I was not aware of the piano being regarded as a metaphor for race relations and harmony, despite having heard "Ebony and Ivory." Somehow it bypassed my neural circuitry!
I think it's a burden for Nina as well as for any woman or member of a minority that they are not seen for who they are but as a representative of their gender and ethnicity or race. It has to be stifling and exhausting if you're in the public eye and always 'on' in that regard. I think you make a really valid point that is worth exploring in terms of both her life choices and her music-making.
Thanks, Ellen. Yes, it must have been exhausting. She speaks about these aspects well in her autobiography and in the documentary La Legende from around the same time (early 90s). Her studio album from that time, A Single Woman, has a great liner note by Ntozake Shange, who makes a similar point: the album, she writes, 'is about a woman in the process of defining her life, deciding her fate, accepting, without shame or guilt, her own needs and desires'.
I was not aware of the piano being regarded as a metaphor for race relations and harmony, despite having heard "Ebony and Ivory." Somehow it bypassed my neural circuitry!
I think it's a burden for Nina as well as for any woman or member of a minority that they are not seen for who they are but as a representative of their gender and ethnicity or race. It has to be stifling and exhausting if you're in the public eye and always 'on' in that regard. I think you make a really valid point that is worth exploring in terms of both her life choices and her music-making.
Thanks, Ellen. Yes, it must have been exhausting. She speaks about these aspects well in her autobiography and in the documentary La Legende from around the same time (early 90s). Her studio album from that time, A Single Woman, has a great liner note by Ntozake Shange, who makes a similar point: the album, she writes, 'is about a woman in the process of defining her life, deciding her fate, accepting, without shame or guilt, her own needs and desires'.
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