The GB Album Club 042 - Nina Simone in Concert by Nina Simone (Cycle Finale!)

Duders! Welcome to the 42nd edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, we donned our finest Hot Topic Jack Skellington shirt and we put on that black eye-liner we knew deep down we were only wearing to embarrass our elders and we got down with some emo rock. This week, hey, it's only the arguably greatest singer of all time! This week our album is Nina Simone in Concertby Nina Simone! This album was picked by yours truly, and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THIS ALBUM: Due to it being called Nina Simone in Concert, a very generic name not helped by the fact that the cover of the album says"Nina Simone in Concert" without any separation between "Nina Simone" and "In Concert," this album is listed in a bunch of places as just In Concert. The album is, however, called Nina Simone in Concert, and searching just "In Concert" gets you wrong results depending on what platform you're on blah blah blah if there's any confusion, you're looking for the one with the green album cover that ends with "Mississippi Goddamn." The links above are correct.

Anyway, here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we made a pool of albums and we pick one at random every week to listen to and discuss! This is the last album of this cycle, but if you want to get in on the next one, do so here at our Discord! Other than that, we'll be back in a few weeks or so!

So I picked this album because it's a top three all time favorite for me, and the reason why is that listening to this album in my dorm sophomore year made me realize what I care about when it comes to not just music, but art in general. Mainly that it's not about "good" or "bad" so much as it is about effective or non-effective.

Let's just say, to pull an example out of thin air, you're a black singer in Jim Crow America and you're performing a live cover of "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera, a power fantasy song in which a mistreated sex worker (or in this case, motel maid) fantasizes about being a secret pirate queen and taking bloody revenge on all the townspeople who have wronged her. How do you sing it?

If you want to, you could sing it pretty. You can adhere to proper standards of technically proficient singing, hit every note perfectly, and make something perfectly pleasing, and hey, it'll probably work. Or you can do what Nina did. Sing it off-kilter and strange. Bring out all the anger and sorrow at the core of the song by giving up a little bit of control. Of course, art is not a binary, and this isn't meant to be a dig at the former. But the latter will always reach my heart faster and harder.

"I Loves You Porgy" is a love song, and she sings it with warmth and longing. The pain of being torn away from Porgy is too much to bear, and she sings those parts as such. This version of "Plain Gold Ring" is a reimagining of the same song from her debut album that brings much stranger instrumentation to bring out the anguish of pining for someone who isn't available. "Go Limp" is a comedy song about two young lovers meeting at the civil rights marches, and not only does she sing it lighter, but she does some great on-stage banter too.

The lesson I learned from this album is one I think about constantly when making my own art (I'm a screenwriter). It's not about what you have. It's about how you use it. And of course, it doesn't hurt that Nina Simone is one of the greatest singers and performers of all time, and this is of course the album with the famous recording of "Mississippi Goddamn" on it. So... yeah, I think this album is basically untouchable as far as recorded music is concerned, live or otherwise.

Favorite Songs: "I Loves You Porgy," "Pirate Jenny," "Mississippi Goddamn"

I'm only familiar with Nina Simone in passing, so I didn't know quite what to expect here. "Singer Spotlight" is not my favorite style of jazz, so this album started off slowly for me. It started to turn on Pirate Jenny and Jim Crow Gone, then Go Limp was fun and very cute with the banter, and Mississippi Goddamn was great. I've listened to politically charged music before, of course, but mostly in the rock or punk genres where there is a lot of music going on around the message. Even one of my favorites in Harry Bellefonte was often a bit more circumspect or light hearted in his commentary (at least within his songs). So to hear something so stark was almost a bit uncomfortable, in a good way. My teen daughter was in the car while I listened to it, and she enjoyed it. I don't know that I would go so far as to say I would come back to it, but I am glad it was on the list.

@redwing42: I'm very afraid of this coming across as me "well, actually"-ing you, but that's actually her on piano as well as singing. Again, I bring it up not to correct, but to point out that she actually considered herself a pianist first, and her goal starting out was to play classical music and be a concert pianist. (They get into that a lot in the doc What Happened, Miss Simone?, which I feel is one of the better music docs, though be warned it's incredibly. Granted, I don't feel a huge amount of enthusiasm coming from you to be interested in watching that anyway, but still.) Instead, she got roped into playing jazz and pop and wound up going hard into the civil rights direction.

I bring all that up because I find it fascinating that you can be so great and get so much praise at doing something you never really wanted to do, particularly when it comes to art. And to go even further, Bellefonte wanted that kind of public adoration and used that lighter touch as a result. Nina didn't and went way angrier (she literally told MLK that she wasn't non-violent), and their lives wound up in such different places. It's wild.