Nina Simone's Gum (2022)

By Warren Ellis (member of The Bad Seeds - as in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Genre - Memoir written by a person too sweet to write a memoir 

Recommended for: Someone you’ve seen hold a record sleeve in both hands, close to their chest but not touching their body. Like they know there are other copies, but this is the one that protects the music that is playing right now.

Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis, a multi-instrumentalist and producer most notably recognized as a collaborator of Nick Cave via the Bad Seeds, is a weird, indulgent, unnecessary and beautiful attempt at a memoir. Let me list the ways it could go wrong:

It could be creepy (it sort of is). 

Ellis is a white man writing about Nina Simone.

It’s not a memoir. 

“We need Nina Simone more than ever; her voice; her strength and resolve. Her defiance, courage, fearlessness. Imagine a Nina Simone heart-sized gum in the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island.”

The above passage is the kind of thing we’re working with in this book; an earnest and innocent unawareness of how ridiculous it is. In 1999, Nina Simone performed at a concert organized by Nick Cave. Upon sitting down at her piano, she took out her gum and placed it on a towel atop the piano. Mesmerized by the performance (or just mesmerized by her presence), Ellis went on stage afterwards, grabbed the towel/gum, and kept it for the next 20 years, as a spiritual memento in his life, musically or otherwise. Eventually, he had a replica cast in gold and silver, a process that makes up a good deal of the book. 

I was wary of a book about Nina Simone written by a white man for obvious reasons. Simone inhaled a society’s struggle, saw it through the unflinching eyes of her own pain, and released a voice that viscerally punched back. To examine that deeply, I think you probably ought to have a firm grasp on the target of those punches, the oppressive affects those targets had, and the ways they are still claiming their victims. You wouldn’t believe the number of white men willing to write about “Mississippi Goddamn” like it is as historical as the Gettysburg Address and not something that still requires emotional self-evaluation by any listener. 

Ellis avoids this with his unapologetic respect and reverence for her. The book is written from an understood premise that Ellis is lucky to have been able to breathe the same air as Simone. Musician to musician, but more importantly, human to human, he knows what she gave to the world was unimaginable generosity. 

I read Nina Simone’s Gum about a week after watching Wings of Desire, the 1987 Wim Wenders film, at the urging of my wife, which includes a mid-film concert by Nick Cave. It’s possibly the most moving film I’ve ever seen. The movie is about angels who watch over the people of Berlin, trying to understand their pleasures, pained by their struggles. 

The coolest person you’ve ever met doesn’t touch Peter Falk (Columbo to most people) in Wings of Desire. At one point, his character tells an angel, who he can’t see but whose presence he feels, that there’s nothing like a cup of coffee, and a lot of the film’s success hinges on you immediately agreeing you’d rather drink coffee with Falk than be an immortal angel. The appeal he makes for the tactile is pulsing at the spine of Nina Simone’s Gum. 

The weirdness of the book is offset by the sweetness of Ellis. The piece of gum gives him strength, and he clearly is more comfortable talking about that source of strength than he is the reasons he needs strength in the first place. It had me thinking about what we can touch and their meanings to us. That meaning is just stuff floating around in our head. It’s scary when it’s in our head, ethereal and uncertain. You hear about assigning meaning to objects, but less about how the meaning is there before the object. The object just comes along to afford us certainty. If we can touch it, it’s real. 

Nina Simone chewed her last piece of gum a number of years ago. So, I suggest flooding the market with your own tactile creations. I have been thinking about community a lot in the wake of America’s flirtations with fascism. But to most people, community is just a meaning with no object attached to it. Turning meanings into things people can touch and seeing what happens is a start. Every sculpture started with meaning, but so did every library and every co-opt.

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Regionality Was King For A Brief Moment, And Paul Wall Embodied It

I was asked to come on Billboard’s podcast to talk about Paul Wall’s 2005 and what made it so unique. The show’s host, Andrew Unterberger, is someone who I have wanted to have a podcast for years, and now that Billboard gave him the reins, music nerds are in heaven. This was a lot of fun. We get into regionality and race and Kanye and all sorts of silly stuff. Listen here.