Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 119

6WUDQJH6DPSOLQJ1LQD6LPRQHDQG+HU+LS+RS&KLOGUHQ

Salamishah Tillet

American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 119-137 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/aq.2014.0006

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v066/66.1.tillet.html

Access provided by Northwestern University Library (30 Mar 2015 20:35 GMT) Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 119

Strange Sampling: Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children

Salamishah Tillet

I could what you do, easy! Believe me Frontin’ niggas gives me heebe-geebes So while you imitatin’ Al Capone I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone —Lauryn Hill, “Ready or Not”

oday, Nina Simone appears to be everywhere. Beginning with her debut LP in 1958 to her final studio album recorded in 1993, iTunes boasts Tover 110 Simone albums to download. She recorded only 40 of those; the rest are compilations or remixes. In 2012 Meshell Ndegeocello released a tribute album, Pour une âme souveraine (A Dedication to Nina Simone), and in 2013 the avant-garde group Xiu Xiu followed suit with its own, Nina. That same year, Beyoncé name-dropped Simone as her sole predecessor in her documentary, Life Is but a Dream; the Broadway musicals A Night with Janis Joplin and Soul Doctor featured characters based on Simone; and the actress Zoe Saldana set off an Internet firestorm when she was cast in the title role of the upcoming biographical filmNina . And no one has sampled Simone more than Kanye West, who has invoked her on all but two of his albums, including Yeezus’s most controversial track. Simone’s popularity within contemporary American popular culture, however, owes a great debt to the increased use of her sound in hip-hop music. Through the digital sampling of her voice, the interpolation of her piano riffs, or covers of her classics, like “Four Women” or “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” Simone’s presence in hip-hop has been on the rise since 1996, when former Fugees’ member Lauryn Hill brilliantly rhymed herself into Simone’s legacy rather than the hypermasculine American gangsterism that dominated the early-1990s hip-hop scene.1 At the time, the young Hill seemed more heir apparent to Simone’s throne of sonic fluidity, political urgency, and bohemian black glamour than any other hip-hop artist. Since that moment, the vast majority of Simone’s material has been cited, covered, or sampled by a pantheon of African American male hip-hop acts, ranging from the socially

conscious camp of Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and the Roots to less politically inclined artists, such as 50 Cent, Cassidy, Flo Rider, Lil Wayne, Timbaland, and, most frequently and controversially, by the producer and rapper Kanye West. Given the hypermasculinist nature of hip-hop, the widespread interpolation of her music in this genre (as opposed to the more female-dominated musical spheres of pop, R&B, and gospel) might appear dissonant to some listeners, and unsuitable to others. Simone even once admonished, “Rappers have ruined music, as far as I’m concerned.”2 The purpose of this essay, nevertheless, is to consider this gendered framework and examine how hip-hop artists invoke Simone as both a heuristic and musical material that recalls a particularly radical moment of American culture and simultaneously undergoes transfor- mation as they cite her in response to the aesthetic and political forces of their times. In songs like Kweli’s classic hit “Get By” (2002), Cassidy’s cult favorite “Celebrate” (2007), Common’s unreleased track often referred to as “Strange Fruit” (2007), and Hill’s recent “Black Rage” (2012), Simone emerges as both a compelling singer and a cultural signifier, a virtuoso and political visionary, whose sampled voice, pianism, and performative strategy enable a diverse range of hip-hop artists to access and perform a version what I am calling her sonic black radicalism. Simone’s daring reinvention of musical categories, which was animated by the radical politics of the 1960s, created a new musical vision of blackness and model of sonic experimentation and performance strategies for the hip-hop generation. Born during the age of what the cultural critic Greg Tate refers to as the “post-liberated black aesthetic” in which contemporary African Americans are the beneficiaries of putative juridical and legislative equality gained by civil rights agitation,3 this generation of African American artists remains plagued by a new racial paradox or a form of “civic estrangement” in which they are simultaneously citizens and “noncitizens” who experience the feelings of disillusionment and melancholia of nonbelonging and a yearning for civic membership.4 As a figure who aurally ties the hip-hop generation to the black freedom struggle and what Michael Denning describes as “a politics of allegiances and affiliations,” such as Simone’s fund-raising and marching for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and “a politics of form,”5 like her steadfast crossing of the musical color line, Simone becomes a sonic ideal for hip-hop artists who want to engage in aesthetic experimentation and launch a sociopolitical critique against the long history of black disenfranchisement. As West’s most recent sampling of Simone’s “Strange Fruit” on his 2013 album Yeezus indicates, the growing use of Simone is not without its contradictions. Completely decontextualized from its moment of production and Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 121 historical period, hip-hop samples of Simone also reveal the possibilities and the limits of her resurgence as a civil rights metaphor and post–civil rights meme. As one of the few mainstream musicians who actively spoke out against the economic exploitation of black artists while risking her career in the fight for racial equality, she marks a very specific moment in the black freedom struggle. And yet, as a circulating icon in an age of celebrity politics and post- racial mythologies, there is always the risk that her image can be domesticated and divested of its radical politics. In such cases, Simone becomes a floating signifier of a time long gone, of a historical period that can be only partially recovered. As such, I seek to illuminate how the displacement of her sound through sampling uses the past to illuminate the contemporary moment as having a set of new technologies, problems, and celebratory potential distinct from the civil rights movement. The looping of her voice becomes what Robert Walser describes as a hip-hop music that is “discursive and social, created out of dialogue with other people in the past and the present.”6 As such, she facilitates hip-hop artists listening to and learning from the revolutionary practices of an earlier generation as they supply new narratives of dissent and dissonance of their own. While I am clearly building on the work of scholars like Daphne Brooks, Ruth Feldstein, and Tammy Kernoodle, who have theorized Simone’s critical role within and beyond the civil rights movement, I also privilege how post–civil rights artists embrace the technologies of sound (the record and the sample) and style (the remix) to resurrect Simone’s legacy as a blueprint and palimpsest for black freedom. A vision that, as Feldstein reminds us, was a “gendered vision of black freedom” bridged the civil rights, feminist, and black power movements.7 Though Simone did not call herself a feminist, her songs such as “Four Women” and “Images” placed black women’s subjectivities at the center of the most important social changes of the American twentieth century.8 In terms of pure numbers of times sampled, Simone’s presence is not nearly as constitutive or voluminous as a figure like James Brown, whose famous break beats and black nationalist commitments served as a form of sonic black radicalism for an earlier generation of hip-hop artists, most notably Public Enemy. To date, there are only 139 songs that sample her (to Brown’s nearly 4,000), yet she seems more ubiquitous today than when she was alive. But it is both her cultural currency and her ability to, as the New York Times critic John S. Wilson once noted, “Simone-ize” anything by poking experimentally into “the unexpected crannies of a song” that makes her especially appealing for hip- hop emcees and producers who yearn for a sound that marks their virtuosity and political allegiances.9 Here, by reading this Simonizing of hip-hop, I trace how black radicalism has been embodied, gendered, and memorialized within 122 | American Quarterly

mainstream hip-hop culture. By doing so, I also seek to complicate debates about black women’s influence on and invisibility in hip-hop by thinking through the varied ways a black feminist aesthetic and “a black radical tradition that held black women’s self-emancipation as pivotal to black liberation” gets incorporated into this primarily,10 but as Hill’s opening rhyme reminds us, not exclusively male-dominated musical form.

The Voice

In 2007 the producer Devon “Devo Springsteen” Harris originally shopped his sampled-based instrumental track featuring Simone’s “Strange Fruit” to several artists, including Sean “Diddy” Combs, West, and Common. Initially, Common recorded a song that used this track, but released another song that sampled Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on his 2007 album Finding Forever, instead. The “Strange Fruit” sample did, however, end up on the song “Celebrate” by emcee Cassidy on his comeback album, B.A.R.S. The Barry Adrian Reese Story (2007). Despite the different hip-hop styles with which Cassidy and Common associate, street/battle and political conscious- ness, respectively, the use of Simone’s sound was integral to the production of the song as well as to the cultural meanings that the artists themselves want to convey. And if sampling is, as Tricia Rose points out, “an invocation of another’s voice to help you say what you want to say,”11 I would argue that what artists hear as they reproduce Simone’s sound is as important as what they are trying to say. Thus, to understand why Simone’s cover of ‘Strange Fruit” rather than Holiday’s is more sampled in hip-hop, it is important to recognize what we hear when Simone differentiates herself from Holiday’s recording and how that in turn functions as its own form of sonic black radicalism. Written by the Jewish American schoolteacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in 1936, Holiday recorded the song three years later with Commodore Records. The song would eventually be Holiday’s biggest- selling record, becoming so successful that it is often mythologized as written by or exclusively for her.12 As such, we can think of Simone’s 1965 cover of “Strange Fruit” as both a tribute and departure from Holiday’s 1939 original, a version that Stuart Nicholson characterized “as one of the first examples of a popular song becoming impossible to disentangle from a single, specific recording of it.”13 But it is Simone’s arrangement and performance of this explicitly political song within the civil rights context that exemplifies her sonic black radicalism. Similar to Holiday, Simone’s version deviates from the song sheet. But unlike that swing version, there is no instrumental lead-in, no Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 123 small-band encasement; the start of the song is Simone supporting her vocals with her piano playing. Simone’s protest is even more melodically stripped down than Holiday’s. She creates this effect through her strategy of genre reinvention. She performs the piece in B minor, grounding the song in the descending B-A-G-F-sharp lament bass, a musical technique that creates a sense of somberness, gravity, and darkness. This technique, along with Simone’s revising Franz Schubert’s 1828 “Der Doppelgänger,” combined the seemingly disparate musical codes (and cultural histories) of classical music, which is quintessential Simone, for she often quoted classical music within jazz standards.14 By transforming Holiday’s familiar “Strange Fruit” into something unfamiliar and new, Simone renders European classical music as appropriate an archive for her model of black resistance as was her predecessor Holiday. When I asked Springsteen, the producer of the track, why he had cho- sen Simone’s “Strange Fruit” over Holiday’s seminal version, he responded unequivocally: “Because of the rawness of her voice. Her vernacular is more direct. Because of the intonation of her voice and style. There is something really black about her voice. And when you are trying to make black music, there’s not a much blacker voice than Nina Simone.”15 In musical terms, Sim- one achieves this direct sound through her tone and complete lack of vibrato. Describing Simone’s voice reminiscent of old church mothers who get up and raise a song during testimonials, Guthrie Ramsey writes, “In general Simone’s voice intrigues. It seems unsupported, being produced between throat and nose, which disallows the open, hollow sound ‘head voice,’ that many prefer to hear, thrown instead, forward through the nasal cavity.”16 She underscores this forward delivery as she stretches out the song’s climax in the second-to- last line (“for the leaves to drop”)—a peak that she maintains for a full seven seconds, a period almost twice as long as Holiday’s. Whereas Holiday leaves the final line open and unresolved, Simone’s voice literally spans the distance of a minor tenth (rather than Holiday’s minor third), dropping an octave and in a slow glissando. Simone’s denouement sounds contained and unconstrained, not an outburst but a disavowal, not just a refusal but outrage at the ugly violence of American lynching. The sound quality of Simone’s voice as vocal intrigue and commanding presence not only made her an ideal choice for Springsteen’s track but also reinforces her symbolism as a political radical to such a large degree that these traits seem inseparable. The hip-hop R&B singer Mary J. Blige, originally slated to play Simone in a forthcoming eponymously titled film, once de- scribed Simone as “very dark and hardcore. There is something special in her 124 | American Quarterly

voice and those songs.”17 Similarly, Springsteen told me, “Hip hop is a dark art. The street, the struggle, the violence, and all those things that it means to be black America. It is a dark concept. Her darkness makes her hip hop relevant.” Alluding to a darkness that is both material and metaphorical, Blige and Springsteen underscore how sampling Simone becomes another way for hip-hop artists to connect themselves to broader sociopolitical movements as well. According to Farah Griffin, “In the United States, ‘vocal darkness’ is associated with an oppressed minority, identifiable by the skin color.” In the voices of black singers, Griffin notes, “we hear a whole range of meaning” exemplified by the “irony as well as patriotism when Ray Charles sings ‘America’; it is not a matter of individual politics but the vocal tradition out of which he sings.”18 For listeners familiar with the American story, Charles’s embodiment of our vexed racial history and his distinct baritone voice stages both the failure and the promise of democracy for African Americans. Likewise for Springsteen, Simone’s voice amplifies the burden of conscripted blackness and the potential of black creative expression. And even more than Charles, who was another African American artist working at the same time as Simone and also redefining genre boundaries (which eventually included a top-selling country album), Simone’s timbre tied to the radical lyrics of “Strange Fruit” makes her unmistakable performance of individual radical politics and vocal darkness congruent to the “dark” soundscape of hip-hop. This brings me to the subtle but significant differences in Springsteen’s sampling of Simone in the Cassidy and Common tracks. Both Cassidy and Common use Simone’s political and musical iconicity to access the radical lyrics of “Strange Fruit” and launch their own sociopolitical critiques in the present. But, as the songs diverge in lyrical content and their placement of the sample within the songs’ soundscapes, these differences reveal the capaciousness of Simone’s symbolism in hip-hop. As a hip-hop artist known for his political engagement, it is less surprising that Common would interpolate “Strange Fruit” into his narrative of global black suffering (“Similar to Africa the streets is our safari”) and intergenerational resistance (“So far we’ve come / With so far left to go”). Following a standard verse-chorus pattern of the song, the sample appears before each chorus, rendering Simone as both a literal bridge to lyrics about a civil right’s past (“singing we shall overcome cause we came for more”) and a model for Common’s twenty-first-century social justice movement (“I’m emceein they done until the streets are won”). Cassidy, on the other hand, best known for his 2004 single “Hotel,” which featured R. Kelley, and the 2005 Swizz Beatz–produced “I’m a Hustla” seemed like a more counterintuitive inheritor of the song. Appearing on B.A.R.S., the Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 125 album he recorded after serving more than a year in jail and suffering a near- fatal car accident, the inward and individualized story of loss and redemption of “Celebrate” (“I used to pump dimes / now I spit punch lines”) fits with the album’s themes of faith and doubt, mourning and celebration, and death and rebirth. The sample of “Strange Fruit” frames and fades out throughout the song, creating a nonteleological effect that challenges Common’s lineage and musical linearity while also providing an alternative, almost cathartic interpolation of “Strange Fruit.” These differences epitomize the particular ends to which hip-hop artists can use Simone’s sound for their own aesthetic and political refashioning. Thus, if we imagine Simone’s sonic black radicalism at the center of the axis of musical experimentation and revolutionary politics, Cassidy’s counterintuitive sample hints at the former, while Common’s align- ment promises the latter. In my interview with Common, he said, “‘Strange Fruit’ was the first Nina Simone song I actually remember hearing.”19 Like many members of his generation, he first heard Simone’s name when Hill dropped that line in “Ready or Not” in 1996, but it was not until he formally collaborated with West and Springsteen in 2007 that he sampled her. Admittedly, the political and historical specificity that made “Strange Fruit” such a landmark recording also posed a problem for Common. “When Nina Simone sings that song, you feel the pain of the people being hung. You feel the struggle of black people just surviving and really going through the struggle of just existing. I think her version is so powerful and just hits you in the stomach,” Common told me. He went on to say, “But when I got that song, I didn’t know what to do with it because it was such a strong song in itself to sample, and I didn’t only want to rhyme slavery, or our people being hung, so I decided to use it as a metaphor for something else.” That something else is both Common’s tracing of the “blood line” of African American disenfranchisement, “from Ashanti in slums, is children with guns / AIDS and poverty killing our young” and his working through that period of America’s racial past in order to speak a new post–civil rights audience. Put another way, Common uses both the song “Strange Fruit” and the chanteuse Simone as metaphors to describe the durability of the past in our present as well his own process of appropriating that past to serve the needs of the present. Moreover, rather than initiate the collective mourning of lynched black bodies as Holiday and Simone do, Common imagines an afterlife populated by black freedom fighters: “If I make it to heaven, will I get a chance to party and celebrate with the great black bodies? / I’m talkin’ bout Marley, Nina, and Marcus Garvey.” Here the teleological effect of the 126 | American Quarterly

sample as it relates to the structure of the track underscores the linearity and futurity of Common’s political vision. This is especially important when I asked him about Simone’s double presence in the song as sample and lyrical mention, to which Common replied, “Nina Simone’s impact is timeless. She was one of the most unique voices we have ever encountered in history and music, so I would love to meet her. . . . she just told the audience her truth, I could relate to that too.” Through this pantheon in general and Simone in particular, Common not only establishes the crucial role that black music has played in revolutionary movements but also intentionally establishes himself as the child and custodian of that legacy. In Cassidy’s “Celebrate,” because the sample of “Strange Fruit” is set against his more personalized lyrics of self-reflection and redemption, the original meaning of “Strange Fruit” is even more transformed, and arguably more metaphorized than Common’s. The song features an eight-measure introduction and repeating verse and chorus material. Similar to Common’s song, the choruses are usually (but not always) marked by Simone’s voice. But, unlike the use of her sample within the traditional song structure, Simone’s voice “moves” throughout this track. The opening quote from Simone, “Black bodies swing- ing in the Southern breeze,” seems to function as a type of framing device: it is the first and last thing that we hear. In the beginning of the song, it is featured prominently and is loud and full. Within this song neither Cassidy’s rhyme nor John Legend’s chorus act as focal points. Instead, the listener is repeatedly drawn to Simone’s retreating and remerging singing voice. The musicologist Matthew Valnes suggests that we could think of the track “as a sound box or 3-D cube, in which each of the corners becomes a point of reference. The more prominent the sound, the ‘closer’ it is to you as a viewer.”20 To understand the sample as fragmented sound, Anne Danielsen theorizes, “the sound-box is an attempt to differentiate within the same complex. It is an analytical tool directed towards processes within sound, for example, radical change and the lack of continuity in time and/or space.”21 Applying this analytic, the opening sample would be the lower left-hand corner. Throughout the subsequent verses and choruses it sounds like the sample is “farther” away, which means that it moves higher and to the right. At the end of the track, however, the sample of Simone’s voice returns to a more prominent position. The organization of Simone’s sound not only challenges the linearity or teleological feeling that we find in Common’s version but also disrupts the expected interpretation of “Strange Fruit.” Instead of being only about black pain or resistance, the song now derives its meaning from juxtaposition. The strange dissonance of Simone’s lament tied to the Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 127 break beat, the cry wed to Cassidy’s exaltation (“Ya’ll, you could live it up / But don’t give up the fight / Ya’ll, we elevatin / so we celebratin the night”) is his version of sonic black radicalism, what Cornel West says is a “paradoxical cry of desperation and celebration” that is constitutive of hip-hop’s heteroge- neous ideal.22 For Springsteen, like many other hip-hop producers, sampling is always an homage to the past, a digging in the dustbins of history to shape airwaves of the present. And in many ways, sampling’s ability to help invent a new musical genre and transform sound production lies at the heart of hip- hop’s own sonic black radicalism. Differentiating “music in which outlawry is discussed” from “outlawry music,”23 Imani Perry recognizes the oppositional spirit of hip-hop sampling. Through its extensive citation of recorded songs and sounds, sampling has always posed a threat to capitalist notions of public and intellectual property. What continues to be debated, as Nelson George writes, is “whether sampling is a tragic break with the African America’s creative musical traditions or a radical, even transcendental continuation of them.”24 Assuming the latter, Simone becomes an apt conduit for these artists to engage in radical sonic choices and create progressive political lyrics. For they are participating in a tradition not so dissimilar from Simone’s own invocation of Billie Holiday, and while Simone spent the latter half of her career distancing herself from her predecessor’s iconicity, during her early career, Holiday was the singer she most often covered and with whom she saw herself in conversation.

The Sound

“Celebrate” not only echoed both Holiday and Simone; it was inspired by Talib Kweli’s 2002 breakout hit “Get By” on the album Quality. The rising star Kanye West, then best known for his soul-based sampling and production on Jay-Z’s critically acclaimed 2001 album, The Blueprint, produced the song. Kweli had already gained prominent recognition as a member of the politically conscious hip-hop duo Black Star, with Mos Def, and a later collaboration with DJ Hi- Tek. And by the time Kweli and West teamed up for Quality, Kweli had already paid tribute to Simone in his song “For Women” on his and Hi-Tek’s debut album, Train of Thought (2000). Michael Eric Dyson describes this update of her classic “Four Women” as “a study in the narrative reconstruction of the fragmented elements of Black survival and a cautionary tale against the racial amnesia that destroys the fabric of Black collective memory.” Dyson adds, “By baptizing Simone’s sentiments in a hip hop rhetorical form, Kweli raises new questions about the relation between history and contemporary social practice, and fuses the generational ambitions of two gifted artists.”25 128 | American Quarterly

Similar to Common, Kweli intentionally self-identifies with Simone’s radical politics and sonic choices. In his 2006 essay in Fader magazine’s special issue on Simone, Kweli writes, “I relate to Nina Simone because when she came out, they didn’t like the way she sounded, yet she made political records and conscious records that really came to represent her.”26 Here Kweli notes that the audience reception of Simone’s distinct contralto voice—a trait that for contemporary listeners is both haunting and profoundly unforgettable—was initially rather ambivalent. However, by linking the sound of her voice to her politics, he points to how they simultaneously reinforced each other and in turn created her iconicity as a sonic black radical. He also recognizes her as a model against which he can stave off career-long criticisms about the unusual timbre and texture of his own voice, on the one hand, and his lyrics and production as overly political and not upbeat enough, on the other. And while his explicit homage to Simone in “For Women” maintained the somber and pensive quality of her original ballad, one critic noted that the production on Quality engaged “a funkier and more upbeat sound palate to further draw out the nuances of what is already one of the most rounded and complete rap personas in the game.”27 On that album, the track “Get By” samples Simone’s cover of “Sinnerman,” a ten-minute-plus upbeat-tempo song whose lyrics she learned growing up at her mother’s revival meetings. Like “Strange Fruit,” this song also appeared on Pastel Blues and fast became a mainstay in her concert repertoire. Like her use of the lament bass in “Strange Fruit,” Simone’s arrangement of this traditional song marks her reinventiveness. While an eight-measure altered blues form supports the verses, the solo section alternates between two chords: B minor and A major in a descending line. This opening up of the song enables Simone to give a fast-paced delivery that merges the contrapuntalism of classical music with the jazz and gospel piano improvisation, and provides a model of virtuosity that both Kweli and West try to match. In many ways, Kweli’s complicated assessment of the role that drug addic- tion has played in numbing black communities and their everyday resistance to such pain, their getting by, was vintage Kweli. Always present in his work were the mutual themes of black suffering and joy, but West is often credited as making Kweli’s rapid-fire delivery funkier. While the hypnotic drumbeat from Love’s 1969 “Doggone” appears throughout “Get By,” it is the mesmer- izing opening of Simone’s belting of “Holler, Holler Lawd” and the repeated looping of her piano riffs and chorus from “Sinnerman” that form the song’s sonic foundation. By recalling the rock and gospel soundtrack of the civil rights movement, West’s sampling of both Simone and Love’s lead singer and guitarist, Arthur Lee, produced a song that not only enliven their sounds Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 129 for a new generation of listeners but, as another critic wrote, “was accessible enough that I could imagine grandmas tapping their feet to the beat while their grandchildren dance to the music.”28 If West helped provide Kweli with his biggest single to date, he is also the hip-hop producer and emcee that has most reverently (and repeatedly) cited Simone in his oeuvre. West has credited his mother, Donda West, for his musical and intellectual development, while his early hip-hop production aesthetic notably sampled Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, and Shirley Bassey. On subsequent albums, Kanye has sampled Simone, quoting only the instru- mentals from her 1964 version of “See-Line Woman” on his “Bad News,” a melancholic elegy to his mother on his 2008 electropop album, 808s and Heartbreak.29 While there is no sample of Simone’s music on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he cites her along with Maya Angelou and Gil Scott- Heron as the album’s inspiration. And on his 2011 album with Jay-Z, Watch the Throne, their most introspective song about an imagined male progeny, “New Day” samples Simone’s “Feeling Good,” and as I later explore, his most recent album, Yeezus, cites her “Strange Fruit.” In May 2013 Complex magazine launched a video retrospective series titled “Magnum Opus” that featured “Get By.” In an interview about West’s pivotal role in the making of the song, Complex’s editor in chief Noah Callahan-Bever said, “The brilliance of what Kanye West does is he is able to find the pop thread in the most hip hop sounding music.”30 While West’s ability to render hip-hop “pop” is part of his musical signature, for the purposes of this essay, I am interested in West’s engagement with Simone’s sonic archive, those snippets and sound qualities that he chooses to sample in order to render her hip-hop relevant. In “Get By” West samples three different sections of the song: her lyrical shout, her vocalizing, and a single line from her piano solo. The introduction is Simone’s shout and then her closing vocal utterance, an unmeasured section that features her singing in syllables. Simone is known for having a narrow pitch range of two octaves and (as I have already noted) her forward delivery and signature contralto sound. Rather than sample a more recognizable moment of the song, such as her repeated utterance of “Sinner- man,” West chooses to highlight Simone’s voice as sound rather than lyrical interpretation. The piano line that he selects also further highlights this selec- tion of Simone’s singing as both unusual and unexpected. Instead of pulling from the chord progression of the eight-bar blues that is repeated throughout “Sinnerman,” West samples a single, nonrepeated line from her piano solo. In that thirteenth measure of the solo, she deviates from the descending pattern that had previously outlined its harmonic motion. In place of the descending 130 | American Quarterly

pattern, this line jumps up and down as it outlines the B minor–A major progression of the previous eight measures. Simone plays her line in and around the downbeats, an effect that also creates aural dissonance by disallowing the listener to really attach to one chord. By sampling these two distinct moments, West not only uses Simone, as Joe Schloss argues in Making Beats, to locate a rhythmic and timbral compatibility for a larger song pattern but also renders these incongruences as foundational to the song itself.31 For West, Simone’s sound is made up of virtuosic pianism and her vocal timbral play. Moreover, West not only claims her virtuoso musical performance and generic fluidity as influential to his oeuvre, but Simone’s sonic black radicalism was constitutive of the circulation and successful reception of his sampling aesthetic. At the time of the release of “Get By,” West was known for sampling and speeding up classic soul records from the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was the placement and reproduction of Simone’s “Sinnerman” on Kweli’s record that, according to the rapper–producer 88-Keys in “Magnum Opus,” solidified West’s standing as a “hit maker” in the industry. In that same video, Kweli reveals, “People talk about ‘Get By’ being one of Kanye’s best beats. I think it is and I think that’s why I gravitated towards it. And what I mean is, he has some incredible, incredible beats. But, if this is not his best, then definitely his top five.”32 The emergence of West as one of the most sought- after hip-hop producers after this collaboration points to both his facile use of soul samples and the capaciousness of Simone as a musical signifier. For unlike Kweli, whose political and artistic persona is more easily aligned with Simone’s legacy, West’s use of her is more conflicted given the sexist lyrics and video imagery that defines much of his work. West embraces these contradictions in two ways: first, by interpolating Sim- one as a musical foremother, who, like his real mother, serves as the exception to his deeply sexist stereotypes about women, and second, by self-identifying with her status as both rebel and virtuoso, traits in Western music that have been almost exclusively sexually coded as male. The tension between Simone as musical progenitor and West’s own ambivalent narrative about women’s sexuality and motherhood is at the heart of his “Blood on the Leaves,” a song that synthesizes and raises the pitch of Simone’s “Strange Fruit” to such a degree that it is almost unrecognizable. Unlike the celebratory or revolutionary potential that undergird Cassidy’s and Common’s samples, West’s lyrics appear to be the much more robust counterpart to his 2005 hit “Gold Digger,” which sampled Charles’s love song “I Got a Woman.” Updating that angst, he now laments his failed romantic relationships (“You could have been somebody / We could have been somebody”) that were fueled by sex, taking MDMA, and Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 131

“second-string bitches try to get a baby” who trap him into alimony payments by refusing to get abortions. Within this narrative, West’s use of Simone’s piano accompaniment and his remixing her phrasing into “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / Blood on the leaves” take on a new and neutralizing meaning. Out of its original context, the image of lynched black body is now an unwanted fetus. And while in the post–Roe v. Wade era, such fetuses carry huge symbolic weight in the battle over women’s reproductive rights, West’s lyrics are not a politics of allegiance with the women’s rights movement but an ongoing animus targeted at sexually aggressive women, particularly those who are his peers or potential lovers. During West’s 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance, these images—black bodies hanging from trees and a fetus tightly wrapped in an umbilical cord—became even more substitutable when West performed the song in front of a large lightbox image that projected the image of an enormous weeping tree. The director and visual artist Steve McQueen took the photograph, titled “The Lynching Tree,” while filmingTwelve Years a Slave and featured it in his exhibition at the Schaulager museum in 2013. Near New Orleans, the tree once served as a gallows for slaves, and the ground it is filled with several lynched victims buried underneath. According to the cultural critic Wesley Morris, at various moments of his VMA performance, “West got just close enough to be proportionate to its branches. ‘We could have been somebody,’ West screamed, placing an emphasis on ‘body’ as though the word made him sick.”33 As such, West’s live performance partially sustained Simone’s original critique of American racism by substituting his body with the mourned and missing African American lynched victim. And if we return to the metaphor of Simone’s sonic black radicalism at the center of the axis of musical experimentation and revolutionary politics, the introduction of Simone’s sound at this point on the actual Yeezus album is both fitting and ironic. Hailed by a critic as “the most musically adventurous album West has ever released” that reveals “his increasing disregard for musical conventions,” its overall soundscape pushes the limits of electronic dance music (EDM), hip-hop, new wave, punk, and rock.34 As such, it is not merely his most diverse album but also his most sonically radical one. Sometimes the album’s musical heterogeneity is matched by the political potency of songs, like “New Slaves,” which narrates his mother growing up in racial segregation, and “Black Skin- heads,” which, according to Entertainment Weekly’s Ray Rahman, “wallops from the jump with seething rhythms and aggressive, politically charged lyrics. This dense breathless sound sets the tone for an album that reaches far outside of standard sample-based hip-hop, unrepentantly stealing and mutating key 132 | American Quarterly

elements of acid house, clanging industrial, and hard rock; house-of-horrors screams, synths, and squelches leap from the shadows.”35 Unfortunately, West substantially compromises the sonic black radicalism that marks the production and his Saturday Night Live performances of “New Slaves” and “Black Skinheads” by emptying those other songs that literally reference civil rights icons, like “I’m In It” and “Blood on the Leaves,” of their historical and present-day political power. In “I’m In It,” West invokes King’s famed “free at last” to describe the unhooking of a women’s bra and loops Simone’s “Strange Fruit” to decry his exploitation, not by the state or its racist citizens, but by women with whom he hooks up. This disruptive move from subversion to sexism has not gone unnoticed. In response to the album’s release, Spin magazine published “Sheezus Talks: A Critical Roundtable” where “seven badass female culture critics assess and, well, psychoanalyze Kanye West’s bachelor party.”36 And while the critic Puja Patel describes “Blood on the Leaves” as “a self-pitying yarn that scarily sounds like a request to emanci- pate himself from a woman he doesn’t love carrying a baby he doesn’t want,” she also notes that it “turns out that it is the best song on the album.”37 This slippage between misogyny and artistic mastery is not West’s alone. Here, however, it does expose the limits of Simone’s radicalism within the post–civil rights moment, which as West’s sampling skillfully unveils, can be as malleable and manufactured as her sound itself. But, if Simone becomes West’s uneasy symbol of sonic experimentation and political confusion, she remains (more than any other musical figure) his model of rebellion and virtuosity.38 Perhaps no song better exemplifies this use of Simone than the now decade- old “Get By” remix itself. Featuring the all-male cast of Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Kweli, and Mos Def, West opens the third verse with the lines: “It’s on I’m packin weight like Nina Simone piano flow / It’s like Michelangelo painted a portrait of Maya Angelou / And gave it to a sick poet for they antidote / If music gets you choked up / This is the tree and the rope.” Unlike the pantheon of black freedom fighters that Commons rhymes about meeting in heaven, West analogizes and valorizes the artistic genius of Angelou, Michelangelo, and Simone. Moreover, while he subtly references Simone’s politics and “Strange Fruit” (“This is the tree and the rope”), he singles out her pianism (the focal point of the sample) for its ability to replenish the poet’s imagination. Ironi- cally, he does all this to establish further his aesthetic credibility (“And don’t let nobody with the power to sign / Ever tell you you ain’t got the power to rhyme”) and authenticate his vocal timbre to be an emcee (“They used to me toughen up / put some bass in your voice”). Ultimately, his Simone oeuvre best mirrors the strivings and failures of hip-hop itself: sometimes racially progressive Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 133 politics, oftentimes deeply misogynist lyrics, and in his case, a deep yearning for new musical genres that challenge the limits of song form and sound itself.

Coda: The Style

The gamble of hip-hop sampling, of course, is that the black woman’s voice and sound becomes similar to the more dominant marginalizing of black women’s bodies in hip-hop culture. As one of the only theorists to write about gender, sampling, and female vocality, Kyra Gaunt historicizes “how hip hop sampling has become its own quintessential forms of non gendered storytelling about masculine dominance and patriarchy.”39 Referring to the specific ways deejays, producers, and emcees have sampled the chants and rhymes of black girl games, like double Dutch, without acknowledging the source of their citation, Gaunt critiques the centrality of “gender stratification” to hip-hop’s innovative aesthetic.40 For example, in this context, the repetitive looping of Simone’s voice in all these songs could simply be another way to render the black female subject as decorative rather than generative within hip-hop culture, a prop for a particularly masculinist self-discovery and rebirth. Moreover, on first listen, the use of Simone’s covers of “Strange Fruit” and “Sinnerman” in these songs risks being read or heard as the simple appropriation of the disembodied black female sound exclusively in service of black male protest or complaint. But interviews with and statements by the artists themselves sometimes contradict such a reading. By sampling that utterly recognizable sound of Nina Simone, Springsteen and West engage in a conscious citation of a sonic black radicalism in which Simone is both a founding mother and a daughter. By no means has this transformed Cassidy, Common, Kweli, Springsteen, or West into a feminist artist. Their varied forms of self-identifications and invest- ments in her music, however, serve as examples of their efforts to inherit and experiment with a black feminist musical legacy in the present. Jelani Cobb suggests that “sampling placed entire volumes of music on the radar screen for a generation of artists and listeners who might not have been exposed to it.”41 As of a result of their transmission of Simone’s “politics of allegiances and affiliations” and “politics of form,” across time and space, they not only place African American women’s voices at the center of the ongoing black freedom struggle but, for a brief moment, can politicize themselves and their post–civil rights audiences as well. Nevertheless, alongside artists like Meshell Ndegeocello, Janelle Monae, and Esperanza Spalding, it is Lauryn Hill who most explicitly carries on Sim- one’s feminist legacy of extensive musical experimentation and black female 134 | American Quarterly

musical agency. In her case, she not only continues to uphold Simone’s deep commitment to radical generic mixing but also to explicit racial politics. In 2012 she and the hip-hop artist Nas coheadlined a national tour during which she performed “Black Rage,” the only new song that she appears to have penned and performed during this tour. Panned by critics for playing “nearly unrecognizable versions of hits,” Hill’s reworking of her own classics as well as her politicization of Broadway standards is strikingly reminiscent of Simone’s strategy of resistance and experimentation.42 Moreover, the sound of her alto voice itself, as Daphne Brooks writes, echoes Simone and ties Hill to “a legacy of black female vocality that both mimics the actual physical expression of suffering yet works in contestation of that suffering to create a double-voiced musical language of ambivalence and amplified corporeal and narrative en- ergy.”43 Hill literalizes this double-voice, by first rhyming “Black Rage” to the tune of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” and then repeating the lyrics a cappella for emphasis.44 In the first version, she engages in the long tradition of black popular artists covering this show tune. While the most favorite cover of this song is, of course, John Coltrane’s, whose version does not adhere to the strict AABA structure of the original, his solo—and that of his pianist McCoy Tyner—does follow the larger structure of moving between the parallel minor and major. Hill, in a Simone-like way, engages in a more deliberate manipulation of its original form, removing the sixteen measures that move to relative major: “When the dog bites / when the beatings / when I’m feeling sad / I simply remember all these kind of things and then I don’t fear so bad!” that signifies the A section. By doing so, she makes the song darker, more urgent, and strikingly political. In the second version of the song, she underscores her virtuosity as an emcee by stripping down the performance to only her vocal delivery while also recalling the long history of black inequality (“Black Rage is founded on two-thirds a person / Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens”) in which rage is valued as an ironic and viable tool of political denunciation akin to Simone’s own “Mississippi Goddamn.” And it is Simone’s boldness in song form and formal politics that Hill emulates as well as uses to inspire black radical politics in a new generation of listeners. And by doing so, she updates Nina Simone, in style and strategy on the microphone. Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 135

Notes I would like to thank the many friends and scholars who gave me feedback on the various drafts of this essay, in particular, GerShun Avilez, Erica Edwards, Paul Farber, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Josh Kun, Guthrie Ramsey, Joe Schloss, and John Stephens. A special thanks to my research assistant and additional “ear,” Matthew Valnes, for all his wonderful insights and work. 1. By the mid-1990s, rappers like Jay-Z, Lil’ Kim, the Notorious B.I.G., and Nas had adopted a sarto- rial and rhetorical affinity for Italian or Colombian mobsters, such as Pablo Escobar, and films like The Godfather and Scarface. It is this romanticizing of “mafia style” or “mafiosa” that Hill is critiquing in the song “Ready or Not.” For more analysis on the rise of this particular brand of gangster icon in hip-hop, see Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Hip Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 2. LaShonda Katrice Barnett, I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2007), 152. 3. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 200. 4. In my book Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), I argue that as the civil rights movement achieved its goal of ensuring citizenship rights for African Americans, it left those Americans with the burden of “civic estrangement.” That is, their relationship to the civic myths of America—as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all—remains vexed. While legal citizenship includes suffrage and the right to participate in government, civic membership predicates itself on abstract signs and symbols or the civic myths of the nation. In the case of African Americans, civic estrangement occurs because they have continued to experience ongoing economic and social inequalities while being marginalized or underrepresented in the civic myths, monuments, narratives, icons, creeds, and images of the past that constitute, reproduce, and promote an American national identity. 5. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth-Century (New York: Verso, 1996), xx. 6. Robert Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” Ethnomusicology 39.2 (1995): 196. 7. Ruth Feldstein, “I Don’t Trust You Anymore”: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91.4 (2005): 1376. 8. See Daphne Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callaloo 34.1 (2011): 176–97; Feldstein, “I Don’t Trust You Anymore”; and Tammy Kernoodle, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s,”Journal of the Society for American Music 2.3 (2008): 295–317. In addition, I have found Danielle C. Heard’s “‘Don’t Let Me Be Mis- understood’: Nina Simone’s Theater of Invisibility,” Callaloo 35.4 (2012): 1056–84 to be especially insightful as well. 9. Nadine Cohodas, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 105. 10. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharris, and Komozi Woodard, Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 2. 11. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wes- leyan University Press, 2004), 79. 12. According to Robert O’Meally, Billie Holiday would often tell audiences and interviewers that the song was written for her (Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday [New York: Da Capo, 1991]). 13. Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (London: Victor Gollancz, 1995), 114. 14. For a longer analysis of Simone and Schubert, see Alex Ross, Listen to This (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). “Der Doppelgänger” invokes a longer history of sonic black radicalism, for the famed singer and Simone’s role model Marion Anderson recorded the song in 1948. 15. Devon Harris, a.k.a. Devon “Devo” Springsteen, interview with the author, December 15, 2007. 16. Guthrie Ramsey, telephone interview with the author, April 7, 2001. See Guy Ramsey, “Between an Art Song and the Church Mother: Nina Simone Sings the Nation,” http://musiqology.com/2011/06/08/ between-an-art-song-and-the-church-mother-nina-simone-sings-the-nation/ (accessed June 8, 2011). 17. Early in her career, Mary J. Blige was often compared to Holiday. While Blige’s vocal style emulated her soul predecessors Aretha Franklin and Chaka Khan, her lyrics of constant heartbreak and abuse 136 | American Quarterly

reminded many of Holiday’s ill-fate. Asked to comment on Holiday for Notorious magazine in 1999, Blige wrote of Holiday, “Our voices are similar in terms of style and the truth and the sadness in our music. But I refuse to be compared to Billie Holiday. Please compare me to the living. Don’t compare me to the dead. . . . I’ve seen the Diana Ross movie about her life and I have a collection of her music” (Farah Jasmine Griffin,If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday [New York: Free Press, 2001], 13). The website on which her interview about Simone first appeared is no longer available. An excerpt from this interview can be found on Blige’s website at www.soulsummer.com/ mjb-live-and-in-color. 18. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings”: A Mediation on Black’s Women Vocality,” inUptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 108. 19. Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., a.k.a. Common, telephone interview with the author, March 27, 2013. 20. Matthew Valnes, telephone interview with the author, August 30, 2012. 21. Anne Danielsen, “His Name Was Prince”: A Study of Diamonds and Pearls,” Popular Music 16.3 (1997): 283. 22. Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 186. 23. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 113. 24. Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998), 81. 25. Michael E. Dyson, Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture, and Religion (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 299. 26. Talib Kweli, “Talib Kweli on Nina Simone,” Fader 38 (May–June 2006): 97. 27. Sam Chennault, online review, Pitchfork, December 10, 2002, http://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/4549-quality/. 28. David Heaton, online review, PopMatters, December 26, 2002, www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/k/ kwelitalib-quality.shtml. 29. See Donde West, Raising Kanye: Life Lessons of a Hip Hop Superstar (New York: Pocket, 2007). 30. This video was released on May 14, 2013, and is available at www.complex.com/music/2013/05/ magnum-opus-the-making-of-talib-kwelis-get-by. 31. Joe G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 146. 32. See the video interview with 88-Keys and Kweli at the same site: www.complex.com/music/2013/05/ magnum-opus-the-making-of-talib-kwelis-get-by. 33. Wesley Morris, “The Song of Solomon,” www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9870721/the-cultural-crater- 12-years-slave (accessed October 24, 2013). 34. Randall Roberts, “Review: Kanye West’s Wildly Experimental, Narcissistic ‘Yeezus,’” http://articles. latimes.com/2013/jun/17/entertainment/la-et-ms-review-kanye-wests-wildly-experimental-narcissistic- yeezus-20130617 (accessed June 17, 2013). 35. Ray Rahman, “Yeezus: Music Review,” Entertainment Weekly, www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20709700,00. htm (accessed July 9, 2013). 36. See www.spin.com/articles/yeezus-female-roundtable-kanye-west-sheezus-talks-a-critical-roundtable/ (accessed July 21, 2013). 37. Puja Patel, ibid. 38. Other black radical figures whom West often samples or self-references are Malcolm X and Gill Scott- Heron, whose biopic West is rumored to be producing. In the last track on West’s 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Who Will Survive in America?, West samples Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,” and on Late Registration’s “My Way Home” (2005), he samples “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” As the producer of Common’s 2007 single “The People,” West used Scott-Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit.” On his third studio album, Graduation (2007), West references Malcolm X in the song “Good Morning” as well as on Yeezus’s “Black Skinhead (2013). For more on West’s engagement with Malcolm X’s legacy, see Graeme Abernethy, The Iconography of Malcolm X (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 168–213. 39. Kyra Gaunt, “One Time 4 Your Mind: Embedding Nas and Hip Hop in a Gendered State of Mind,” in Born to Use Mics: Listening to Nas’ Illmatic, ed. Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai (New York: Basic Civitas Books), 166. Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children | 137

40. Ibid. 41. Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 53. 42. Bob Gendron, “Lauryn Hill Turns Agitated, Miserable Set at Congress Theater,” Chicago Tribune, November 15, 2012. 43. Daphne Brooks, “‘Bring the Pain’: Post-Soul Memory, Neo-Soul Affect, and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere,” in Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 186. 44. Hill’s song lyrics can be found on her tmblr site at http://mslaurynhill.tumblr.com/. I did not attend the “Life Is Good/Black Rage” tour, but I have relied on multiple viewings of the live performance of the song on YouTube of the November 7, 2012, Electronic Factory concert in Philadelphia.