{"id":15833,"date":"2014-08-11T14:31:38","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T14:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-many-battles-of-nina-simone\/"},"modified":"2014-08-11T14:31:38","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T14:31:38","slug":"the-many-battles-of-nina-simone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-many-battles-of-nina-simone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Battles of Nina Simone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2014\/08\/11\/raised-voice?utm_source=tny&amp;utm_campaign=generalsocial&amp;utm_medium=facebook&amp;mbid=social_facebook'>The Many Battles of Nina Simone<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"link_description\">\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/shrinkrants.tumblr.com\/post\/94386280328\/the-many-battles-of-nina-simone\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">shrinkrants<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"link_og_blockquote\"><p>Claudia Roth Pierpont on how the struggle for civil rights shaped Nina Simone\u2019s life and career, and on a controversial new movie, \u201cNina,\u201d starring Zoe Saldana.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"link_og_blockquote\"><p>It took her an hour to write \u201cMississippi Goddam.\u201d A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words\u2014\u201cAlabama\u2019s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest\u201d\u2014that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: \u201cAnd everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!\u201d Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (\u201cToo damn lazy!\u201d), government promises (\u201cDesegregation\u00a0\/\u00a0Mass participation\u201d), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to \u201cGo slow,\u201d a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, \u201cToo slow!\u201d It wasn\u2019t \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d or \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It\u2019s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: \u201cOh but this whole country is full of lies,\u201d she sang. \u201cYou\u2019re all gonna die and die like flies.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Many Battles of Nina Simone shrinkrants: Claudia Roth Pierpont on how the struggle for civil rights shaped Nina Simone\u2019s life and career, and on a controversial new movie, \u201cNina,\u201d starring Zoe Saldana. It took her an hour to write \u201cMississippi Goddam.\u201d A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-47n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}