Gil Scott- Heron

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run brothers
The revolution will be live

Nearly fifty years on, the motto coined by poet Scott-Heron is still damn relevant; a disarming message that knows no era, and one that strikes at the heart of a capitalism and its associated politics ever more removed from man as a mere child of nature and the Universe, rather than of a petty consumerism far from the individual's essential needs. Just swap TV for smartphones and television programs for social media, and there you go. Everything becomes contemporary.
The man who saw himself as a poet soon became one of the most important musicians in the history of popular music; but above all, the most influential activist for the sacrosanct rights of the African-American community in the turbulent United States of the Seventies. An endless issue, one that continues to fill the streets, five decades later once again riven by divisions and abuses that seem to feed on themselves regardless of a (former) Black President, and of the much-vaunted globalization, de facto a total-community development model that should erase every social and racial distinction, in favor of permanent, definitive exchange and interconnection.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949, with his destiny already written. His mother was an opera singer and his father was “The Black Arrow”, the first Black athlete to wear the Celtic Glasgow shirt. As a boy he was sent to live with his grandmother in Tennessee and chosen by the school as a “guinea pig”, along with two other Black children, to form an integrated class alongside their white peers. It was a disaster. During that particular period of his life, Gil found soothing refuge in writing, a talent that earned him a scholarship to the prestigious Fieldston School, where he was one of only five Black students in the entire school. It was precisely the socio-economic alienation of that environment that most shaped his character, which grew increasingly rebellious and impatient with institutions; a restlessness that would follow him to Lincoln College too, which he left once he'd finished his debut novel “The Vulture” and the poetry collection “The Nigger Factory”, both of which earned him a solid place on the literary scene of the time.

After the death of his beloved grandmother, his mother took him back with her to New York, to the Bronx. And it was precisely this encounter with the Big Apple that changed his life, his whole approach to the burning issues of the ghetto. Gil suddenly found himself inside the inter-racial metropolis with the country's sharpest contradictions, but also with the highest concentration of activists and angry Black Panthers squaring off against the white elite in charge. Having written, in his youth, two literary works that would secure his place in history as one of the most intriguing narrative talents of his era — with “The Nigger Factory” becoming over the years an absolute source of inspiration for celebrated artists, above all Spike Lee — Scott-Heron toured the US alongside his friend Stevie Wonder, a series of landmark dates dedicated to the large African-American community scattered across the States, still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King. Following those events, Scott-Heron met Bob Thiele, legendary producer at Flying Dutchman Records, and it was Thiele who convinced him to set his texts to music. The subsequent artistic union with his longtime friend, the phenomenal musician Brian Jackson, would help perfect the rest. The epoch-defining “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” would appear on his first album, “Small Talk At 125th & Lenox Ave” from 1970 — warmly received by the Black community, which encouraged this young man to keep using music as a vehicle for his literary inclinations — and it was placed as the opening track of the following “Pieces Of A Man”, released the year after.

To call this record a milestone is an understatement. It's one of those works so tied to the history of a nation that it ends up becoming a chapter of it. And so, in the artistic story of Gil Scott-Heron, one cannot help but mention the two great figures of the United States' political and social revolution: the aforementioned Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, both assassinated during the Sixties. Discriminated against, segregated, often unjustified targets of violence not only from white people but also from the police. Slowly, Black Americans were being led by their leaders to overturn centuries of a slaveholding tradition. While alongside this rebellion there was a sort of return to the roots, musically represented by the revival of the blues, Black music since the Fifties had instead been going through a period of crisis, with the commodification of that very blues effectively giving rise to the explosion of rock and roll, with few exceptions on the black side (Little Richard, Chuck Berry).
Over time, rock's mutation as a social phenomenon would be expressed on the Black-music side by the birth of R&B, soul, and, many years later, hip-hop — a genre that owes practically everything to Scott-Heron's experience as a creator of rhymes and of that thing called spoken word, forerunner of flow and of every MC on this planet, on a par with the verses spread just a year earlier by the fiery mouths of the “brothers” Last Poets on their first masterpiece.

“Pieces Of A Man” is a record of capital importance not only for black music, but for the whole history of music in general. Between Thiele's jazz approach and Jackson's riskier methods, this masterpiece managed to bring Scott-Heron's tenets to the surface in a blend of free jazz and social folk, amid alienation, existentialism and identity crisis: with its innovative music it's unlike anything heard before, yet at the same time it's also extremely accessible and empathetic, a collection of spotless snapshots, thanks also to the work of conductor Johnny Pate, Ron Carter (double bass, electric bass), Bernard “Pretty” Purdie (drums), Burt Jones (electric guitar) and Hubert Laws (flute and saxophone), who knew how to give air to Scott-Heron's acid-tongued words.
It all begins with what is perhaps Scott-Heron's most important and best-known piece, the first lucid and groundbreaking rap vision of an entire era's zeitgeist: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, originally released on his debut album in spoken-word form. It's essentially a proto-rap whose lyrics take direct aim at the US government and the mass media, amid political references, stripped-down arrangements, hammering basslines and drums that drag you into the abyss with a rhythmic structure that would be reused time and again throughout hip-hop history. The song's title revives what was originally a popular slogan among Black Power movements in the United States in the Sixties, and it's evoked here in a jagged funk groove, chiding the “brothers” watching TV while the fight rages in the streets below; backing Gil's tirade (a Curtis Mayfield with far less diplomacy) are, at the forefront, Ron Carter's electric bass and Hubert Laws's darting flute.

Following the fiery verdict that “the revolution will not be televised”, the force with which Gil Scott-Heron spits out his truths can paradoxically also be the gentlest in the world: such is the case with “Save The Children”, which dwells on political and economic security for future generations (bringing to mind Marvin Gaye), and with the infectious melody of “Lady Day And John Coltrane”, written by Scott-Heron as a tribute to the hugely influential jazz artists Billie Holiday and John Coltrane; the lyrics deal, in fact, with music's cathartic power to free people from problems like alienation and existentialism in the modern world, celebrating these legends of the past not only through its metrical form but also through a tremendous vocal performance. And yet, it soon becomes clear that Gil's latent ruthless streak isn't aimed only at outside forces: with equal ferocity, the man turns the blade on himself in “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” (which became a hit in the hands of Esther Phillips), a dark and dangerous composition whose disillusionment almost foreshadows the addictions that would mark much of Gil's later life.

Elsewhere, Scott-Heron's introspection ranges continually from hope to despair, trying to emerge from confusion, trying to reconcile beauty with harsher emotions: besides being a fine poet, Scott-Heron also proves himself a particularly gifted singer on "When You Are Who You Are", which offers a soothing glimpse, or on the reflective "I Think I'll Call It Morning", where his voice is completely enveloped by Brian Jackson's keyboards. Perhaps the most resonant moment on this album, and also Scott-Heron's finest as a lyricist, is the title track, a cinematic account of a man who has lost his job: behind the drama, set to a piano-ballad arrangement, lies the heartbreaking reaction of a son who discovers his father's dismissal and watches him fall apart until the chilling climax of his arrest. Gil – backed by Carter's double bass and Johnson's piano – brings the listener so close to the dramatic situation (the puzzle scattered across the room, grandma's straw broom, the postman's arrival) within a scene of everyday life shattered by the arrival of a letter that suddenly sends everything into pieces; a moment of emotional collapse described in terms so easy to picture that it becomes almost impossible not to feel that family anguish on your own skin.
Next comes "A Sign Of The Ages", extending the mood of the title track, while "Or Down You Fall" (cradled by flute) and "The Needle's Eye" (with a James Brown-like atmosphere) veer off schizophrenically in a different direction, while the closing "The Prisoner" cyclically returns to the territory of the opening track, in the memory of a decaying man, marked by many years lived in the ghetto, trapped in a harrowing social struggle, rounded off by the sound effects of chains.

The music on "Pieces Of A Man" is characterized by soft instrumentation, a series of loose chords and a voice that's always warm; devices that Scott-Heron would emphasize even further with Brian Jackson on their next album, "Winter In America", in 1974.
The poet and musician would die in New York at the age of sixty-two, leaving behind a wave of deep sorrow. An unexpected loss, especially after the rebirth revealed on "I'm New Here" in 2010, just months before his passing. The poet was keen to point out that the battle to be fought had always remained the same: safeguarding the social minority, which has no color. Although he hadn't recorded in a while and had struggled with drug problems, Scott-Heron kept touring; a tireless performer, one of those pure, sincere and visceral talents with very few equals in twentieth-century music. A great soul, who through his music and words has inspired, and will continue to inspire, entire generations of African-American musicians and beyond.

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20/05/2018