The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts, tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the dark, creeping motive that comprises the song’s melodic underpinning. She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simone’s powers bordered on emotional clairvoyance.
Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. (more…)