"We Almost Lost Detroit": Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Remake of Gil Scott-Heron Classic

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. | "We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gil Scott Heron

Kevin Powell: #OccupyWallStreet: The Revolution Will Be Multiplied

#Occupy Wall Street: The Revolution Will Be Multiplied

by Kevin Powell | special to NewBlackMan

I wasn't sure what to expect on the sunny and gusty afternoon of Wednesday, October 5, 2011, when I left a lunch meeting in the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan, New York City. I purposely scheduled the get-together there so I could easily move from the restaurant to Zuccotti Park, on Broadway between Liberty and Cedar near Ground Zero, where protesters have been camped out for three weeks. No, they are not actually occupying Wall Street (the city and the police are making sure of that), but they are close enough, right smack in the middle of America's largest and most powerful financial district. This began this past summer when the anti-capitalist magazine AdBusters put out a call for Americans to occupy Wall Street on September 17th. With people's rebellions in places like Egypt, Spain, and the American state of Wisconsin still fresh in some folks' minds, seems it was only a matter of time that protests would begin to spread, like wildfire, throughout America, regardless of who is in the White House at this very moment.

I came because I am in support of the protesters, of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and elsewhere, for two basic reasons. One, I too have been profoundly affected, financially, by The Great Recession, and I grew up in poverty, my single mother and I, so it troubles me to the highest degree to see anyone in America suffering hardships, economic or otherwise. Secondly, I have been a political and community activist and organizer for 27 long years, since I was a teenage student and youth leader, and I've worked in all sorts of movements and mini-movements. I've organized or participated in more building takeovers, sit-ins, marches, rallies, conferences, benefits, disaster relief efforts, concerts, and political and community interventions and negotiations than I can even recall at this point. This is my life work, to help people to help themselves. Thus any time I see or hear of a critical social cause, if I am able to do so, I am going to jump right in.

It is this spirit I carried into Zuccotti Park. And what an amazing spiritual and political vibe there: People on laptops and hand-held devices typing or texting nonstop. People napping on blankets, sleeping bags, or the grass. People plucking guitar strings, blowing horns, and banging on drums and garbage cans. People having random but passionate conversations here and there about "capitalism," "democracy," "President Obama," or "the police." People sitting peacefully, in a circle, as they meditate amidst all the compelling, organic, and chaotic magic around them. People serving food to the regular protesters in the community kitchen, while other people are painting demonstration signs on strips of cardboard with captions like "Poor people did not crash the economy" or "Give me back my future." People borrowing, returning, or thumbing through books from the makeshift lending library. Everyday people, mostly younger, but certainly a number of elders, some of whom, I am sure, have in their activist resumes Civil Rights or anti-Vietnam work, or a fond memory of Woodstock. Most of the people here are White, although there is some people of color present, too. Also very clear that there are straight folks and gay folks, persons with disabilities, and persons who are war veterans, with a few wearing their camouflage-green uniforms.

As I walked slowly through Zuccotti, from the Broadway entrance to the Trinity Place side, I thought it strangely ironic that the park's northwest corner is across the street from the old World Trade Center site. In fact Zuccotti Park was covered in debris immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and subsequently was used as a staging area for recovery efforts. Kissing the sky high above Zuccotti now is the Freedom Tower, the 105-story edifice with a price tag of about $3 billion and counting, which will finally be opened some time in 2013.

I also thought of the fact that Lower Manhattan had once been the staging area for significant parts of the American slave trade, the importation of Africans, my people, literally creating the concept of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange because, well, the first stocks ever exchanged and the first global economy were enslaved Black people. As proof, not far from the Occupy Wall Street protest is the African Burial Ground, where bones of some of these Africans were discovered several years back. And before the Africans, and the European settlers, slaveholders, and colonizers, were the original owners of this land, the Native Americans. Manhattan as a word is of the Lenape language, and it means "island of many hills."

Not that any of the above would be known to the average person, or perhaps even the average protester here, but I think it important for those of us who call ourselves Americans, or human beings, or both, to be clear that nothing we do, with a structure or not, is without a context, or is ever disconnected from the history of who we are. We literally walk atop the spirits and the graves of the good and the bad that has led us to these days of protest and occupation.

We the people, that is. Therefore, this infant movement is absolutely correct in stating, loudly, "We are the 99 percent." We the American people, of diverse backgrounds, while the wealthiest 1 percent in America owns and controls 42 percent of America's wealth. You see it with the completely-out-of-control unemployment numbers and rapid freefall of America's middle class, as well as the horrific reality of America's underclass. You see it with the tax breaks and in-your-face salaries for corporations and their executives. You see it with the soaring crime rates in our communities, those crimes directly tied to financial desperation, especially in ghetto communities. You see it with students either dropping out of college due to tuition hikes and a decrease in student loans, and you see it with students with degrees on various levels that simply cannot find a job, any job. And you see it with the people sitting in court fighting foreclosure on their homes, or battling landpersons to hold onto apartments they rent.

Why this very week of the mass Occupy Wall Street protest my office has been inundated with calls, emails, and social network messages from people, everyday people, searching for work, or an apartment they can afford. One woman, a 74-year-old Brooklyn resident, is on the ledge, about to be evicted, but can only spare $800-$850 per month for rent. Her monthly social security check is $931. So she will have just $80-$130 per month to cover things like groceries, public transportation, and her prescription drugs. In the richest nation on earth it is completely inhuman and obscene that there are so many people suffering, surviving, barely, day-to-day, as images of wealth, power, and privilege are routinely thrown in our faces via our mass media culture.

So Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and throughout America is for those of us who feel our voices and misery have been ignored. It is for those of us who believed, way down in our guts, that Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential candidate, was the change, finally, America had been waiting for. But I knew even then that that was not the case, that the best Mr. Obama could possibly be was a symbol of what was possible, but that real change only happens from the bottom up, from the people, never from the top down. That was the case with slavery and the abolitionist movement. That was the case for women and the feminist movement. That has been the case for the lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender community, and the gay rights movement. And that was certainly the case for Black folks and the Civil Rights Movement.

So it must be the case, now. And that is precisely why this people's "revolution" has multiplied. If you visit www.occupytogether.org, you see meet-up and actions on many levels presently happening in nearly 500 American cities. If you visit http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/Introduction you get personal testimonies from everyday people describing how tough their lives are during these times. Some mainstream media tried to ignore, distort, or even mock this movement initially, but no more. Not when celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Russell Simmons have come aboard to support, and not when 700 protesters were arrested attempting to cross the Brooklyn Bridge the other day. And not when you are dealing with a generation of young people so tech-savvy they are very clear that they are the media themselves, fully stocked with video cameras, informational websites, and even their own newspaper, "The Occupied Wall Street Journal." This is a movement everyone, and you need to get a late pass if you are missing what is happening here. For this is historic.

At least labor unions in cities like New York and Boston get it. What made October 5th so special is that workers were present in a massive way for the first time. Some 20,000 protesters showed up, many of them belonging to my city's largest labor unions, led by their union presidents. At Foley Square, a stone's throw from the Manhattan exit of the Brooklyn Bridge, and where the long-running tv drama "Law & Order" was often filmed, nurses, teachers, and other organized labor folks swarmed to a rally and march in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. What was most memorable is the fact that one union leader after another admitted they were simply following the lead of "these young leaders." Unions definitely remain important in New York City politics, as evidenced by the assembly line of elected officials who showed up hoping to get the obligatory photo opportunity and microphone moment. But, to me, if we are to have a truly progressive, multicultural movement in America, it Is going to demand a different kind of coalition for these times, one led by a new configuration of progressive voices, and not overwhelmed by union leaders, not overwhelmed by politicians, not overwhelmed by religious leaders, and certainly not overwhelmed by the funding of corporations or foundations (I duly noted what leaders and organizations were not in attendance because of who clearly funds their work).

That old guard coalition has been happening since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and it has run its course and we must let it die a natural death. While I was certainly glad and honored to be at this union-led rally (my own mother was a long-time member of 1199SEIU in Jersey City, where I was born and raised), my heart and mind were with the people in the crowd, and back at Zuccotti Park. Later for power or ego trips, photo opps, or who can and cannot speak at a rally. This is about the people, like that 74-year-old woman my team and I are desperately trying to find an apartment she can afford. And not for nothing, we've got to support the leaders, visible or not, who are actually the voices for the people and have their pulse on the veins of the people.

For when we in leadership positions, whether we call ourselves leaders or not, and begin to think in those terms, and not in terms of our careers or our prestige or our individual or organizational agendas, then and only then do we begin to do what the Tea Party begat in 2009: a natural-birth movement led by the people, then nurtured into a full-fledged political dynamo. Part of that nurturing-and the unions made this abundantly real just by their sheer numbers-has to be the inclusion of people of color into the Occupy Wall Street movement. Until yesterday, at least in New York City, the scene was, again, mostly White sisters and brothers (yes, we all are sisters and brothers, no question). Well-meaning, yes, but good intentions do not mean you are truly progressive. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" but there is not a consistent and daily picture of the rainbow coalition of America from city to city. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" and your leaderless leadership (which is untrue, because someone is clearly calling the shots here, at least some of the time) is mostly White males, and not inclusive as it could be of women, of people of color, of gay sisters and brothers, and of other marginalized people as equal partners in the leadership, visible or not. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" and not understand the importance of history, of our shared history of protest, of movements, and how it is going to take younger people and older people, and new activists and seasoned activists like myself, to make this into the powerful movement it can truly be, not just for a few weeks, or a few months, but for the next several years, and as needed.

And you can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" if, eventually, there is no real agenda for the people other than a lashing out about Wall Street, about the need for jobs, or to end all wars, and on and on. Where influential Tea Party backers were both brilliant and strategic is that they saw this spontaneous thing happening and they got behind it and blew wind into the sails. So much so that there are now Tea Party political candidates within the Republican Party. And certainly Republican presidential nominee contenders who feel compelled to respond to the Tea Party national agenda.

(And, to be fair to my White sisters and brothers, Black folks and Latino folks in America in particular, two of the most in-need communities, economically, need to get off our collective behinds and fully join and co-lead the Occupy Wall Street movement. As the saying goes, either you are a part of the solution or you are a part of the problem....)

That is what we on the left, we so-called progressives or liberals or whatever we call ourselves, must do. Drive the national conversations on issues of the day in a new direction. And not as a reaction to Republicans, or the Tea Party, or right-wing conservatives, but because we understand, as a people who know change is in our hands, truly, that movements only last if you are proactive, and have a vision for what needs to happen, even while maintaining a very loose and democratic leadership structure where different voices are heard and honored.

I thought of this and more as we 20,000 strong marched down Broadway to Zuccotti Park. It was organized and disorganized, it was fast and it was slow, and it was empowering and it was frustrating. And I loved every second of the march, of the people spilling into the park, of the sense of love and peace everywhere, of the heightened intensity of the drummers, at once whipping the crowds into a frenzy, and by the same token those drums a call, spiritually, for protection of these fearless protesters. And God knows that protection was needed, because as day shook loose its clothes and became night, more New York police, on horses, on motorcycles, on foot, and in the wagons, were dispatched to the area. A security guard at a local building even told me that some plainclothes officers had come in a few times this week to go to the highest floor possible, to do surveillance on the protesters.

As Russell Simmons called them, these are mostly "sweet kids." They are participating in civil disobedience, one of the grand traditions of world democracy, as taught by giants like Gandhi and Dr. King, two figures those in power love to quote when convenient. But that does not matter when the power structure of any country, be it Egypt or America, feels threatened. Or embarrassed. So when about 1000 of these protesters decided, at nightfall, to march down Broadway, to literally occupy Wall Street, they were met with the full force of the New York Police Department. About 30 were arrested and rumors immediately shot through the protest, like the stink of fresh urine on a side street wall, that a number of protesters had been beaten or maced by the police. Even a local tv crew was maced, it was said. (See http://occupywallst.org/ for more details) No matter, even more police barricades were brought out, even more police showed up, and before you knew it we were contained, like pigs in a pen, to a one-block radius on Broadway, right in front of the park. Warning sent loud and clear: you can protest, but the moment you dare to journey beyond these boundaries, we are going to stop you and arrest you.

One of my favorite chants of the movement is "Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like." But when we beat and mace our young people for exercising their democratic rights to speak their minds and to assemble peacefully, what message are we sending to them, to ourselves, and to the world? And how are we any different, then, than Bull Connor, that infamous police chief of Birmingham Alabama, as he water-hosed and unleashed vicious barking dogs on young people during the Civil Rights era? Or leaders in foreign countries who attack their protesters for demanding democratic reform as we are doing here in the streets of America? And was it not New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself, a few weeks back in a radio interview, who said there would be unrest, soon, in America, if we did not get Americans jobs? Word for word, Mr. Bloomberg stated "We have a lot of kids graduating college can't find jobs. That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

Neither do I, Mr. Bloomberg. But, like the protesters, what I do want to see, in our nation, is economic opportunities and justice for all Americans, not just for the privileged few. And I am clear that you cannot tease people about the unlimited possibilities of America then when they decide they want to have it, tell them no, we were not being serious. Where this movement goes from here is anyone's guess. Maybe it is simply suppose to be a space where the disillusioned and disgusted can finally make their voices heard. Or maybe it will be the progressive, multicultural movement I want to see, that I feel America so badly needs, in this 21st century. No matter what happens, no matter where this goes, it is so evident, more than ever and as was said during the Civil Rights Movement, that the leadership we've been waiting for is us....

***

Kevin Powell is a nationally acclaimed political activist, public speaker, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. The author or editor of 10 books, Kevin's 11th, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of Dr. King: And Other Blogs and Essays, will be published January 2012 by lulu.com. Email him at kevin@kevinpowell.net, or follow him on Twitter @kevin_powell

Thinking About Gil Scott-Heron

Thinking About Gil Scott-Heron

by Joe Schloss | special to NewBlackMan

Gil Scott-Heron’s passing is hitting me almost like the death of someone I knew personally. I guess what I mean is that his influence in my life was so broad that it wasn’t really possible to comprehend its magnitude until I had time to move through different aspects of my daily experience and notice how many of them suffered from his absence. I’ve been thinking about why that should be the case, and the answer certainly includes all the things others have noted: the politics, the humor, the style, the attitude, the voice, the influence.

But there’s something else, too, and I think it’s this: It’s easy to write positive songs if you believe the world is all sunshine and roses. What’s hard is to write positive songs when you know better.

Don’t get me wrong: I love purely optimistic music…It’s just that sooner or later I always start to feel like I’m lying to myself.

But I never felt that way when I listened to Gil Scott-Heron.

Flowers woke up blooming,
put on a color show just for me. (I appreciate it.)
Shadows dark and gloomy,
I told them all to keep the hell away from me.
Because I don’t feel like believing
everything I do gon’ turn out wrong.
When vibrations I’m receiving
say “hold on, brother, just you be strong.”

Yes, and all I really wanna say
Is that the problems come and go
but the sunshine always seems to stay.

Just look around.
I think we found
A lovely day.

The only people who can choose not to believe that everything’s going to turn out wrong are the people who suspected it might in the first place.

And a person who would tell the shadows to “keep the hell away from me” has a very different outlook from a person who lives in a world without shadows.

Gil Scott-Heron lived in a world that was full of shadows. A world that was full of grey areas and second-guessing and backsliding, of both the personal and political varieties. But that’s precisely why you could trust his songs. Because that’s the world.

Even the song “Peace Go With You Brother” - which so many of us posted to eulogize him - is full of ambivalence when you really listen to the lyrics:

Peace to you, brother
Don’t seem to matter much now just what I say.
Peace go with you, brother
You the kind of man who think he got to have his own way.
You’re my father; you’re my uncle and my cousin and my son.
But sometimes, sometimes…
I wish you were none.

But I’ll manage to smile
and I’ll say, “Peace go with you, brother”.

But Gil managed to smile. He transcended his own ambivalence.

My favorite Martin Luther King quote doesn’t even address civil rights directly. It comes from the first speech he made opposing the Vietnam War…a speech that, coincidentally, was given at Riverside Church, the same church that hosted Gil Scott-Heron’s funeral:

Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

As someone who is “mesmerized by uncertainty” pretty much on a daily basis, I know what he was talking about. And so, clearly, did Gil Scott-Heron. He didn’t ignore that. He didn’t minimize it. He didn’t make you feel like there was something wrong with you for not being completely sure about things. But he didn’t let you off the hook, either. Finding that balance, after all, is not only the essence of being an effective activist. It’s the essence of being a decent human being.

Gil Scott-Heron made music for decent human beings and, by doing so, he encouraged each of us to become one.

Let me put it this way: it’s pretty much impossible to write a song advocating increased government regulation of the coal mining industry - one that criticizes the Taft-Hartley Act by name - without seeming pedantic, or at least extremely boring. Nevertheless, he did it:

Here come the mine cars, and it’s damn near dawn.
Another shift of men, some of them my friends, coming on.
Hard to imagine, working in the mine.
Coal dust in your lungs, on your skin, and on your mind.

I’ve listened to the speeches,
and it occurs to me politicians don’t understand.
Thoughts of isolation, ain’t no sunshine underground.
Feels like working in a graveyard three miles down.

The first time I saw him perform this song, someone yelled out from the audience, “We don’t need coal! We need revolution!” To which Gil immediately responded: “Yeah, but you still need something to keep you warm while you’re revolutin’!”

That was almost twenty years ago, and the older I get, the more I understand the truth of those words. Lots of people sing about revolution, and some of them even do something about it. But how many of them keep you warm?

***

Joseph Schloss, Ph.D. is the author of Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-hop Culture in New York (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). He is a Visiting Scholar in Music at New York University and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Hubert Laws and Mark Anthony Neal Discuss Gil Scott-Heron on NewsTalk Ireland

Remembering Gil Scott-Heron
NewsTalk Ireland 106-108fm
The Green Room | with Orla Barry

Guest:

Hubert Laws, Jazz Musician
Mark Antony Neal, Duke University Professor


Listen Here

The Legacy of Gil Scott-Heron

A Tribute to Gil Scott Heron

The Advocates | WLTH 1370am (Gary, Indiana)

with Attorneys Tony Walker, Trent A. McCain, and Richard Leverett

Guests: Minister Conrad Tillard, Sr. Pastor of Nazarene Congregational Church, a United Church of Christ (UCC)

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor, African & African American Studies, Duke University.

The Devil and Gil Scott-Heron

The Devil and Gil-Scott Heron

by Mark Anthony Neal

As the story goes, Robert Johnson, one of the most influential guitarists of the twentieth-century, met the “Devil” at a crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Accordingly Johnson sold his soul to that “Devil” in order to play the guitar with a power and precision that many deemed otherworldly. The “Devil,” in this instance, was likely the Yoruba Orisha of the crossroads, alternately known as “Legba,” “Elegba,” “Eshu Elegbara” and Papa Labas in the fiction of Ishmael Reed. That power and precision that Johnson wielded so effectively, might be better referred to as truth, not so neatly packaged in the Blues tradition—a tradition that notably transcends the musical genre that shares its name.

As Angela Davis notes in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “the blues were part of a cultural continuum that disputed the binary constructions associated with Christianity…they blatantly defied the Christian imperative to relegate sexual conduct to the realm of sin. Many blues singers therefore were assumed to have made a pact with the Devil.” (123) Within African-American vernacular, the figure of Legba is often referred to as the “Signifying Monkey” and perhaps most well known by the Oscar Brown recording with that title and Henry Louis Gates’s groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988).

Though the figures who possess the power of the crossroads are often thought to solely reside in Black oral traditions—the proverbial poets, preachers and rappers—others such as Blackface actor Bert Williams and Johnson have been written into the tradition. But for all the respect and pride derived from the brilliance of such artists, in the end they remain always already outside of the communities for which the truth most matters. Davis observes that the “blues person has been an outsider on three accounts. Belittled and misconstrued by the dominant culture that has been incapable of deciphering the secrets of her art…ignored and denounced in African-American middle-class circles and repudiated by the most authoritative institution in her own community, the church.” (125)

In his legendary essay “Nobody Love A Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk,” Greg Tate puts an even finer point on the status this cultural outsider: “Inscribed in his (always a him) function is the condition of being born a social outcast and pariah. The highest price exacted from the Griot for knowing where the bodies are buried is the denial of a burial plot in the communal graveyard…With that wisdom typical of African cosmologies, these messengers are guaranteed freedom of speech in exchange for a marginality that extends to the grave.”

***

A year ago Gil Scott Heron released, I’m New Here his first studio recording in fifteen years. Fittingly, the lead single was a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” and while the choice of material may not have wholly been Scott-Heron’s, the song—as the spiritual embodiment of its composer—for damn sure chose Gil Scott Heron. And this is not to suggest that Scott Heron—who often referred to himself as a “Blues-ologist”—was unaware of Johnson; He like Johnson, had spent a lifetime at the mythical crossroads that have defined much of Black vernacular culture. I’m New Here was a dark and brooding reminder of the costs associated with the power that the crossroads engenders. Burn away all the bells and whistles, bleeps and blurs, and Scott-Heron is standing at that same intersection of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi with Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Henry Dumas, Linda Jones, Son House and so many others.

Shame on every writer who reported Gil Scott-Heron’s death with the blurb, “Godfather of Rap,” writers who have—per Angela Davis’ observations—totally missed the point of the man’s career. It was a term that Gil Scott-Heron was not ambivalent about: “There seems to be a need within our community to have what the griot provided supplied in terms of chronology; a way to identify and classify events in black culture that were both historically influential and still relevant (Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott Hereon, xiv). This is less Scott-Heron distancing himself from Hip-hop (though he would do so from time to time), but more a recognition that what he did, sat at the feet of traditions that came before him. He writes, “there were poets before me who had great influence on the language and the way it was performed and recorded: Oscar Brown, Jr., Melvin Van Peebles, and Amiri Baraka were all published and well respected for their poetry, plays, songs and range of other artistic achievements when the only thing I was taping were my ankles before basketball practice.” (xiv)

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is easily the best known of Gil Scott-Heron’s compositions. Written and recorded just as the most militant energy of the Civil Rights and Black Power era seemed to be waning, the song was a sharp and prescient view of the commodities of struggle and resistance—the place where revolutionary acts give way to market forces and prime time ratings. In 1971, Scott-Heron couldn’t have imagined 24 hour news programming like CNN, let alone Al Jazeera, though “Revolution” proves as relevant now, as it might have even been when he wrote it. To be sure, Gil Scott-Heron did pay a price for his truth-telling and his willingness to make politically relevant music accessible to all that would have it. Accessible is the telling term here, as Scott-Heron admitted that “because there were political elements in a few numbers, handy political labels were slapped across the body of our work, labels that maintain their innuendo of disapproval to this day.” (xv)

Perhaps we’ll never fully know if the drug-addiction and other dependencies that so often derailed Scott-Heron’s vision was part of some COINTELPRO inspired conspiracy to deny our most gifted and passionate, access to the thing that matters the most—their right minds (surely cheaper and neater than assassination). When Albert King sang “I Almost Lost My Mind” he wasn’t just whistlin’ in the dark about the warm body that had just left his bed—somewhere folk like Huey P. Newton, Etheridge Knight, Esther Phillips, Sly Stone, Flavor Flav, and a host of others, including Scott-Heron, fully understood what he lamented. Yet can’t help to think though, that Gil Scott-Heron knew that he was not here to be simply loved; that there were hard truths that he had to tell us and his addictions would always guarantee that we would keep him at an arm’s distance. Those times he went silent, it was as much about those addictions and it was his unwillingness to bullshit us for the sake of selling records. If he couldn’t tell us the truth, he wouldn’t tell us anything, returning regularly to those crossroads via the needle or the pipe.

It is important to remember that Gil Scott-Heron was also a prodigy—was coloring outside the lines in ways that were significant, but not all that remarkable, for a generation of young Black folk who understood the importance of challenging boundaries from the moment they took their first breaths. Some might call that freedom. There was the grandmother, Lily Scott who made sure the young boy read books and read the weekly edition of The Chicago Defender—the closet thing to a Black national newspaper for Black Americans in the mid-20th Century—where Scott-Heron first read the columns of Langton Hughes. Before he married beats (and melodies) and rhymes, a 19-year-old Gil Scott-Heron had written his first novel. 

Thankfully Scott-Heron took to heart Haki Madhubuti’s (the Don L. Lee) adage that revolutionary language really didn’t matter if it couldn’t reach folk on the dance-floor; Scott-Heron took it a step further, recognizing, as the Last Poets and Watt Prophets did, that some of the cats never left the street corners. (At that same moment, Nikki Giovanni also understood there were also souls to be saved in the pews, hence her Gospel inspired Truth is on the Way). Those earliest Gil Scott-Heron recordings, like Small Talk at 125 Street, Pieces of a Man, Free Will and Winter in America, released on independent labels like Bob Thiele’s Flying Dutchman and Strata-East, seemed like sonic counterparts to the $.05 cent poetry broadsides that poet and publisher Dudley Randall used to sell on the streets of Chicago in the 1960s.

The revolution might not have been televised then, but if you listen closely to songs like “No Knock,” (in response former Attorney General John Mitchell’s plan to have law enforcement enter homes without knocking first, though he could have been talking about the Patriot Act), “Home is Where the Hatred Is” (on drug addiction) and “Whitey on the Moon” (which still elicits giggles in me) the revolution was clearly being recorded and pressed. The difficulty in those days, was actually making sure that distribution of Scott-Heron’s music could match demand for it.

Gil Scott-Heron got unlikely support from Clive Davis—yes the same Clive Davis who would later create boutique labels for L.A. Reid and Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Sean “PuffyDiddyDaddy” Combs, and serve as svengali for Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys. Davis, who funded the now infamous “Harvard Report” on Black music while at Columbia Records, where he oversaw the careers of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Sly and the Family Stone, had been deposed from the label and was starting a new label, Arista. Davis needed acts, and in particular, acts that already had an established base, and Scott-Heron fit the bill.

It was an odd marriage indeed—notable that Davis never really signed another political artist of Scott-Heron’s stature—but it also allowed Scott-Heron to experience the most prolific period of his career, with defining albums like First Minute of a New Day (1975), From South Africa to South Carolina (which featured the anti-apartheid anthem “Johannesburg”), Bridges (1977), and Reflections (1981), which featured his 12-minute scouring of then just elected President Ronald Reagan on “B-Movie” (released months after Reagan’s 1981 shooting and after Scott-Heron had completed a national tour opening for Stevie Wonder).

For all of our memories of Scott-Heron’s political impact, his music covered a full gamut of experiences. A track like “Lady Day and Coltrane” paid tribute to Black musical traditions, while songs like “A Very Precious Time” and “Your Daddy Loves You” found Scott-Heron thinking about issues of intimacy. Well before proto-Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer would be recovered by scholar and critics, Scott-Heron set Toomer’s Cane to music. Even as young activists make the connection between Black life and environmental racism, Scott-Heron offered his take on the plaintive “We Almost Lost Detroit.”

“We Almost Lost Detroit” was later sampled by Kanye West for Common’s “The People,” speaking to the ways that Scott-Heron remained relevant some thirty years after his popularity peaked. Much has been made about West’s “duet” with Scott-Heron on “Lost in the World” (drawn from Scott-Heron’s “Comment # 1) and Scott-Heron’s use of West’s “Flashing Lights” on the recent “On Coming from a Broken Home.” The latter song was drawn from Scott-Heron’s tribute to his grandmother Lily Scott, who died in 1999. In a society in which fatherlessness continues to be deemed as simply pathology, Scott-Heron defiantly asserted “I come from what they called a broken home/but if they had ever really called at our house/they would have known how wrong they were…My life has been guided by women/but because of them I am a man.”

On Friday May 27, 2011, Gil Scott-Heron went home to reunite with Lillie Scott. His job was done.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy. He is co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd Edition) which will be published this summer.  Neal teaches African-American Studies at Duke University.

Adam Mansbach on Gil Scott-Heron

"He was Breaking Shit Down": Remembering Gil Scott Heron

by Adam Mansbach | Special to NewBlackMan

I’ve known for fifteen minutes now that Gil Scott-Heron is gone. Time enough to play “Winter in America” and “Pieces of a Man,” and to cry, and for the belief that his death is among the greatest tragedies I’ve ever known to harden inside me. That probably sounds ridiculous, and perhaps it is. Certainly, Gil died in slow motion: there is nothing to be surprised at here, no sudden violence ripping apart the fabric of a life. But the fact remains: the most incisive and salient political musician this country has ever produced – ever – is gone.

The fact that drugs took him under – and I don’t mean today, I mean over and over again ¬– makes it worse; makes me angry in a diffuse, perhaps unreasonable way: leads me into thought-rants like if he’d been acknowledged as the national treasure he was, if they (“they”) had given him a fucking MacArthur, then at least he would’ve been one of those enough-money-to-function drug addicts, and he’d be with us still, shadow-version of himself or not.

But all that is beside the point. First things first, the depth and scope of Gil Scott-Heron’s musical-political content is beyond compare. Nothing and nobody comes close: not Bob Dylan, not KRS-One, nobody. During the prime of his career (1970-1984), he was out in front on practically every major political issue – not just nationally, but globally. His commentary was incisive, nuanced, hilarious, and routinely prescient. He carved up the entire Nixon administration with a stainless steel scalpel, psychoanalyzed Reagan and Reagan-happy America better than anybody else I can think of. Challenged the South African government, clarioned the dangers of nuclear power, called out racist cops. Did environmentalism is the early seventies. Gun control in 1980. The Iranian Revolution, the No-Knock Law. Abortion.

And that’s just his topical shit; it’s harder to say what “Ain’t No Such Thing As Superman” or “Winter in America” is about… unless you just cut to the chase and start throwing around words like “zeitgeist,” or phrases like “the troubled soul of America.” And if Gil didn’t invent the pointedly-absurdist extended-free-associative-pop-culture riff, he certainly perfected it in his most famous song.

But none of that even get at his greatness, or at least not fully. The flipside of Gil’s panoramic political worldview was the depth of his self-analysis, the delicacy of his portraiture: for every world-shaking anthem, every “Johannesburg,” there is another song buried deeper in his catalogue, one that charts the quietest, most intimate of blues moments with sublime beauty, raw honesty, unfettered emotion.

I met Gil in 1994, when I was seventeen and he was touring behind the release of his first new album in a decade. Went to check him at Regattabar in Cambridge, and rushed him afterward, a sheaf of my own poems in hand. He didn’t break his stride – clearly, the man had somewhere to be – but he did take them. Several hours later, well past midnight, my phone rang (that is, the phone in my parents’ house rang). It was Gil. He’d read my shit. For the next two hours, I listened to him talk, and jotted notes. I still have the piece of paper. It says things like “Black Elk Speaks” and “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” The word “Skippy” is underlined a bunch of times; midway into the conversation, I figured out that Skippy was Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer, and the vast, intricate web of Gil’s monologue started to make more sense – a frightening amount of sense, in fact.

Was he high as hell? Probably. It didn’t matter. He was breaking shit down, and I never wanted that phone call to end. I moved to New York City later that year, and ran into him soon after, on 112th and Broadway, in front of the used-CD stand. He didn’t remember our phone call, but I never forgot it. 

There’s much more I’d like to say, but it’s one a.m. and I suspect I’ve got more tears to shed. Writing this late is probably a mistake, and so is writing this early, this soon after the fact. I don’t want to end this with a flourish, or a benediction or a cliché; I guess I don’t really want to end it at all.

***

Adam Mansbach's last novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle, it has been called "extraordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, "beautifully portrayed" by the New York Times Book Review and "intense, painful and poignant" by the Boston Globe, and translated into five languages. His new book Go the F**k to Sleep, a satire abour parenting will be published next month.

GSH: The Revolution Has Been Sampled, Remixed and Televised

The scope and relevance of Scott-Heron's work is nearly unparalleled. There isn't much his music & poetry hasn't covered and their aren't many artists who haven't covered him.

Gil Scott-Heron:
The Revolution Has Been Sampled, Remixed and Televised
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is easily the best known of Gil Scott Heron’s compositions. Written and recorded just as the most militant energy of the Civil Rights and Black Power era seemed to be waning, the song was a sharp and prescient view of the commodities of struggle and resistance—the place where revolutionary acts give way to market forces and prime time ratings.

In 1970, Scott-Heron couldn’t have imagined 24-hour news programming like CNN, let alone Al Jazeera, though it is fitting that as the revolution is indeed being televised from Tahrir Square in Egypt, that he is as healthy and as relevant as he has been in nearly two decades.

To be sure, Gil Scott Heron has paid a price for his truth-telling and his willingness to make politically relevant music accessible to all that would have it. Perhaps we’ll never fully know if the drug-addiction and other dependencies that have so often derailed his vision was part of some COINTELPRO inspired conspiracy to deny our most gifted and passionate, access to the thing that matters the most—their right minds (surely cheaper and neater than assassination).

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Gil Scott Heron's 'New York Is Killing Me' Remixed by Chris Cunningham

from MOMA.org

New York Is Killing Me
featuring Chris Cunningham

Cult filmmaker, musician, photographer, and producer Chris Cunningham is known for his highly acclaimed music videos for artists including Aphex Twin, Björk, Portishead, and many others. Since 2003 his focus has moved to music: he produced two tracks on The Horrors' Mercury Prize–nominated Primary Colours; won a Cannes Golden Lion for his reworking of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" in his 2008 Gucci Flora commercial; and created audiovisual remixes for Gil Scott-Heron and Grace Jones. Recently, he has headlined festivals around the world with his new live show, and is presently working on his first audiovisual album.

Special thanks to XL Recordings, ACE HOTEL NEW YORK, and Sud de France Wines: Jaja de Jau and Domaine Lavail.