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, how- ever, 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 ©2014 The American Studies Association 120 | American Quarterly 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 contra- dictions. 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 radi- calism 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 tradi- tion 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.