Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon in the mountainous west of North Carolina. Simone’s slow effort to get to that far shore of her creative mind is why her recordings are today still daring and direct. Underneath the vulnerable, broken person, it turns out, there was a genius. If most Behind the Music-style movies trade in stories of creative martyrdom-underneath the genius is a vulnerable, broken person-Simone’s biography offers one twist more. The movie’s title, taken from an essay by Maya Angelou, gestures toward a question that continues to haunt especially the troubled, crazy years of Simone’s later career. In What Happened, Miss Simone?, a smart new documentary by Liz Garbus available today on Netflix, the brilliant, sometimes contradicting layers of Simone’s myth get peeled back to reveal the even more brilliant, contradictory imagination at its core. Then, abruptly and for several years, she vanished from the stage. For an extraordinary decade, Simone was the resonant sound box of a nation in change. And she seemed to inhabit each of these genres as if it were her main vein of craft, the music that she’d been performing all her life. She was internationally lauded and resented as a performer of protest music. She sang Top 50 rock hits and rejuvenated folk. Yet she sought to join with every sort of music she could find. Even if it is possible to be both frank and enigmatic, raw and refined, Nina Simone, who rose to prominence a half a century ago, spent most of her career trapped beyond the limits of her art.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |