I was shocked by the new documentary that premiered this month on Netflix about singer Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone? I loved Nina when I was much younger, I saved up my pittance of an allowance to buy her long-playing vinyl record albums. I'm not denying anything in the documentary, it probably all happened, but I think the program concentrated too much on the negative, and not enough on what made Nina great in the first place.
I don't think she got a fair shake from Netflix. She's long dead, she can't defend herself. Sure, she was troubled. But she was also a major talent. I choose to remember the talent. This program came across like a black version of Mommie Dearest, or Let's Get Nina. Her daughter, her husband, everyone trashed her memory. Her daughter has every right to tell her side of the story, or course. But like Christina Crawford, her memories are those a child, and children often resent adult decisions a parent has to make, and compromises adults must make to navigate rough seas.
Nina's voice reflected her suffering �" as a woman in a man's world, as a black person in a white person's world. She never saw the light at the end of the tunnel. She was consumed by racism and sexism. She even seemed to hate her fans, the basis of her support, the foundation of her financial security. Simone always felt like an outsider in her own country. So much so that she moved to the Republic of Liberia in West Africa, the nation founded by freed slaves from the U.S., primarily from what were at one time the Confederate States of the Deep South.
Critics are lambasting a coming dramatization of Nina's life because her male love interest in the movie was actually gay, so how could he be the love of her life? Hey, it's a movie, not a documentary. Billy Dee Williams played Billie Holiday's love interest in Lady Sings the Blues, a completely fictional character, but a handsome male lead made the movie much more interesting, made Lady Sings the Blues a love story. That's what Hollywood does best.