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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.

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