In Praise of Gil Scott Heron

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SPECIAL— BY MARK VALLEN 

Scott-Heron. Severe drug-addiction may have shortened his life considerably.

Gil Scott Heron died on May 27, 2011 at the age of 62. Some obituaries have referred to him as “The Founding Father of Rap”, but as the BBC put it in their coverage of Heron’s passing, “He was quick to reject some of the more grandiose epithets such as the ‘Godfather of rap.’” I think it proper to refer to Heron as a griot. In the traditions of West Africa, a griot is an itinerant musician and storyteller who keeps alive a people’s history through song and poetry. That was certainly Heron’s role in life, and his works had an enormous influence on my generation.

In explaining his artistry, he once said; “For the longest kind of a time, I have felt that people who said that they did not care anything about politics or were not interested in it were making a political statement in and of itself. The new poetry that evolved in our society, concerned the fact that folks wanted to use both words that people could understand, and well as talk about ideas that people could understand.” I shared Heron’s belief that art, in no small sense, sprang from an awareness of the world, and his music was the iconic soundtrack for my life as a politically engaged artist throughout the 1970’s and beyond.

 

I first heard Gil Scott Heron in 1970, when he released his debut album, A New Black Poet: Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a searing piece of vinyl that castigated American consumerism, racism, and pseudo revolutionaries. The album contained Whitey on the moon, a poem set to music that brought attention to the contradictions of spending vast amounts of money on the space race while social and racial inequality festered in America’s urban slums. But the album’s real gem was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a raging spoken word piece set to conga drums that damned America’s commercial media and advertising empires and the somnolent effect they have over a confused population…

“The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.”

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised became anthemic in a way, its truth immediately grasped by all those who imagined a different type of society, this is still true today. The song’s title has entered the English lexicon, defining the chasm between real social events and the fallacious spectacles broadcast by capitalist mass communications. As Heron himself put it in an 1990s era interview;

“The first change that takes place is in your mind, you have to change your mind before you can change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that the revolution will not be televised, we were saying that the thing that’s going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film, it will be something that you see and all of a sudden you realize – ‘I’m on the wrong page’, or ‘I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note, and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.’”

After his 1970 debut album I enthusiastically followed Heron’s artist output, which matured dramatically. But it was his 1975 album, First Minute of a New Day, that really got my attention. The jazz and blues oriented masterwork was a collaboration with longtime musical associate Brian Jackson. It heralded the African Liberation struggle then blazing in our collective consciousness with an infusion of African rhythms and instruments held in a jazz and blues structure. The record included the song Winter In America.

Winter In America was a devastatingly melancholy ode to the true condition of the United States. The song addressed the entropy many were sensing at the time; Nixon’s Watergate debacle was in the news but there was no resolution, America’s war on Vietnam was being lost and would totally collapse in ‘75; the powerful Black Liberation, student, and antiwar movements were dwindling. “And I see the robins perched in barren treetops, watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor, but just like the peace sign that vanished in our dreams, never had a chance to grow.” Oddly enough, Heron’s elegy seems all too relevant to our current situation.

First Minute of a New Day also contained the evocative Guerilla, and We Beg Your Pardon America, a scathing indictment that lambasted the pardoning of Nixon by Gerald R. Ford – the only U.S. president recognized by official circles not to have been elected. For many of us, the righteousness expressed in Heron’s spoken word piece would be the only semblance of justice to come out of the Watergate fiasco. The album also contained the song, Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman, a still relevant warning to those who believe that a political superhero will come to our rescue.

If First Minute of a New Day put us in touch with the African Liberation Movement, then the 1976 From South Africa To South Carolina spurred us all into action. The album contained Johannesburg, a call to actively support the freedom fighters then battling the vile racist South African apartheid regime. “Well I hate it when the blood starts flowin’, but I’m glad to see resistance growin’.” Listening to that song for the first time I knew I would become actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement; some years later when distributing my Free South Africa poster at demonstrations against apartheid rule, protestors chanted a refrain from Heron’s song; “What’s the word – Johannesburg!” (a video of Heron’s live performance of Johannesburg can be viewed on the BBC’s website).

There are many other brilliant musical diatribes from Heron that are etched upon my mind, his caustic Jose Campos Torres (1979), the anti-nuclear Shut Em Down (1980), the anti-Reagan Re-Ron (1983). Heron’s discography is much too extensive to list here, and I have not even mentioned his most recent recordings; those unfamiliar with his output are urged to take a closer look. His best works will no doubt become eternal, and it is difficult to imagine that there will ever be another Gil Scott Heron – yet times demand that other singer/songwriters step forward to play the role of griot.

MARK VALLEN serves as Arts & Culture editor for The Greanville Post. A well-known visual artist, he makes his home in Los Angeles.

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RECOMMENDED CITATION:

Mark Vallen, “In Praise of Gil Scott Heron” (www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/2011/05/in-praise-of-gil-scott-heron.html )

– May 28, 2011). This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

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addendum / BONUS FEATURE

And From The New York Times, no less—
Gil Scott-Heron, Voice of Black Culture, Dies at 62

By BEN SISARIO
Published: May 28, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken
style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in
pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable
voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early
influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He
was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.

His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his
British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an
American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not
immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had
become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had
prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said
in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He
preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions
of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.

Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black
nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late
1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude
and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially
conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down
Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being
sampled by stars like Kanye West.

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil
Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the
leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last
Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical
bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee
and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his
estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.

In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his
work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the
Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100.
Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the
historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote
his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book
of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The
Nigger Factory,” soon followed.

Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned
to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk
at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small
label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by
conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a
full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr.
Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.

“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black
cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized
by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various
stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for
four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture
references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the
gullibly dominated:

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award
Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle
and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the
revolution will not be televised, brother.

During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with
significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult
popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of
the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after
starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at
Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at
Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star
anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”

But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his
recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled
publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been
convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at
Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.

Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of
the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also
horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged
questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile
reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so
troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided
mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr.
Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.

That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy
as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of
addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he
said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you
ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could
watch you die?”

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired
figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was
sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,”
his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by
Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at
Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.

Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather
of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.

“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids,
so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to
the jazz station.”

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