The sunshine of his accomplishment
socialistworker.org | Jun 2nd 2011
Akunna Eneh, Khury Petersen-Smith and Alan Maass pay tribute to a great
artist whose politically charged poetry and music gave voice to our
movement.
WE LOST one of the more brilliant minds and powerful voices for freedom last
weekend. Gil Scott-Heron, the musician and spoken-word legend, died on May
27 in New York City at the age of 62.
Many of the articles written about his passing reduced his life to his
struggle with drug addiction, and his massive body of work over 40 years to
a single piece, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." But all of
Scott-Heron's music and poetry should be celebrated--and he deserves to be
remembered as one of the most powerful voices of the Black freedom struggle.
Born in Chicago in 1949, Scott-Heron spent his childhood with his
grandmother in Tennessee. It was there that Scott-Heron became enamored with
Langston Hughes, one of the great Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
After his grandmother died when he was 12, Scott-Heron moved with his mother
to the Bronx. There, he was recruited to attend the Fieldston School, a
private prep school, where he was awarded a full scholarship for his
exceptional abilities as a writer.
Scott-Heron attended college at Lincoln University, a historically Black
college in Pennsylvania that Hughes had attended four decades before. He
took time off to write two novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, both
of which received acclaim.
But Scott-Heron would become best known for his poetry and music--a unique,
percussion-driven blend of jazz, blues and soul serving as the setting for
his words, spoken or sung, but always powerful and politically charged.
He became an important voice of the Black Power era that shaped him. On the
liner notes of his first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, Scott-Heron
listed Malcolm X, Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton, and musician
Nina Simone as among his influences.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
GIL SCOTT-Heron's stories, poems and songs are rich with contempt for racism
and for the institutions of American power. A favorite target was the
hypocrisy of northern liberals who decried the racism of the Jim Crow-era
South while ignoring the poverty, police violence and discrimination that
Blacks experienced in the North.
But Scott-Heron also turned his critical eye on Black America, challenging
powerful institutions of the African American community such as historically
Black colleges, and aspects of Black culture that undermined unity in the
face of a hostile society. He mercilessly skewered Blacks who rose to
prominence as political moderates--like, in "The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised": "Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a red, black and green
liberation jumpsuit that he has been saving for just the proper occasion."
Scott-Heron was especially moving in his depiction of the destructive toll
that drugs took on the Black community. Tragically, Scott-Heron battled his
own drug addiction, struggling under the weight of the brutal society that
he resisted.
While Scott-Heron's art spoke most directly to the oppression that he
experienced intimately--racism--he turned his fire against other forms of
discrimination and injustice. Songs like "Who Will Pay Reparations on My
Soul" expressed solidarity with indigenous peoples of the Americas. In 1979,
Scott-Heron performed his song "We Almost Lost Detroit" at the No Nukes
concert at Madison Square Garden in protest of nuclear energy.
His "Three Miles Down" is an anthem of solidarity with labor--mineworkers in
particular. The words from a 1978 album will remind labor activists today of
the April 2010 mine disaster that killed 29 workers in West Virginia:
Damn near a legend as old as the mines
Things that happen in the pits just don't change with the times.
Work till you're exhausted in too little space.
A history of disastrous fears etched on your face/
Somebody signs a paper everybody thinks is fine
But Taft and Hartley ain't done one day in the mines.
You start to stiffen. You heard a crackin' sound.
It's like workin' in a graveyard three miles down.
More recently, Scott-Heron cancelled a show in Tel Aviv during a 2010 tour
in solidarity with the Palestinian boycott of Israel, stating he wouldn't
play in Israel "until everyone is welcome there."
Scott-Heron's work had an immense influence on poetry and music. His
particular approach to spoken-word and the integration of it with music was
seminal in the birth of hip-hop.
Public Enemy's Chuck D attested to his stature with his Twitter comment in
response to Scott-Heron's death: "RIP GSH...and we do what we do and how we
do because of you." Kanye West's recent album My Beautiful Dark Twisted
Fantasy closes with what is both a tribute to Scott-Heron and essentially a
remix of his poem "Comment #1 (Who Will Survive in America)"
Scott-Heron himself was more skeptical about his music's connection to hip
hop. He preferred the description "bluesologist" and believed his
singing/spoken-word style reached back into the blues tradition.
However it's categorized, though, there's no denying the power of Gil
Scott-Heron's work--and its painful relevance today. Listening to some of
his pieces from the 1970s, you could think he's talking about 2011--like "We
Almost Lost Detroit," which is about the ever-present threat of nuclear
disaster and eerily speaks to the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan:
Just thirty miles from Detroit
Stands a giant power station.
It ticks each night as the city sleeps,
Seconds from annihilation.
But no one stopped to think about the people
Or how they would survive,
And we almost lost Detroit
This time.
As beautifully and bitterly as Scott-Heron described and attacked the
experience of racism and oppression, he also lovingly celebrated the
contributions of Black activists and artists in creating a more livable
world.
His fast-paced and brilliant poem "Ain't No New Thing"--recorded for his
Free Will album accompanied by flute and percussion--is a scathing
indictment of a society that exploits and oppresses Black people and then
appropriates Black music, literature, art and culture. In it, Scott-Heron
names Black artists such as Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix
and proclaims that they:
...will live on!
And on and on in the sunshine of their accomplishments,
The glory of the dimensions that they added to our lives.
Gil Scott-Heron, too, will live on. His contributions to art and radical
politics will not be forgotten, and his legacy will far outlive his
too-short life.
Original Page:
http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/02/sunshine-of-his-accomplishment
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