I put The Original and Best of Nina Simone on while I was doing some chores on Sunday. I hadn’t heard it in years and just wanted something relaxing playing in the background while sweeping the floor and cleaning the surfaces. I heard it throughout but listened only intermittently, letting its melodies move in and out of focus, Simone’s deep, rasping contralto doing the same.
Some music refuses to be ignored. Whether it makes you swing your hips or well up with emotion, it demands your whole attention. It says: here I am, the most important thing in the room. Other kinds of music can disappear into a thrum like traffic on a busy road nearby. The noises smush together into something you simply forget is there. The Original and Best of Nina Simone is something else. It’s the kind of music you might put on when you have friends over for a glass of wine. It changes the feeling in a room without being demanding. You might not realise how much it’s adding until that last track finishes and you suddenly wonder what on earth could do the job as well as it just did.
I’m not saying Nina Simone is an unobtrusive artist. There is something faintly absurd, perhaps even indecent, about taking music containing so much anguish and human force and using it to make the kitchen feel nice while wiping crumbs from a worktop. Yet somehow it isn’t. Why not?
Despite her singular voice, we can listen to her sideways, catching a lyrical phrase, a piano melody, the sudden roughness in her tone, before drifting back and letting the record recede. It remains whole, however much or little attention we give it. There is something generous in that, but also a kind of sadness: being beautiful whether heard or ignored.
There are many beautiful things that do not insist on being noticed. A tree outside a window might improve somebody’s whole life without their knowing it. Only once it was gone would they understand what it had been doing for them. We often measure music by its ability to seize and hold our attention, but perhaps another measure is how empty the room feels when it stops.