Just finished watching the Nina Simone Netflix Documentary (their first foray into original docs/films). Man, good stuff. It made me lament all the more that Zoe Saldana will play her in a biopic that I'll be SURE to miss. That's just insulting on so many levels.

But this was a very compelling piece. It captured the complexity and tragedy of her life, and the depth and beauty of her talent. Its really eerie how similar the parallels Lauryn Hill's career has with hers.

I hope this gets some traction in the artistic community and people catch a vision for what ELSE their music can inspire besides wanton materialism and hedonism.

What a beautiful and misunderstood soul Her husband aided significantly in her downward spiral, if ONLY....

datdude said:

It's up? Cool! I'll need something to purge the BET Awards out my brain later night.

Is there another way to watch it if you don't have Netflix?

To watch the doc, you must be a Netflix subscriber. The other option is to wait for the DVD release. And after that there are torrent files; however, I prefer not to encourage anyone to download pirated content.

Yeah that doc was dope as shit. Any suggestions on which album I should start with of hers?

missfee said:

Is there another way to watch it if you don't have Netflix?

This one is a bit better and older Doc with a bit more footage not shown in the new one:

i was a very little girl when nina simone would have been in her prime. i remember my mother had a greatest hits album of hers that she used to play all the time. my mom would play the side that had 'four women', 'pirate jenny', and 'i put a spell on you'. whenever pirate jenny came on, my brother and i would say, 'oh no, mommy's playing that scary lady again'! as i got older and learned more about her, i used to play the side with 'mississippi goddamn'. she was indeed no joke, very opinionated. i know a woman who worked for her and concurred that she was a very difficult person to work for. i just remember reading a blurb in jet magazine when i was a teenager that said that nina had some priest perform an exorcism on her daughter.

Identity said:

To watch the doc, you must be a Netflix subscriber. The other option is to wait for the DVD release. And after that there are torrent files; however, I prefer not to encourage anyone to download pirated content.

i plan to go up to san fran to visit my mom and brother for the fourth. my brother got my mom one of those hdmi deals where she can hook into his netflix account. i'm sure my mom will want to see it, too.

JoeBala said:

missfee said:

Is there another way to watch it if you don't have Netflix?

This one is a bit better and older Doc with a bit more footage not shown in the new one:

Someone just sent me this one last week. Looks good!

This BBC doc with the singer Laura Mvula exploring Nina Simone's life story and talking about her influence on her own work was on a couple of weeks back, too. Everyone's getting in on the action, it seems, because of the new doc and possibly that cursed Saldana flick. The Guardian ran a decent feature too.

kibbles said:

i was a very little girl when nina simone would have been in her prime. i remember my mother had a greatest hits album of hers that she used to play all the time. my mom would play the side that had 'four women', 'pirate jenny', and 'i put a spell on you'. whenever pirate jenny came on, my brother and i would say, 'oh no, mommy's playing that scary lady again'! as i got older and learned more about her, i used to play the side with 'mississippi goddamn'. she was indeed no joke, very opinionated. i know a woman who worked for her and concurred that she was a very difficult person to work for. i just remember reading a blurb in jet magazine when i was a teenager that said that nina had some priest perform an exorcism on her daughter.

The doc does touch on the fact there were issues between her and her daughter, but doesn't go into any indepth detail, just enough for you to get a taste of the relationship, ending with an explanation of why Nina was going through what she was going through. I'm reading some critics weren't satisfied with it because it didn't delve deep about her, to me I got enough to understand well enough what was going on with her, where she stood, her motivations, a very good idea of who she was.

I enjoyed the Netflix film quite a lot, she's an incredible talent. However I'll watch the "better, older" one linked here as well. There were some areas of her life that I thought the new doc skimmed over, and I'd love to see more footage.