![A piece on the radicalization of Nina Simone — Jessica H.
Remembering Nina Simone as a Siren and Powerful Civil Rights Activist- Yasha Wallin wrote in Politics, Music and Creativity
…using music as a soap box wasn’t an easy choice, as she once wrote, “Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and 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 bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”
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A piece on the radicalization of Nina Simone — Jessica H.
Remembering Nina Simone as a Siren and Powerful Civil Rights Activist
- Yasha Wallin wrote in Politics, Music and Creativity…using music as a soap box wasn’t an easy choice, as she once wrote, “Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and 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 bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”
(Source: good, via blackrockandrollmusic)
