Singer activist or activist singer?

              Nina Simone, widely known as a black singer, more specifically as the protest singer, is a different black American leader to deal with. Unlike other black leaders, like MLK and Malcolm X, she used a different approach toward protest and demanding rights for her people. I argue, that unlike the popular perception of Simone as a singer who was also an activist, she was instead an activist who used music for her political endeavors. She was primarily a black activist and music was a secondary thing which was a medium to meet political goals or to voice political demands.

              Her music trajectory tells us about her precedence of activism and how a strong commitment towards black rights influenced the lyrics of her songs. Whatever was going on in her activism, or her interactions with the black leaders were vividly evident in the lyrics. Her songs were her biography of sorts and helped the listener navigate her emotions and responses to the changes going on in the movement, and how she wanted to articulate her heart out on matters of black lynching and violence. For instance, her song “Mississippi Goddamn” came out at a time when the civil rights movement was at its peak. A rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated by a white man, and a bombing had happened in a church in Birmingham, Alabama which results in the killing of four girls. These instances filled Simone with rage and she took her frustration out through her music in the form of this song. Her tone is not passive, but is a call to end these atrocities “now”, to have mercy on them “now”, and to grant equality “now”.  These expressions come at a time when lynching, killing, and segregation of the black people was the unquestionable norm and her tone of ‘enough is enough’ tells the enemy to stop these dehumanizing acts.

              She also released an entire album only three days after the assassination of MLK dedicating in his memory. The songs captured the emotions for Martin Luther King and also the envisioning of a utopian future, as in the case of “ain’t got no/I’ve got life”. These themes are very much in line with what was going on in the Black society at that time. Simone was different from others because of her uniqueness of articulation of these emotions, and frustrations. She adopted a different approach not only towards her racial problems but also towards her interaction with her people. If she had to admire a leader, she would do so through music, as she did for MLK. So, music was a way to connect herself with her community. Other civil rights leaders were brilliant orators, she communicated with people through her music.

              The dent in her career after Mississippi goddamn tells us what Simone saw as her ultimate goal in life. it wasn’t music, but it was the call for black rights through music. Music and protest were not two separate entities, but the latter gave rise to the act of singing. This link between art, in this case, the music, and politics is inextricable and art is most of the time political. Simone, through the usage of aesthetics, gave way to a new form of leadership which was perfect in articulation and defiant in its own right.