Why Must Nina's Soul be poisoned by Yoghurt?

Why must Nina's soul be poisoned by yoghurt?


Sean O'Hagan
Sunday April 8, 2007
The Observer

I'm having a Nina Simone moment. Last week, while visiting a friend whose iPod is permanently set to 'shuffle', I was caught unawares by her version of Dylan's 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues'. I had not heard the song in a while and it's drowsy, jazzy swirl took me by surprise all over again. I went home and dug out all her old records and I've been immersed ever since.

That's when I realised I have one problem with Nina Simone right now, a problem I would not have had, say, five years ago. A problem that has nothing to do with Nina per se. It concerns the provenance - and the meaning - of one of her best-known and stirring songs, a song from that troubled time when she, like many black artists, embraced the cause of civil rights. In the late Sixties, she wrote the anthemic 'Young, Gifted and Black' and the angry 'Mississippi Goddam'. She sang the stirring 'Backlash Blues', written by her friend, author Langston Hughes, and turned another song, 'Ain't Got No/I Got Life', originally written for Hair, into a stirring celebration of black pride and defiance.

The latter song was not strictly hers, but as soon as she sang it, she claimed it. If you doubt this, click on YouTube and witness her performance at the Harlem Music Festival in 1969. It is one of those heartstopping moments that YouTube was made for, a slice of musical history, but, more important, a glimpse of a time when a song could really mean something, could carry the weight of a people's hopes and dreams, its aspirations and anger. A time, too, when a singer could echo the activism of the streets, could galvanise the consciousness-raising radicalism of an era. Nearly 40 years on, that song is being used in a TV ad to sell yoghurt.