prepare. myself for our first tour since Lisa's birth. I was to start a week at the village gate on the 20th of the month and then fly to L.A. for further concerts. In Mount Vernon, we had a little apartment built over the garage, which was my private hideaway, where I went to practice and prepare for forthcoming performances. I was sitting there in my den on the 15th of September when news came over the radio that somebody had thrown dynamite into the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, while black children were attending a Bible study class. Four of them, Denise McNair,

Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins had been killed. Later that day, in the rioting which followed, Birmingham police shot another black kid and a white mob pulled a young black man off his bicycle and beat him to death out in the street. It was more than I could take, and I sat struck dumb in my den like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. All the truths that I had denied to myself for so long, rose up and slapped my face. The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963.

But it wasn't an intellectual connection of the type Lorraine had been repeating to me over and over. It came as a rush of fury, hatred, and determination. In church language, the truth entered into me, and I was a time. I came through. I went down to the garage and got a load of tools and junk together and took them up to my little apartment. Andy came in an hour later, saw the mess and asked me what I was doing. My explanation didn't make sense because the words tumbled out in a rush. I couldn't speak quickly enough to release the torrents inside my head. He understood though, and was still enough

of a cop to see I was trying to make a zip gun, a homemade pistol. As an aside, Andy was her husband for a while and previously before he married her he had been a cop, hence that little point just so people understand. I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone. I didn't know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people getting some justice for the first time in 300 years. Andy didn't try to stop me, but just stood there for a while and said, Nina, you don't know anything about killing. The only thing you've got is music. He left me alone while I calmed down enough to think straight. The idea of fighting for the rights of my people, killing for them if it came to that, didn't disturb me too much. Even back then, I wasn't convinced that nonviolence could get us

what we wanted. But Andy was right. I knew nothing about killing, and I did know about music. I sat at my piano. An hour later, I came out of my apartment with the sheet music from Mississippi goddamn in my hand. It was my first civil rights song, and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down. I knew then that I would dedicate myself to the struggle for black justice, freedom, inequality under the law for as long as it took until all our battles were won. Once I got inside the civil rights movement, I found out that many people already thought of me as a political artist, a protest singer, because I used to talk about civil rights on stage sometimes, praising the freedom writers or asking if there was anyone from SNCC, pronounced SNCC,

the student nonviolent coordinating committee, in the house. If there was, I got them to stand up, so all those who were doing nothing while these people got busted fighting for their rights felt good and guilty. But I didn't consider myself involved. I was just spurring them on as best as I could from where I sat, on stage, an artist, separate somehow. That's how I felt, coming as I did from a classical background. Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty, and to mix all that with politics seems senseless and demeaning. And until songs like Mississippi goddamn just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes in a simple tune.

That was the musical side of it I shied away from. I didn't like protest music because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative. It stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombings and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument. And with Mississippi, God damn, I realized there was no turning back. I went up to New York as planned and sang the song in public for the first time at the village gate. It brought the place down, and I got the same reaction wherever I said. sing it. We released it as a single and it soed well, except in the South, where we had trouble

with distribution. The excuse was profanity, God damn, but the real reason was obvious enough. A dealer in South Carolina sent a whole crate of copies back to our office with each one snapped in half. I laughed because it meant we were getting through. In some states, the distributors bleeped out the word, God damn, changed the wording on the sleeve and released it under the title, Mississippi, asterisk, number sign, star, asterisk, etc. after the murder of medgar evers the alabama bombing and mississippi goddam the entire direction of my life shifted and for the next seven years i was driven by civil rights and the hope of black revolution i was proud of what i was doing and proud to be a part of a movement that was changing history it made what i did for a living something much more worth while i had started singing because it was a way of earning more money then fame came along and i began to enjoy the trappings of success but after a while even they weren't enough and i got my fulfillment outside of music from my husband my daughter my my home. That changed when I started singing for the movement, because I justified what I was doing to myself and to the world outside. I could finally answer Mama's great unasked question.

Why do you sing out in the world when you could be praising God? I needed to be able to answer that question because although being a performing artist sounded like something grand and wonderful, up to then it felt like just another job. I didn't feel like an artist because the music I played, to which I dedicated my artistry, was so inferior. That was why I put as much of my classical background as I could into the songs I performed and the music I recorded, to give it at least some depth and quality. The world of popular music was nothing compared to the classical world. You didn't have to work as hard, the audiences were too easily pleased, and all they were interested in was the delivery of the lyrics. It seemed like a nothing world to me, and I didn't have much respect for popular audiences

because they were so musically ignorant. As I became more involved in the movement, this attitude I had towards my audiences changed, because I admired what they were achieving for my people so much that the level of their musical education didn't come into it anymore. They gave me respect too, not only for my music, which they loved, but because they understood the stand I was making. They knew I was making sacrifices

and running risks just like they were, and we were all in it together. Being a part of this struggle made me feel so good. My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music's pursuit of excellence. It was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people. I felt a fierce pride

when I thought about what we were all doing together. so if the movement gave me nothing else, it gave me self-respect. It was at this time in the mid-60s that I first began to feel the power and spirituality I could connect with when I played in front of an audience. I'd been performing for ten years, but it was only at this time that I felt a kind of state of grace come upon me on those occasions when everything fell into place. At such times I would give a concert that everyone who witnessed it would remember for years, and they would go home afterwards knowing that something very special had happened. Those moments are very difficult for a performer to explain, It's like being transported in church.

Something descends upon you and you are gone, taken away by a spirit that is outside of you. I can only think of one comparison. I went to a bullfight in Barcelona once, not knowing what to expect. I sat in the sun drinking vodka, waiting for it to begin, and when they got the bull out and killed him, I threw up from the mixture of alcohol in shock. It was a Sunday afternoon bloodletting, a real bloodletting. Back and try on, at revival time, people would come through and shout, carry on and foam at the mouth. We'd call it bloodletting, but it wasn't, not real bloodletting like it was that Sunday afternoon.

I realized then that Spanish people were not much different from black people in America in the Holy Roller Church, and the songs performed by the flamenco musicians were similar to those performed by my people in churches in the Black South, all rhythm and emotion. The only difference was they actually killed the bull in Spain, whereas in America they had revival meetings where the death and sacrifice were only symbolic. But it was the same thing, the same sense of being transformed, of celebrating something different, deep, something very deep. That's what I learned about performing, that it was real, and I had the ability to make people feel on a deep level. It's difficult to describe because it's not something you can analyze. To get near what it's about, you have to play it. And when you've caught it,

when you've got the audience hooked, you always know because it's like electricity hanging in the air. I began to feel it happening, and it seemed to me like mass hypnosis, like I was hypnotizing an entire audience to feel a certain way. I was the Torridor, mesmerizing this bowl, and I could turn around and walk away, turning my back on this huge animal which I knew would do nothing because I had it under my complete control. And like they did with the Toradors, people came to see me because they knew I was playing close to the edge, and one day I might fall. This was how I got my reputation as a live performer, because I went out from the mid-60s onwards, determined to get every audience to enjoy my concerts the way I wanted them to, and if they resisted at first, I had all

the tricks to bewitched them with. I know it all sounds a little Californian and wired, but it wasn't like that at all. I had a technique and I used it. To cast the spell over an audience, I would start with the song to create a certain mood, which I carried into the next song and then on through into the third until I created a certain climax of feeling, and by then they would be hypnotized. To check, I'd stop and do nothing for a moment, and I'd hear absolute silence. I'd got them. It was always an uncanny moment. It was as if there was a power source somewhere that we all plugged into, and the bigger the audience, the easier it was, as if each person supplied a certain amount of the power. As I moved on from clubs into bigger halls, I learned

to prepare myself thoroughly. I'd go to the empty hall in the afternoon and walk around to see where the people were sitting, how close they'd be to me at the front and how far away at the back, whether the seats got closer together or further apart, how big the stage was, how the lights were positioned, where the microphones were going to hit, everything. I was especially careful of microphones, taking the trouble to find one that worked for me and throwing away those that didn't. So by the time I got on stage, I knew exactly what I was doing. Before important concerts, I would practice alone for hours at a time, so long sometimes that my arms would seize up completely. There was one period when I was so dissatisfied with drummers that I decided not to use them anymore. So I

sat down for days and trained my left hand like a drum. Just as I mastered it, my arm went paralyzed from all the work it had done. Other times I'd fall asleep at the piano, and Andy would have to come and put me to bed. I made sure the musicians in my bands understood in every detail the way we were the way we were to play and we rehearsed regularly. But the vital thing was that they empathized with me and understood the way I was likely to go on stage. My ideal musician was Al Shackman, but there were others who were almost as wonderful,

and those that weren't got fired on day one. My bands knew the repertoire of songs I would choose from, but I never gave them a set list until the very last minute, sometimes as we walked out on the stage, because the songs I played each night depended on the mood I caught from the audience, the hall, and my preparations through the day. When I walked out to play, I was super, sensitive. And whilst aware of the crowd, tried to play for myself, have a good time, and hope the

audience would get pulled into that, as if, like my musicians, they were an extension of me for the time the concert lasted. The saddest part of performing was, and still is, that it didn't mean anything once you were off stage. I never felt proud of being a performer or got vain about it, because it mostly came naturally, and I didn't feel that I completely understood or controlled what happened on stage anyhow. I did my preparations as carefully as possible in order to set the scene, but having done that the rest was difficult to predict. I knew the songs to play and in what order, but the difference between a good professional performance and a great show, one where I would get lost in the music, was impossible to know. It just happened. Whatever it was that happened out there under the lights,

it mostly came from God, and I was just a place along the line he was moving on. With civil rights, I played on stage for a reason, and when I walked off stage, those reasons still existed. They didn't fade away with the applause, and there were always new ideas to discuss, articles to read, speakers to listen to and songs to write. For the first time performing made sense as a part of my life. It was no longer that strange and wonderful two hours out front which only depressed you more when you got back to the dressing room and stared at the paint peeling off the walls

and wondered if you'd get any sleep that night. As my commitment deepened and I started to play benefits, go on marches and mix with a wide range of people involved in civil rights, I got to hear stories about what I meant to some of these activists, and what I heard astonished me. I was always most sympathetic to SNCC, which was made up of younger people, students mainly, and had risen up spontaneously in 1960

around a series of sit-ins and segregated diners in Greensboro, South Carolina. The attitude of the people in Snick was the closest to how I felt, that there was more than one way to skin a cat, and whatever means work to get what you wanted was the right one to use. Like Snick, I felt non-violence was the way forward

in the early 60s because it seemed to get results, but I wasn't committed to non-violence for ideological reasons like Dr. King's organization, the SCLC. I knew a time might come where we would have to fight for what was right, and I had no problem with that. The Ku Klux Klan weren't not in violence, and neither were the police, nor the government if they felt threatened. My friends and SNCC told me that when they got started and had their meetings to discuss strategy, meetings which often turned into parties later, there would always be Nina Simone records in whoever's house the meeting was held in. In 1962, I heard this years later,

some SNCC guys from Howard University in Washington went to a conference in Nashville and were astonished to find their Tennessee comrades had the exact same records of mine as they did. The Washington members had thought Nina Simone was their own private discovery, but everywhere they went to meet fellow workers, they found my records. In 1964, SNCC had a conference in Atlanta, which was fixed for a certain date until the Mississippi delegation wrote, saying that, as I was coming to play at the Magnolia Ballroom two weeks later, they wanted the conference date switch, so they could get to see me and go to the conference at the same time. So they switched the date. Other SNCC people told me proudly that the only thing that ever got stolen from their offices, meaning the only things SNCC workers stole from each other, were books and Nina Simone records.

And that the only thing guaranteed to make members forget their nonviolent training was for them to find out their Nina Simone records were missing. When I started to hear these stories, and much of this was happening before Medgar Evers was killed and the church bombed, I realized that the whole time I'd been in New York, to come to terms with my career, and all those afternoons when Lorraine had been telling me there was a struggle going on which I had to get involved in, I had been involved anyway. Those kids out in the backwoods knew I was part of their fight before I knew it myself.

And when I finally met up with them, the storm troopers of the movement, who didn't have the protection of fame, money, and a comfortable home like I did, who risked their lives every single day, it convinced me further that I had no choice but to line up alongside them. You can call it what you like, but to me it seemed like destiny. Thank you.