"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

     In the article “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” it helped me to more clearly understand what Nina Simona was all about. Every song that she wrote served as a purpose to get a point across or to tell a story about her life. Nina Simone’s songs expressed political topics like women empowerment and oppression and she also expressed her psychological issues through singing. In the article there was a quote that said “the importance of message delivery has been noted by Stephen Duncombe (2002), who states “it is one thing to read lyrics on a page, quite another to hear them sung with emotion or laid over a danceable beat”. I agree with quote because just from my own personal experience of reading some of Nina Simone’s song and then going back and actually listening to her sing them it helped me to really understand and feel the emotion and story that she was trying to get across. Listening to the lyrics being sung with a “danceable beat” helped me to connect with her songs and better understand what she is feeling, it gives you a much different effect then just reading the lyrics. 

     What I found most interesting to learn about Nina Simone in this article was the fact that she suffered from psychological issues, such as bipolar disorder and substance abuse, late in her career. “The presence of topics related to mental illness in Simone’s lyrics encourages a breaking of the silence and normalizing mental illness experiences, thus increasing the

acceptability of support and mental health services.”  This quote shows another way that through expressing something that she battle in her life and fat strongly about she was able to raise awareness to an issue that was not seen as “normal”. She was able to bring attention to a lot of uncommon issues of the time which made her such an influential singer and written.