(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
If there’s anything an activist dislikes, it’s performativity. Over the decades, countless musicians have raised awareness of the things that truly matter, which, as we know, is the first stage in starting necessary conversations. Where this move begins to get hazy, however, is when signalling fails to become action—something that Nina Simone was heavily aware of.
Talking about Simone in the context of the contemporary music landscape is difficult, not because her legacy speaks for itself but because it seems too monolithic to cram into small spaces. After all, Simone achieved a lot throughout her life and career, not just musically but societally and culturally, too, all of which feels entirely outweighed by mere appreciative vernacular.
However, that in itself is what made her so great. Simone wasn’t ever one to dabble in pretences or surface-level dialogue, nor did she entertain fallacies for the purpose of sensationalist conversation. Those speaking to Simone—whether in a journalistic setting or a casual one—knew that she enjoyed talking about the things that mattered, from why she fell in love with music to how she grew to want to save the entire world.
At the same time, these moves weren’t to be viewed poetically, as is often the case when discussing Simone today. She had a quality of quiet beauty about her, and of course she did, but this wasn’t solely connected to her activism in the way it seems to be from outsiders’ eyes. She knew, understood, and lived all of the tragedies she felt close to her heart, and she listened to and absorbed those she didn’t experience, repurposed for the flames of her march like someone truly on a mission.
This is why she sometimes clashed with others. While her disdain for some musicians stretched beyond her own beliefs, one of the many things was that she felt some failed to hit the mark, especially when it came to voicing issues that meant a lot to her. One such example was The Beatles. Other than the obvious reasons, the Fab Four might have started off on the right foot compared to a Black woman, Simone felt that some songs, like ‘Revolution’, failed to address the real root cause of the issue.
“Revolution means what is going on all over the world,” she explained. Continuing, “If you listen to the lyric, you will see that although it does include the racial problem, it includes all the revolts and rebellions going on all over the world … poor against rich, young against old, new breed against old establishment.” Elsewhere, she implied that their success was a matter of timing, claiming they were “not exceptionally talented” but that “fate” allowed them to “develop” without “fighting everybody around them.” A far cry from her experience.
Another Simone seemed to take issue with was Billie Holiday. Despite covering her songs and the intense comparisons, especially when it came to civil rights activists, Simone seemed to dislike much of what Holiday represented, even once coming after her voice. “I don’t like drug addicts, and she sounds like a cat,” she once explained, implying that her displeasure likely came from somewhere more personal than anything rooted in Holiday’s legacy.
And while the details of her dislike for Holiday remain unclear, it seemed as though her aversion to certain aspects of others’ artistry came from the one place she vowed to steer clear of—pretence. It’s easy to imagine that, in Simone’s world, nothing was worse than posing as righteousness, especially for those who never had direct experience of such suffering themselves or were less inclined to want to understand or learn about it.
The Beatles might mean the world to a lot of people, and Simone never wished to dismantle everything they came to represent, but she remained realistic about how they got their fame and why. As someone who was rejected as a classical music student because she wasn’t white, Simone had firsthand experience of the industry’s racist infrastructure and the biases that pushed people like her down, even in its own insidious and unsuspecting ways.
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