“To Love Somebody” sung live in Rome, 1969, and “An Artist’s Duty” :
When Nina Simone sings To Love Somebody in Rome, 1969, she does not romanticize love. She loads it with historical weight. Her voice carries exhaustion, tenderness, and insistence at once. Love appears as labor, risk, exposure — not as refuge.
That performance happens at a moment when love is no longer separable from survival.
And this is exactly what she later names, without metaphor, in An Artist’s Duty.
She does not describe a choice.
She describes a condition.
“At this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate… I don’t think you can help but be involved.”
This sentence is brutal in its clarity. Art is not autonomous. Art is implicated.
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