In 1996, the Fugees burst on the scene with “Ready or Not,” and most lis­ten­ers were not ready: for the omi­nous, eclec­tic, Caribbean-inflect­ed pro­duc­tion, the smooth, sexy men­ace of Lau­ryn Hill’s hook (“you can’t hide / Gonna find you and take it slow­ly”), or the inter­play of ref­er­ences in the break­out star’s rhymes. “Rap orgies with Por­gy and Bess / Cap­ture your boun­ty like Eliot Ness,” Hill raps, and then a few lines lat­er, “So while you’re imi­tat­ing Al Capone, I’ll be Nina Simone / And defe­cat­ing on your micro­phone.”

The tongue-in-cheek line intro­duced a gen­er­a­tion of fans to the icon­ic singer and vir­tu­oso pianist, who could and did play every­thing from blues, jazz, soul, cabaret, clas­si­cal, and Broad­way tunes like those from the Gersh­win clas­sic (hear Simone’s “I Loves You Por­gy,” here).

Hill has paid homage to Simone ever since. In 2015, she pro­mot­ed the trib­ute album, Nina Revist­ed—the sound­track to doc­u­men­tary What Hap­pened to Nina Simone?—at the Apol­lo. Report­ing on the event in The Verge, Kwame Opam like­ly spoke for thou­sands in admit­ting he’d “first heard Nina’s name in that clas­sic line on ‘Ready or Not.’”

Last year saw the release of The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of Eunice Way­mon, a title com­bin­ing Hill’s acclaimed solo album with Simone’s birth name. The record, pro­duced by Ameri­go Gaz­a­way, is a “mashup of songs by Fugees emcee and hip hop leg­end Lau­ryn Hill, and the jazz and soul icon Nina Simone.” What might have come off like a mar­ket­ing stunt trad­ing on both names instead “ele­vates them to new heights,” writes Zack Gin­grich-Gay­lord at KMUW, “putting them in con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er and mak­ing it sound like the col­lab­o­ra­tion was always meant to be.”

Maybe one rea­son these imag­i­nary stu­dio ses­sions work so well has to do not only with Hill’s ven­er­a­tion of Simone, and the har­mo­nious meet­ing of their two voic­es and sen­si­bil­i­ties, but also with Simone’s promi­nence in so much recent hip hop. Among the dozens of soul artists whose grooves have giv­en loops and hooks to many a rap clas­sic, she now holds a spe­cial place, as the Poly­phon­ic video at the top shows in an explo­ration of four Simone songs that have left an indeli­ble mark on hip hop’s cur­rent sound.

The first of those songs, “Feel­ing Good,” appears on both the Hill/Simone mashup album and in a pow­er­ful cov­er by Hill on Nina Revis­it­ed. Simone’s soar­ing ver­sion of the song—originally from the British musi­cal The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd—“turned it into a musi­cal stan­dard” for the next sev­er­al decades. In the 2000s, it popped up in tracks from Wax Tai­lor, Lil Wayne, and Jay Z and Kanye West, “two artists who have made careers out of sam­pling the high priest­ess” of soul and whose names come up fre­quent­ly in this dis­cus­sion.

The sec­ond song iden­ti­fied as one of “hip hop’s secret weapons,” Simone’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the gospel “Sin­ner­man,” may be her “great­est accom­plish­ment” and appears in tracks by Tim­ba­land and Fly­ing Lotus and in the Tal­ib Kweli track “Get By,” pro­duced by a young Kanye West.

Simone’s appeal to hip hop artists goes beyond her incred­i­bly pow­er­ful voice and piano. She was a fierce civ­il rights activist who used her music as a form of protest. Her ver­sion of “Strange Fruit,” a song first turned into a civ­il rights anthem by Bil­lie Hol­i­day from a poem by Abel Meeropol, has inspired tracks by Cas­sidy, Com­mon, and, most famous­ly, West again on his 2013 “Blood on the Leaves.” West uses the song as a back­drop for a nar­ra­tive of his per­son­al prob­lems and rela­tion­ship woes, which doesn’t real­ly hon­or its his­to­ry, the Poly­phon­ic argu­ment in favor of his use notwith­stand­ing.

That’s not the case with reimag­in­ings of the last Simone song in this explain­er, her orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion “Four Women,” which imag­ines four dif­fer­ent women express­ing the pain racism has caused them. In 2000, Tal­ib Kweli and pro­duc­er Hi-Tek came togeth­er as Reflec­tion Eter­nal and record­ed their own ver­sion, men­tion­ing Simone’s South­ern inspi­ra­tions in the intro before telling con­tem­po­rary tales of four women in New York. “More than just a sam­ple,” the track “rein­ter­prets the mes­sage” of “Four Women” and applies Simone’s 1966 insights to the present, some­thing Jay Z also does on 2017’s “The Sto­ry of O.J.”

It is worth not­ing that all of the tracks the Poly­phon­ic video men­tions as exam­ples of Simone’s influ­ence on hip hop were released after Lau­ryn Hill and the Fugees brought Simone to the atten­tion of young rap­pers, DJs, pro­duc­ers, and fans just com­ing of age in the mid-nineties. Since then, Simone’s music has since left its mark all over the genre, and it’s easy to see why so many would be drawn to her intense, author­i­ta­tive musi­cian­ship and polit­i­cal urgency.

Simone may not have had the chance her­self to enter into con­ver­sa­tions with Lau­ryn Hill, Tal­ib Kweli, Com­mon, Kanye, or Jay Z, but through hip hop’s end­less­ly cre­ative abil­i­ty to make the musi­cal heroes of its past live again in song, it is as if she is still speak­ing, singing, and play­ing to the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of black artists—and through them, to the future of hip hop.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Watch a New Nina Simone Ani­ma­tion Based on an Inter­view Nev­er Aired in the U.S. Before

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It can be dif­fi­cult to know what to do some­times with adding machine heir and Naked Lunch and Junky author William S. Bur­roughs. In the trick­le-down acad­emese of con­tem­po­rary jar­gon, he is a “prob­lem­at­ic” fig­ure who doesn’t fit neat­ly inside anyone’s ide­o­log­i­cal com­fort zone, what with his unre­pen­tant hero­in addic­tion, occult weird­ness, con­spir­a­cy mon­ger­ing, and exten­sive first­hand knowl­edge of crim­i­nal under­worlds.

There was no one bet­ter qual­i­fied to mid­wife the coun­ter­cul­ture.

NME’s Leonie Coop­er calls Bur­roughs “a dour punk in a sharp suit,” and lists some of the high­lights of his biog­ra­phy, includ­ing his famous acci­den­tal shoot­ing of his wife and moth­er of his only child—an event that did noth­ing to dimin­ish his love of guns. “He wrote bleak­ly com­ic tales which were sub­ject to obscen­i­ty tri­als in the States thanks to their dwelling on sodomy and drugs but which lat­er saw him elect­ed to the pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Let­ters.”

The main­stream­ing of Bur­roughs hap­pened in part because of his appeal to musi­cians, from Paul McCart­ney, Mick Jag­ger, and David Bowie to Kurt Cobain, Tom Waits, Throb­bing Gris­tle, and Ministry’s Al Jour­gen­son. “Musi­cians flocked to him in a quest for authen­tic­i­ty.” Although the dead­pan Bur­roughs usu­al­ly appeared “mas­sive­ly unim­pressed” by their atten­tions, he was “hap­py to com­ply and asso­ciate him­self with artists both up and com­ing and estab­lished.”

David Bowie went fur­ther than seek­ing a pho­to op or one-off col­lab­o­ra­tion, adopt­ing Bur­roughs’ cut-up tech­nique as his pri­ma­ry method for writ­ing lyrics, a tech­nique also put into prac­tice at var­i­ous times by The Bea­t­les, Cobain, and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. Oth­er artists, like Steely Dan and The Soft Machine, took their names from Bur­roughs’ work but shared lit­tle of his night­mar­ish sci-fi-cult-noir sen­si­bil­i­ty.

Bur­roughs “pre­ferred to asso­ciate him­self with an edgi­er kind of per­former,” col­lab­o­rat­ing with R.E.M., Waits, and Cobain and “hang­ing out at sem­i­nal rock club CBG­Bs” in the 70s and 80s. He became a friend and men­tor to artists like Pat­ti Smith, Lou Reed, and Thurston Moore. Although Iggy Pop is often referred to as the “god­fa­ther of punk,” that title might as well belong to William S. Bur­roughs.

Dur­ing the birth of rock and roll in the 50s, Bur­roughs was a most­ly unknown fringe fig­ure. By the late six­ties, his influ­ence became cen­tral to pop­u­lar music thanks to The Bea­t­les, Led Zep­pelin, and The Rolling Stones. But he would not be tamed or san­i­tized. An ear­ly gay hero who sided with out­siders and under­dogs against cor­po­rate machines, he was defi­ant to the end, leav­ing a lega­cy that con­tin­ues to inspire anti-estab­lish­ment artists, even if they’re unaware of their debt to him.

In the new book William S. Bur­roughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Casey Rae, you can learn much more about Bur­roughs’ major influ­ence on rock and roll in the 60s, 70s, 80s, “when it became a rite of pas­sage to hang out with the author or to exper­i­ment with his cut-up tech­niques,” as the book descrip­tion notes. His direct influ­ence con­tin­ued into the punk revival of the grunge era and has become “more sub­lim­i­nal” since his death in 1997, as Rae tells Jim DeRo­gatis and Greg Kot in the Sound Opin­ions inter­view above. (Scroll to the 14:50 minute mark.)

It’s hard to find con­tem­po­rary artists who aren’t influ­enced by the artists Bur­roughs influ­enced, and who—wittingly or not—haven’t inher­it­ed some of the Bur­rough­sisms that are every­where in the past fifty-plus years of rock and roll his­to­ry. Hear a playlist of Bur­roughs-adja­cent songs ref­er­enced in Rae’s book at the top of the post (open­ing with Duke Elling­ton’s “East St. Louis Too­dle Oo,” lat­er cov­ered by Steely Dan), and learn more about Bur­roughs’ musi­cal adven­tures at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

William S. Bur­roughs Drops a Posthu­mous Album, Set­ting Read­ings of Naked Lunch to Music (NSFW)

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness