I was asked to write a piece about Gil Scott Heron for the ace lefty magazine Red Pepper , so that's what I did. It had to be edited down to size a bit for the magazine - here's the original - but the full version has a lot more info about GSH's musical legacy, so I thought I'd stick the full thing up here.
‘The revolution is about basketball’
If Gil Scott-Heron, who died in New York on 27th May 2011, rejected the media portrayal of him as the ‘godfather of rap’, it’s perhaps easy to see why. Scott-Heron is best known for his groundbreaking spoken word piece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a three minute long call-to-action for the disenfranchised black youth of 1970s America. Saturated with contemporary political and pop cultural references and shot through with an acerbic wit, it sets out to wrench its audience from the cultural opiates of mass media news, sitcoms and, above all, advertising:
‘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.’
So when the rapper KRS One re-wrote the lyrics to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised for a 1995 TV commercial for Nike – transposing the titular lyric to ‘The revolution will not refrain from chest bumping…The revolution is about basketball, and basketball is the truth’ - Scott-Heron must have felt like things had come full circle. What had started out as an anthem of Vietnam-era free thinking had, in the hands of one of his alleged musical ‘godchildren’, become a vehicle for marketing ‘made in Vietnam’ trainers to black youth within the space of 25 years.
But for all the bling excess of much contemporary hip hop and rap, musically and poetically it’s easy to see why Gil Scott-Heron was so extraordinarily influential to the genres. His first album A New Black Poet - Small Talk at 125th and Lenox was recorded live in a small club in New York with just Scott-Heron on vocals with conga and bongo accompaniment on all but two tracks, on which he accompanies himself on piano and guitar. The vast majority of the album, including an overtly homophobic track unpleasantly titled The Subject Was Faggots, is spoken word; almost as close to traditional poetry as to the soul and funk music with which he became associated in later albums. Produced by Bob Thiele, a legendary record producer who ran the Impulse! jazz label and wrote Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World, the album was clearly aimed at a jazz market, and Scott-Heron namechecks influential jazz musicians throughout. But with hardly any instrumental playing and Scott-Heron’s own self-deprecating comment on one of the rare melodic tracks, Enough (‘a lot of people think it’s a poem, and after they hear me sing it, they’re sure it’s a poem’), the message to the record-buying public was clear: you listen to this music for the lyrics, for the message.
His next album, Pieces of a Man, was the first of his fruitful collaborations with keyboardist Brian Jackson, and is a far more conventional piece of work: Scott-Heron sings each of the 11 songs and is accompanied by a full band including celebrated jazz musicians Ron Carter on bass and Hubert Laws on flute. The subject matter is a lot wider-ranging, too, and alongside a re-working of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Home is Where the Hatred Is – an empatheic story of a ghetto junkie – there is a tribute to his jazz heroes (Lady Day and John Coltrane) and an uplifting Bill Withers-esque soul track (I Think I’ll Call It Morning).
He further developed this blend of soulful funk and poetically personal and political lyrical writing on the follow-up, Winter In America. This album, for a time something of a hard-to-find cult hit due to initial distribution problems, had Brian Jackson sharing the billing with Scott-Heron for the first time, and it’s easy to see why; Jackson’s swirling yet deeply funky electric piano and flute dominate the soundscape and evoke comparisons with Miles Davis’ electric period. The Bottle matched Scott-Heron’s powerful exploration of inner-city alcohol and drug abuse with an infectious bass-led groove and Jackson’s characterful flute, becoming a popular single and one of Scott-Heron’s most enduring songs. Over Jackson’s grooves on the rest of the album, Scott-Heron revists familiar subject matter – politics, urban deprivation, drug abuse - but with a somewhat more cohesive approach than his previous albums, making it closer to a concept album than his more free-form earlier work. Pan-africanism and afrocentricity bind together Scott-Heron’s typically wide-ranging themes, with the album being bookended by two versions of the same track, the meditative Peace Go With You, Brother:
“Now, more than ever, all the brethren must be together
Every brother, everywhere, feels the time is in the air
Time and blood flows through common veins
And in the common eyes all see the same
Now, more than ever, all the family must be together
Peace go with you, brother.”
Following the success of The Bottle, Scott-Heron moved to major label Arista for the following few years, which also saw a move back towards spoken word poetry on the 1979 album The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron. But it was also during this period that Scott-Heron began to actively promote some of the causes that were close to his heart. His 1975 single Johannesburg, with its chorus “Tell me brother, have you heard / From Johannesburg?” was amongst the first pieces of popular culture to deal with the apartheid in South Africa; with typical wit, Scott-Heron also draws parallels between race relations in the US and South Africa. He was featured on the 1985 anti-apartheid protest song Sun City, and when in May 2010 he was reminded of the chorus of this song (“I ain’t gonna play Sun City”) by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, who claimed that "your performance in Israel would be the equivalent to having performed in Sun City during South Africa’s apartheid era", he pulled the gig. In 1979 he also made his anti-nuclear stance clear by appearing at the No Nukes concert in Madison Square Garden where he sang We Almost Lost Detroit, written about the partial meltdown of Fermi 1 reactor in 1966.
But in contrast to the 1970s, the 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Scott-Heron. He released several albums on Arista, but none were especially critically or commercially well-received, and Arista dropped him in 1985. Scott-Heron - somewhat ironically given the lyrical content of some of his work – battled drug and alcohol dependency for much of this and the later period of his life, and though he continued to tour, it wasn’t until he signed with TVT records in 1993 and released Spirits that he garnered much critical attention. But then once again he disappeared for an extended period, battling dependency problems and twice going to jail for cocaine possession.
Shortly after completing the last of these sentences in 2007, Scott-Heron met british producer Richard Russell, who coaxed him into the studio to record his first studio album for 16 years, and the one that was also to be his last, I’m New Here. The most personal and confessional of all his work and almost entirely spoken word and blues-based, this album was also a departure musically, with the production favouring stripped-down electronic and acoustic instruments rather than the bubbling electric funk of his 1970s recordings. Re-mixed by zeitgeisty producer Jamie xx as We’re New Here, Scott-Heron again reached out to a new audience and saw renewed interest in his work, including a collaboration with Kanye West.
From his lo-fi early spoken word material through his 70s funk and post-millenium renaissance, Scott-Heron is perhaps the most esoteric of that tiny group of musicians who can claim to have changed not only the musical, but the political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Like Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, his music reached out to generations of disenfranchised youth by being deeply soulful and funky whilst coupling that raw emotional power with an intelligent and thoughtful political message. But Scott-Heron’s poetry, his spoken word, rather than his music may be what comes to define his influence. His 1993 track Message to the Messengers – an outspoken address to the rap artists of the 1990s who were claiming lyrical descendance from him – perhaps sums this up best:
“And I ain't comin' at you with no disrespect
All I'm sayin' is that you damn well got to be correct
Because if you're gonna be speakin' for a whole generation
And you know enough to try and handle their education
Make sure you know the real deal about past situations”
“Pop music doesn’t necessarily have to be shit”, Scott-Heron said of the success of his single The Bottle. And if there is one thing that defines Scott-Heron’s legacy, this is surely it: pop music with the power to inspire a generation.
Rob Deering
Steve Hall
Men of War
Marcel Lucont
Steve Pretty
Stuart Baggs
Alex Horne
Stephen Carlin
Diane Spencer
Steve Pretty has the unlikely privilege of owning a mixtape of songs that were played at his own wake, which he attended on 30th January 2005.
