I turned to the recordings of Gil Scott-Heron after writing that he should have and did known better than to abuse drugs as he did, leading to his decline and demise. They make me ever more impressed with his scope and intensity, in both long ago and recent work. His 2010 recording “Me and the Devil” fully justifies the black and white zombie pulp of the video by Coodie and Chike that accompanies it. It’s a horror song of a burned out, psychotic soul, a new link in an American tradition running from Edgar Allan Poe through Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf to Jim Thompson, George Romero and Martin Scorsese. [Read more…]
Gil Scott-Heron, hard-eyed realist, dead of self-inflicted escapism
Gil Scott-Heron, dead at age 62, was a poet, prophet and spokesperson of the black urban American experience. A merciless and unsentimental truth-teller when he emerged on the scene in the ’70s, by telling Afro-identified kids dancing to Motown and grooving on psychedelic rock that “the revolution will not be televised” he meant that the real revolution in Civil Rights and human conduct was not a show, that those who wanted to make it happen or enjoy its results had to liberate themselves from sitting on the couch zoning out, that there was dirty work ahead.
I heard him in 1970 at Colgate University on a bill with the Last Poets — one reason why the rise of poetry slams and rap didn’t seem like anything new to me when they came along a decade later. I didn’t listen to him much, but I heard and mostly respected what he had to say — and anyway, Scott-Heron’s message wasn’t aimed at me. I admire that he reached his target audience, without compromising his vision.