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Why must Nina's soul be poisoned by yoghurt?


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I'm having a Nina Simone moment. Last week, while visiting a friend whose iPod is permanently set to 'shuffle', I was caught unawares by her version of Dylan's 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues'. I had not heard the song in a while and it's drowsy, jazzy swirl took me by surprise all over again. I went home and dug out all her old records and I've been immersed ever since.

 

That's when I realised I have one problem with Nina Simone right now, a problem I would not have had, say, five years ago. A problem that has nothing to do with Nina per se. It concerns the provenance - and the meaning - of one of her best-known and stirring songs, a song from that troubled time when she, like many black artists, embraced the cause of civil rights. In the late Sixties, she wrote the anthemic 'Young, Gifted and Black' and the angry 'Mississippi Goddam'. She sang the stirring 'Backlash Blues', written by her friend, author Langston Hughes, and turned another song, 'Ain't Got No/I Got Life', originally written for Hair, into a stirring celebration of black pride and defiance.

 

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The latter song was not strictly hers, but as soon as she sang it, she claimed it. If you doubt this, click on YouTube and witness her performance at the Harlem Music Festival in 1969. It is one of those heartstopping moments that YouTube was made for, a slice of musical history, but, more important, a glimpse of a time when a song could really mean something, could carry the weight of a people's hopes and dreams, its aspirations and anger. A time, too, when a singer could echo the activism of the streets, could galvanise the consciousness-raising radicalism of an era. Nearly 40 years on, that song is being used in a TV ad to sell yoghurt.

 

Call me old-fashioned, but I have always had a problem with pop songs and advertising. It's not just the issue of selling-out that concerns me, it's the strange things that happen to a song when it is used to sell a product. In the case of Nina Simone's 'Ain't Got No/I Got Life', the song has been remixed by dance producers Groovefinder in a way that suits the happy-clappy message of Muller dairy products.

 

In the process, it has been stripped of context and of meaning, rendered whiter than white. It has become not just an advertising jingle but an integral part of Muller's brand identity. Indeed, if you click on the Muller website, you may be surprised, like me, to find out that you can, just by consuming a jar of yoghurt, 'live a Muller life'.

 

The Muller life is somehow summed up in those adverts that feature Nina Simone's songs, but has nothing to do with anything as vulgar as political activism or consciousness-raising. Unless you are the kind of person who believes that eating the right kind of yoghurt is one of those crucial lifestyle choices that defines you as much as the labels you wear or the postcode you live in. If so, you probably deserve to be patronised by smug German yoghurt capitalists.

 

My problem is that I'm not sure Simone deserves such a fate. We've been down this slippery slope before. I still remember the disbelief and distaste that came over me when I first heard the Velvet Underground's S&M opus 'Venus in Furs' unfolding over a TV advert for Dunlop tyres. The same reaction occurred more recently when I heard Joanna Newsom, perhaps the strangest and most out-there artist of the last few years, over an ad for Orange mobile phones.

 

What possessed her? What possessed them? Who decided that a quietly odd little song that begins with the words: 'Svetlana sucks lemons...' might be the perfect theme tune for teenagers of all ages who aggravate their fellow humans with shouted phone conversations and terminally dumb, insanely loud ringtones.

 

There seems to be some kind of artist-advertising disjuncture going on, but neither side in this Faustian pact seems even vaguely aware of it. No doubt both Joanna and Orange have benefited from their, erm, collaboration, but it has left this potential customer-fan distinctly dissatisfied. 'This Side of the Blue' was never my favourite Joanna Newsom song, but now it makes me want to throw up and is perhaps the single defining reason why I will never purchase a mobile phone from Orange.

 

In my book, great songs are debased when they are used to shift product. I don't care that the music of the late Nick Drake supposedly reached a whole new audience after his song 'Pink Moon' was used to flog Volkswagens. He wrote it during a very troubled time in his short life and sung it to keep the demons at bay. He did not write it to sell German cars. Like Simone, Drake is not around to see his art traduced by those who think that everything, including a piece of a person's very soul, has a price.

 

Would that the late, great prince of righteous anger, Bill Hicks, were around to speak up on their behalf. 'Quit putting a goddam dollar sign on every f***ing thing on this planet!' he fumed in one of his now celebrated anti-advertising rants. That was way before Jack White of the White Stripes wrote a song for Coca-Cola, before Dylan did that Victoria's Secret advert. I hesitate to write the next bit, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, but how long before a Woody Guthrie dustbowl ballad is used to sell real estate? 'This Land Is Your Land' anyone?

 

 

 

From here: Observer

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