Her legacy to the world is her music, a diverse and deeply engaging catalog of music in multiple forms and genres. It’s no wonder that her later years were marked by anger, outrage and bipolar disorder, when her trauma would drive her to traumatize others. As an African-American with a vagina, she was triply out of sync. This may seem strange to those who look back on the mid-60’s as the golden age of the protest song, when Bob Dylan Peter, Paul & Mary, Barry McGuire and Janis Ian became household names and even Elvis joined in the fun with “In the Ghetto.” Nina Simone took the hit because she was a powerful black woman who refused to hold back, a spectre even more terrifying to racists than the big black stud lurking in the shadows waiting for the chance to give all those peaches-and-cream white women the time of their lives.Īs an artist, Nina Simone was automatically out-of-sync. record sales during the mid-60’s certainly indicate that her embrace of the Civil Rights Movement had damaged her brand. radio stations once she raised her voice in protest, and the decline in her U. Nina always felt she had been blacklisted by U. Once she crossed the line into protest songs with “Mississippi Goddam” on Nina Simone in Concert, public perception changed. Nina Simone began her career singing songs well within acceptable boundaries, a combination of show tunes, standards, an occasional blues number and traditional gospel songs. It’s much harder to take criticism from a woman, especially an angry black woman, even when that woman is exceptionally talented and presents the message in the socially-acceptable formats of easy listening, soft jazz and Broadway show tune. Society finds it much more palatable to accept criticism when it’s delivered by nice-looking white guys with a sense of humor. In addition to their obvious talent and the intimacy they had created with the listening audience over the years, there was one other advantage they had that allowed them to challenge social norms without appreciably damaging record sales. Whether it was John observing that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus, expanding the limits of pop songs with “Strawberry Fields Forever” or admitting the use of LSD, The Beatles made a significant contribution to the expansion of the definition of “normal” in the Western world. Much to their credit, The Beatles continued to push boundaries. The threat turned out to be a false alarm the foundations of society remained firmly in place. Joe could now write off long hair and screaming girls as “just kids being kids,” sit back and enjoy the new normal. “Hey, maybe these long-hairs are okay after all,” thought Average Joe after finding himself whistling to covers of Beatle songs by Herb Alpert and Ella Fitzgerald. Their early songs obeyed the basic rules of pop music, as demonstrated by the flurry of establishment artists who rushed to cover the works of Lennon & McCartney soon after they conquered America. Most of the controversy surrounding The Beatles when they arrived in the States had more to do with their hair and their impact on young girls than their music.
Occasionally those boundaries expand to allow for more musical variation, and sometimes artists expand cultural boundaries through the inherent drive to differentiate themselves from the norm. Its melodies, harmonies and lyrics generally fall within accepted boundaries. It is designed to make you feel comfortable, secure and happy with your life. Most pop music is an anesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is therefore a subversive experience, as all societies structure themselves to encourage stability, conformity and a shared vision of life. When you experience something aesthetically, you open yourself to alternative ways of looking at life, the people around you and the society you inhabit. An aesthetic experience (as opposed to an anesthetic experience) wakens the mind and senses of the listener or viewer. The artist spends a lifetime differentiating between personal truths and societal truths, using this perceptual divide to create aesthetic experience. Nina Simone spent most of her life out of sync with the world, a state of existence characterized by pain and frustration, but also essential to artistic development.
0 kommentar(er)
