In the same article, The Birth of a Nation’s music supervisor Maura Duval Griffin revealed that she too, had been attracted to the song after hearing West sample it on “Blood on the Leaves.” While it’s great that West and hip-hop in general have come to hold Simone in such high esteem, it’s come with a price, one to which I wish more music supervisors would pay attention to. “The song captures an anger and feeling of injustice that’s appearing in American culture right now,” Feinberg told the magazine. So what’s so sticky about this one song? Miles Feinberg, the executive vice president at Music Sales Corp., which owns the rights to Simone’s recording, told Billboard the company has experienced an uptick in requests to license it. I feel like that’s what a lot of people felt like when they felt like they were not part of this election or their voice wasn’t counted and I felt like it made a lot of sense for me for that moment.” That’s sort of the thing, as this country grows, there’s always a penance and a price that brown people - the disenfranchised of this country - always end up being the fruit that has to pay from the tree of what this country is. “The strange fruits she was originally talking about were our bodies. “I chose the Kanye version and the Nina Simone version because I feel like that song was iconic for the times in which it was recorded,” said black-ish creator Kenya Barris. In the midst of a heated discussion, Johnson began one of his trademark soliloquies, this time about his complicated, devoted love for a country that very often doesn’t love him back.Īs he spoke, “Strange Fruit” provided the soundtrack for his words.

The story followed Andre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) to his job at an ad agency, where he works alongside people who voted for Donald Trump. “Lemons” was the episode that took a look at the Johnson family in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

Most recently, Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” appeared in the “Lemons” episode of black-ish. But it’s Nina Simone’s version, released in 1965, that has benefited from a resurgence, be it as a sample on Kanye West’s 2013 “Blood on the Leaves” or as the sonic backdrop for scenes depicting the mutilated and lynched bodies of slaves following Nat Turner’s revolt in last year’s The Birth of a Nation. Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of the lyrics penned by activist Abel Meeropol is widely regarded as the standard for “Strange Fruit,” the famed dirge protesting an epidemic of lynch mob terror in the early 20th century.

The Aftermath by Kay Simone