ETHOS

By Chloe Wayne

I’ve been meaning to write this for weeks. And I’m not referencing our tacky-ass lack of posting (due to final exams and such…stupid college kids), I mean that I haven’t been able to find the words.

As the fifth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death passed a few weeks ago, I struggled to catch the slippery sentiments afire in my brain, but failed to string them into anything longer than…What happened to activism in popular culture like that? Where are public figures who have grown weary of simple philanthropy and tired liberal rhetoric?

Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam

I long for a new “Mississippi Goddam” (take a listen– link is above). The piano pulses and agitates as urgently and frenetically as Simone’s exhortations; it’s difficult not to believe a torrential one-woman apocalypse will be wreaked upon America if she does not get her way.

Today, how many people know that Simone risked her musical career and livelihood several times to headline benefit concerts—for the likes of SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP among others—for free? When popular cultural memory remembers Simone, musical masterpieces such as “I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” come to mind (Common recently sampled the latter on Finding Forever).

But what about “Pirate Jenny” on one of her live albums, In Concert? The narrator, a poor black female laborer, imagines counter-violence against her oppressors, “deciding whether they should be killed ‘now or later.’ In a powerful whisper, devoid of any musical accompaniment, Simone offered her protagonist’s answer: ‘right now’” (Ruth Feldstein, “I Don’t Trust You Anymore”). I cannot think of any 21st-century pop culture figure who has put forth such an explicit, angry, radical attack on the status quo.

Speaking of radical icons of the African-American musical tradition– Flava Flav, I spit on thee! May the destruction of a thousand locust plagues descend upon thy being (just kidding….sort of).

Gag me with a fork.

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