Speak.Collaborate.Listen

room-arrest said: Love what you wrote. My father had this really strange Nina compilation called Les Indispensables and this was the last song on the album. “Do What You Gotta Do” was on there too. What a cover

I agree with you, but when I first started listening to her music I just couldn’t appreciate that song, it annoyed me so much! Weird as it sounds I think I was blinded to its truth by my own black-and-white feminist politics. It irked me that Nina seemed to be the Penelope to her lover’s Odysseus: “Nina be an agent! Don’t just accept your karma, make him stay!’ But yeah … I’ve grown up a little, the song is beautiful.

That album is like church - Go to Hell, Why? (The King of Love is Dead), I Shall be Released & her interpretation of Paul Dunbar’s Compensation! She just purrs out her existential argument with ‘God in his great compassion’, the quiet fury of it unfolding in the last stanza: ‘Because I have loved so vainly / And sung with faltering breath / The master in his infinite mercy / Offers the boon of death’. Wooo, Nina.