How We Break Each Other's Hearts

Nina Simone: 'Isn't It A Pity?'

Jun 12, 2024

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I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but Nina Simone’s music never spoke to me. Friends would talk rapturously about the holiness of her music, but I couldn’t feel it.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I spun her marquee releases — I Put a Spell on You, Pastel Blues, Nina Simone Sings the Blues — hoping for something to reveal itself, like I was panning for gold with a vinyl sieve. I never found any. “Feeling Good” became one of those songs I thought was cheapened by its popularity, to the point that I rolled my eyes and hit skip every time it came up in a relative’s playlist. “Mississippi Goddam” is powerful poetry, but the thrumming showtune instrumentation always made me a little seasick. (Yes, I understand the political importance of the juxtaposition.) For whatever reason, the raw, sometimes jagged edges of her voice didn’t fit my ears, no matter how hard I tried jamming them in place.

One afternoon last year I went to see Ari Aster’s film Beau is Afraid. It’s a strange and unnerving movie, hilarious when it shouldn’t be and oddly affecting in its cruelty and chaos. Asters’s previous films had always terrified me in infesting ways, his nightmare meditations on family and relationships eating at my nerves like lice. I knew very little about Beau, only that it was meant to be funny.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know it’s hard to summarize. More than a few critics called it an Oedipal Odyssey, and, indeed, it does follow a hapless, childlike Joaquin Phoenix for three hours while he tries to get home to his mom, who, it becomes increasingly clear, has really fucked him up. He is paralyzed at the thought of leaving his own apartment, terrified to even cross the street.

In the months before I stepped foot in that theater, I had been unpacking my own complex, difficult relationship with my own mother. The process, helped along by a series of psychoanalysts, had dredged up traumas and conflicts I hadn’t thought about in years, irritating emotional scar tissue that had never healed correctly. At some point the sutures properly ripped and I had a breakdown. I became afraid of going out into the world and started collapsing inward, like an exhausted star. It took cajoling to get me out to see Beau. By then I was less of a hermit than I’d been in the initial days of my crack-up, but still wary of doing anything that didn’t involve my own four walls. If I’d known what the movie was about beforehand, I probably would have picked something else.

When Beau finally makes it home he is almost immediately forced to reckon with the realities of his relationship with his mom. He discovers that his life was just something that happened to him. His choices were made for him, not by some golden thread cut and sewn by fate but by the person who was supposed to bring him into the world. In my seat, I shivered with recognition.

Exhausted from his epiphanies, Beau falls asleep. Then soft piano chords begin to echo through the house. I didn’t recognize the song from the initial notes. But when the lyrics came – Isn’t it a pity? – they rang in my mind as clear as a bell.

Often, when my mother’s mania came, she would break the silence in our house by blasting her favorite records through the surround sound system. George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass was a constant fixture, and “Isn’t it a Pity?” was one of her favorite tracks. It popped up on the car radio too. She was often incapacitated by one or another medication, and more than once I – age 14 – drove her to doctor appointments. When the song came on K-EARTH 101 she would go silent, just mouthing the lyrics so as not to disturb Harrison’s gentle birdsong voice. Looking back, I realize what an appropriate soundtrack it was. A 14 year-old boy illegally driving his dazed mother to her psychiatrist: Isn’t it a pity?

The voice that shook Beau awake wasn’t Harrison’s but Nina Simone’s. In 1971 Simone recorded a live, 11-minute version of “Isn’t it a Pity?” at Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey that was one of the last turnstiles for soldiers before they headed to Vietnam. In Harrison’s version, he extends each syllable, begging you to respond. Simone, by contrast, lets the words fall to the ground like ashes at her feet. She already knows the answer.

It took just four words for me to finally understand the holiness of Simone’s music I’d always heard people talk about.

Isn't it a pity?
Now, isn't it a shame?
How we break each other's hearts
And cause each other pain?

There’s an effortless strength in her voice, but also restraint. She understands that the power of the words are in their simplicity, and how much devastation there is in small things. Harrison’s version has always felt to me like something we’re all meant to be singing along to at an ashram, surrendering together to the world as it is. Simone shrinks the song to a more private scale. I felt like she was singing directly to me, asking me to let go and just repeat the words back to her. I heard the song’s central, ruinous question as if for the first time.

While, on-screen, Beau was still reeling from his discoveries about his mother, I experienced what I can only describe as emotional clarity. Instead of trying to explain or rationalize my own sadness, I could just feel it. I was grateful for that simplicity. Simone’s voice washed over me. I sat in my seat and wept. ✹

T.M. Brown has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Brooklyn.

Archive Fever

Tracks has compared a cover version to the original before, in my piece on Whitney’s version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Strange Overtones.”
Tracks has considered the parent-child relationship before, in what remains our most-read piece: Becca Rothfeld on the Magnetic Fields.

Beau is a Playlist

Spotify user “lascancionesdelatele” has cobbled together a playlist that combines the Beau is Afraid soundtrack and score. I can’t find something similar on Apple Music 🤒.

Coming Attractions

B.D. McClay on the Backstreet Boys!
Diego Báez on the GZA!
Ed Park (yeah, Pulitzer💅finalist💅 Ed💅 Park) on … well, you’ll see!