Skip to main content

Gil! Scott! Heron!

I was just a kid when I had my first contact with Gil Scott-Heron.

Or at least, I think I was; with each passing year, memory becomes an unstable fog of moments unanchored by time and place as much as you'd like. But I know what delivered that memory -- the seventh episode of the first season of Saturday Night Live, from December 1975 with the electric Richard Pryor hosting -- and I remember that sliver of impact upon seeing Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson and the band pumping out "Johannesburg" with a mixture of funk and the blues and something more, something novel in the universe of my youthful brain. I just remember wanting to hear it again as soon as possible.

And then, years later, I heard the atom bomb of his career: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Instantly dated (due to the specific cultural references) and forever timeless (due to the philosophy behind the use of those references), that song is often seen as the ground zero for the development of what we now know as hip-hop. That's fundamentally incorrect -- hip-hop is more than just the vocal delivery that is better known as rap -- but at the same time, the simultaneous musical and cultural impact, the tone and content of the delivery, and the overall vibe of what developed years later into hip-hop is all there in that song. It remains to this day an incredible achievement.

But Gil Scott-Heron was known for much more than that: a poet, writer, performer, musician, and griot (as he preferred to be understood), all gone far too soon at the age of 62. Gil Scott-Heron died last week, and the world is worse for it.

In early 2010, after over fifteen years of relative quiet, Gil released I'm New Here, a fantastic collection of new music on the XL label (home to Adele, Friendly Fires, and many others). And at the Coachella festival that same year, I was able to see Gil perform live, a performance I'd looked forward to for many years. 60 was a memory for him, and his wanderings through life had shaved him down to the bare essence of humanity (struggles detailed in this New Yorker article), but his wit and musical intelligence was undiminished, and his performance was one of my favorites from the eight years I've been to that festival. That's why it was such a crushing blow to hear of his passing.

Please do yourself a favor: watch this BBC4 documentary from the mid-00's and then go here to read a bit more about his catalog. That should allow you to discover and appreciate one of the unique American voices in the last third of the 20th Century. And to be saddened by the loss.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NBC -- Never Believe Contracts

Whatever side you're falling on in the recent NBC late-night "deck chairs on the Titanic " shuffle, you have to admit it's been good comedy for all parties involved. While Letterman and Craig Ferguson have been sharp (especially Letterman, who has been gleeful in his "I told you so" vitriol), the best bits have come from Leno and O'Brien. Evidence: It's hard to follow all the angles here, but two things are clear: NBC violated Leno's contract (guaranteeing the 10pm slot), and NBC didn't violate O'Brien's contract (which made no time slot guarantees). So it's not hard to see who the loser here will be. O'Brien won't get the show he wants, Leno will step into a hollow echo of his past success, and tens of millions of dollars will be up in the air. Only Jimmy Fallon will continue to gestate his talent relatively unmolested, and his security is merely a function of the low expectations of his time slot. Meanwhile, CBS (a
Post a Comment
Read more

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling
Post a Comment
Read more

"I'll Drive You Home"

Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask
Post a Comment
Read more