I was seventeen when I first heard Nina Simone's "Four Women," and the force of it stopped me cold in my parents' cluttered basement, standing among boxes of old vinyl. That wasn't music as background or decoration—it was music as reckoning. Each voice she conjured represented a different way Black women had been forced to exist in America, and she embodied every one with devastating precision. Her contralto voice didn't ask for permission; it demanded witness.

What strikes me now, decades later, is how Simone refused the false choice between artistry and activism. She brought the entire weight of her classical training—those years at Juilliard, the Bach and Beethoven she mastered—and wielded it like a weapon against injustice. The result was something entirely her own: protest songs that swung like jazz standards, love songs that carried the undertow of rage, performances that blurred the line between concert and confrontation.

I've been thinking about her lately while visiting galleries filled with contemporary artists who similarly refuse to be categorized. There's a painter here in the city, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, whose work excavates Black queer history through fragmented imagery and archival material. Like Simone, she doesn't explain herself to make viewers comfortable. She presents the work and trusts that those ready to receive it will understand.

This is what great art does—it doesn't perform accessibility; it demands that we rise to meet it. Simone never simplified her politics for white audiences, never smoothed the sharp edges of her anger. When she sang "Mississippi Goddam," she made sure every word landed like the accusation it was. And yet the music itself was gorgeous, complex, technically breathtaking. Beauty and fury aren't opposites. Sometimes they're the same thing.

I find myself returning to artists like Simone and McClodden when I'm overwhelmed by how much contemporary culture asks us to consume art passively, to scroll past it, to engage without really feeling. Their work reminds me that art can be a radical act of refusal—refusal to entertain without challenging, refusal to soothe without confronting, refusal to exist quietly.

If you've never listened to Simone's live albums, start with Nina Simone at Town Hall. Let yourself sit with the discomfort and the transcendence. Let it change something in you.

#music #NinaSimone #artcriticism #blackartists