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Then again, she could opt for folk songs from the years that followed-a bit of Dylan or perhaps “House of the Rising Sun,” where she would portray the destitute young girl drawn to a life of prostitution. Jazz – like “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” with its swinging, ready-for-a-party piano – reflected her days playing clubs in Atlantic City, where drunken college boys became her first audience and she had to learn to sing, fast, in order to make a living. Her piano playing was steeped in the classical music she studied as a child in North Carolina, where she showed such an early gift that a local music teacher raised funds to pay for the child’s further education. Starting with her first album in 1958 (recordings for which were recently reissued as Mood Indigo: The Complete Bethlehem Sessions, followed by the double-disc The Colpix Singles), Simone left behind one of the most remarkably eclectic bodies of work in pop history – a journey into the evolution of popular music itself.Įither in concert or on record, you never quite knew what you were getting with Simone.
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That staggeringly diverse list reflects the variety of Simone’s work. Blige, Lauryn Hill, Usher, Feist and John Legend, and remixed by the likes of Avicii and Postal Service. Since then, songs associated with Simone have been covered by Muse, Mary J. The rediscovery of Simone has been gradually building since Tracy Chapman and the late Jeff Buckley covered her songs either before or just after her death. “If you want to say rock & roll is anger music, then Nina Simone is rock & roll.” “ Nina Simone was more rock & roll than a bunch of people who have already been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” says modern folk artist Rhiannon Giddens, who discovered Simone via YouTube clips and later covered “Tomorrow Is My Turn” on her album of the same name. “I am no more evil or temperamental than anybody else, the only thing is I’m more obvious,” she told Newsweek in 1963. During a performance at a record-industry conference in 1977, she berated the executives in attendance – “Most of you people out there are crooks” – and was booed off the stage. When she finally did appear, she interjected shouts of “I must get my money!” and “I will get my money!” into the songs. At New York’s Village Gate in 1959, she kept her audience waiting an hour, all while she holed up in her dressing room complaining about her fee and the size of the crowd. “Four Woman,” her 1966 song about a quartet of African-American women (a prostitute, an activist, an interracial woman and a daughter of slaves), was banned in Philadelphia and other cities, just like “Louie Louie” or similarly censored songs of the time. A woman of deep complexity and uncompromising authority, Simone, who died in 2003 at age 70 from breast cancer, rewrote the rules for what it meant to be a woman in so-called show business. The capper of the current Simone moment will be her induction this month into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – although, if all it took was insouciance and a rebel streak to qualify, Simone could have been welcomed there years ago. So there’s a lot of reverence for Nina and a sense that she didn’t get her due during her lifetime.” “She wasn’t a household name like Aretha, who made more commercial choices like going on night-time talk shows. (It was followed by a less–well-received dramatized biopic, Nina, starring Zoe Saldana.) “I knew how much people in the music world loved Nina,” says Garbus. Two years ago, director Liz Garbus’ unflinching Simone documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, was nominated for an Oscar Lana Del Rey asked for a special screening, and Garbus heard that Beyoncé loved the film. The 2017 song joins the list of other recent hip-hop tracks that have sampled Simone including Kanye West’s “Blood on the Leaves,” Lil Wayne’s “Understood,” and West and Jay-Z’s “New Day.” As producer No ID told Rolling Stone last year about Jay-Z’s use of Simone samples on 4:44, “That’s the score to his life. Consider Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.”: The Grammy-nominated 4:44 track incorporates a sample of Simone’s “Four Women,” and the accompanying video even depicts a cartoon version of the late singer. Nina Simone died 15 years ago this month, but judging on influence alone, it’s begun to seem like she never left.