The big meanings of 'Nina Simone's Gum'

Ever since I read this book in 2022, I’d been looking for the right syllabus — OK, any syllabus — that could support its wonderful weirdness. Written by a musician, it’s one of the finest theoretical texts about cultural materialism I’ve ever savored.
 
And it’s all about a spent piece of chewing gum.

Warren Ellis plays otherworldly violin for Nick Cave as well as his own band, Dirty Three. I’ve encountered him twice. The first was when Dirty Three opened for Beck in the fall of 1996 at Tulsa’s famed Cain’s Ballroom. Beck was in full party-boy mode (zzzzz), and I was being a very typical rock critic by being more interested in the opening act. Dirty Three music has no words, and no need of them. During the set, as Ellis sawed at his instrument, he would occasionally spit. Being surrounded by people in close quarters, he did the gentlemanly thing (?) and hocked his loogie skyward, so that it spattered on the low drop-ceiling above him. Problem is, he kept doing this. The spittle accumulated. Gravity did its thing. The shimmering glob soon smacked back down — on his head. “Well, I’m glad we can provide some entertainment for you,” he told the chuckling crowd.
 
Amazingly, when I interviewed Ellis a whole 16 years later before a gig in Chicago, he remembered the incident. “That was the show when the loogie fell on my head?” he said. “That was the only applause I got all night.”
 
From the mouths of babes, as it were — though Ellis’ latest project is about an everyday object snatched from the mouth of a musical saint. As the title suggests, it’s a book about Nina Simone’s Gum — a single wad of base and sweeteners chewed by the singer and left behind at a gig. Cave had managed to book the revered Simone to headline a festival in 1999. The scene was rapturous. Every description of the show in the book sounds more like a religious frenzy than a mere music concert. When a show ends, superfans sometimes rush the stage to grab mementos, often the posted set list. But when Ellis hurdled seats to reach the stage after Simone had waddled off, he grabbed the gum. She’d been chewing it as she made her entrance, and she discarded it by sticking it on the piano as she began. He didn’t know why, but he pried it off the piano and stuck it in a bag.
 
In that bag the gum remained for many years. Until it began regaining its flavor, as it were. At first, Warren didn’t mention it to people, that he had grabbed the gum, that he still had it. Slowly, the fact started slipping out. People were fascinated, intrigued, weirded out. The narrative here begins whirling like one of his own improvisational pieces — what kicks off with a small, seemingly insignificant phrase grows into a tangled, head-spinning arrangement. The gum evolves from keepsake to totem. A casting is made from the hard, old lump and turned into silver pendants. In the end (spoiler alert), the gum itself is exhibited as part of a museum display, under a spotlight behind reinforced glass — an everyday object transformed into a node of cultural meanings.

Warren, of course, is not a scholar, but Nina Simone’s Gum is some of the most intriguing and potent cultural studies I’ve ever read. It’s a poetic text about the meanings we inscribe onto the lowest of materials. Gum as archive of social experience, as lofty social icon, certainly as a new frontier for museum studies (e.g., at what humidity does one properly preserve a chewed piece of gum?). Throughout his text, Warren and others often discuss the gum using religious terms and metaphor. Early on, he unwraps the towel containing the artifact and describes it as a holy relic: “the sacred heart, the buddha … Christ on the cross … this sacred thing.” The original concert was “a religious experience”; the later silver ingot of the gum’s likeness is “like a relic — a hair of Christ.” All of this reverence grows as an “imagination that was activated by nothing.”
 
Not nothing, though, as we often discuss in my pop cultural classes. That, after all, was the impetus for the birth of cultural studies — the arguments that the low culture mattered as much as the high stuff, that female representation in a James Bond film was as important as in a Botticelli painting, and likely more so when you compare the population sizes of painting spectators vs. moviegoers. This allegedly insignificant stuff is immensely socially powerful, and when we hear discourses claiming otherwise there are purely political reasons for their circulation.
 
In a podcast interview, Ellis explains — like a cultural-studies scholar — how meanings are transferred from individual contexts into larger, social discourses:

Somebody asked me this … did I have any regret about it, you know, like, did I feel I’d sort of betrayed [the gum] in some way? And I said, no, the opposite actually. I feel a sense of relief, because it feels like it belongs to the world … and that’s what separates it from other things that I had that we’re just personal little totems. I mean, all these things that we have that we like to hold onto, they trigger our memory, and our memory is what defines us. They make us feel a certain way when we look. … But the gum was another thing, because it connected people to a thing greater than that, beyond being a personal little, beyond the sort of spoon collection that somebody may have collected all their life and ends up for 50p in the thrift shop. What it meant to that person is gone with them. (17:56-19:03)

My students didn’t quite know what to make of the selections I assigned them or of my outsized enthusiasm for the subject — until one of them brought up a more recent and relevant parallel example. During an outdoor Chicago concert amid the Eras Tour in the summer of 2023, Taylor Swift paused and suffered a mild coughing spell. “I swallowed a bug,” she explained. “That was delicious. Is there any chance none of you saw that?” Not only did we see it, someone tried to sell it. An online ad appeared shortly thereafter offering “Dead bug from taylor swift’s concert” — “used (normal wear)” — for $20 plus shipping.

After some classroom giggles, a student in the back of the room admitted aloud, “I would totally buy that.” Lesson level unlocked!