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While there’s evidence pointing to the likelihood that Simone’s sense of herself was shifting through the 1960s and after, other evidence points to the likelihood that her sense of her audience was as well. This chapter considers the famously complex dynamics that Simone maintained with audiences and how these dynamics fed her performance style—in particular, its tensions between the improvised and the worked out, between transformation and defense, between the attachment of cathexis and the ambivalence of genius. Related also is the perpetually unresolved question of how to classify Simone’s music, what genre she worked in. This chapter considers songs including “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life.”

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