July 4th: Thoughts Related to Vince Staples and Nina Simone

Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" was written in 1964 as a response to, among other events, the

16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Churches are still burning, 51 years later. Given that it is July 4th, today seemed like a good day to meditate on these questions--and because the way that I do that in my own life is through popular culture I thought I would write about Simone and the new album by Vince Staples.

Simone said of the song that when she heard of the bombing her first response was to try to make a weapon, when that course of action proved less productive than she had wished, she wrote the song instead. It is a song filled with rage, sadness, and weariness. It is, in many ways, a companion piece to Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black." But Simone's politics did not stop at songs that were explicitly oriented around protest and political action. Her numerous covers of songs by major white musical figures (she covered Dylan, Paul Anka (via Sinatra in "My Way"), The Beatles, and Jerry Jeff Walker, among others) are just as politically minded, and just as stirring. Simone, among the most rigorously trained musicians in the American popular music catalog, was a masterful arranger, and these songs take on a new life under her hand, a side that demonstrates incontrovertibly that there is a flip-side to the white American experience, that the reflection of every piece of "white" popular culture is "blackness."

All week I've been listening to the new Vince Staples album Summertime 06 and thinking about it, as well as Staples Hell Can Wait, which came out last year. Staples is young, he turned 22 earlier this week, but when he raps about Los Angeles it is with a sense of history that includes Watts and 1992. Tracks like "Hands Up" from Hell Can Wait and "Lift Me Up" from Summertime 06 express the suffocating weight of white supremacy and violence. I haven't been able to help myself of thinking of Simone while listening to Staples. The broad concerns of expresses for his neighborhood and his people, the total disinterest in white intervention or "assistance," and the confidence that such a white intrusion would serve only to erase the people and places that he loves are powerful and thought provoking, and they echo Nina's politics (she refused to endorse non-violence and was seen by many in her particular historical moment as an extremist). He is doing something similar to what Kendrick did in To Pimp a Butterfly, but while Kendrick is invested in the theology and metaphysics of blackness, Staples is concerned with the hands on details. It is as if Kendrick is the Apostle John, with apocalyptic visions of the end of time, and a transcendent focus on the divine aspect of the incarnation, while Stapes is James, who wrote "what is it, my brothers and sisters, if a man have faith and no deeds" (James 2:14). Both artists offer a compelling vision of black power, and in doing so have produced (in one man's opinion) the two premiere rap albums of the year.

P.S. You, whoever you are, should check out the new Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? it is excellent.