MUSIC-US: Gil Scott-Heron Pushes His Revolution

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 9 1999 (IPS) - U.S. musician Gil Scott-Heron earned lasting fame in the turbulent 1960s by coining the phrase, “The revolution will not be televised.”

Today, however, he has had to eat his words somewhat due to the fact everything appears fit for television – even testimony about the sex life of the U.S. president.

“There are strange voices in peoples’ houses nowadays,” says Scott-Heron, a singer, jazz pianist and the forefather of rap music. “People keep saying, ‘Oh, I get my information from TV’, like there’s a person in there… Well, you better try to find out who’s in there.”

Scott-Heron, whose uncompromising songs have struck out at political hypocrisy of all stripes over the years, always has been fond of puncturing the lies that form conventional wisdom.

Whether attacking the skewed logic of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in songs like ‘Re-Ron’ and ‘H20-Gate Blues’ or mocking fake black revolutionaries in ‘Brother’, the acerbic jazz-based artist has never accepted anything at face value.

Part of the price of that forthright stance is that Scott- Heron’s records have quietly disappeared over the years, even as rap music has taken his angry, fast-paced spoken poetry and turned it into a multi-billion dollar business.

Rappers like ‘Chuck D’ of Public Enemy often cite Scott-Heron as an inspiration, but he and his longtime collaborators, including pianist Brian Jackson and saxophonist Bilal Sunie Ali, still make their living by performing concerts in small clubs. Their band, currently called Amnesia Express, remains one of the most soulful, topical and yet whimsical music groups in the country.

Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the albums that Scott-Heron and his colleagues recorded at their peak in the mid-1970s are available again, in a set of albums made available by Rumal-Gia/TVT records.

The albums – recorded by The Midnight Band and credited to Scott-Heron and Jackson – are by turn lyrical, funny and uncompromising as they depict a United States divided by racism, class divisions and deceitful politicians. The songs on ‘Winter in America’, ‘The First Minute of a New Day’ and ‘From South Africa to South Carolina’ take on Watergate and Nixon’s ouster, nuclear power plants, apartheid, alcoholism and the turmoil of everyday life.

That may sound didactic, but as Scott-Heron showed during Amnesia Express’s recent tour of New York, the band remains as sensitive and wry in its insights as ever. In concert, Scott-Heron is as much a comedian as a musician, poking fun at obvious targets like racist police and odd ones like meteorologists and the month of February.

The movie ‘Jaws’, he notes, could never have featured black people since they would stop going to the beaches the moment they learned a shark was in the water: “You’re swimming, he’s buying groceries.”

More importantly, Scott-Heron’s focus is on the normal lives of ordinary people, not necessarily on the news. ‘The Bottle’ depicts down-and-out people turning to alcohol to escape their troubles.

Songs like ‘Your Daddy Loves You’ and ‘Pieces of a Man’ show warmth and love even as they trace the lives of people facing marital woes and unemployment. Yet the basis for Scott-Heron’s continuing popularity is his keen eye for the distance between truth and power, and his exploration of how lies infect most of politics.

‘Johannesburg’, a 1975 hit with a boisterous, stomping energy, might sound dated with the end of the apartheid era in South Africa but not the key line “Freedom ain’t nothing, freedom ain’t nothing but a word.”

Similarly, ‘South Carolina (Barnwell)’ was written at a time of a growing movement attacking nuclear power plants, such as the Barnwell plant located near poor black communities in South Carolina. Now, long after the anti-nuclear power movement’s peak, the song’s chorus “Whatever happened to the protests and the pain? What about all the people who gave a damn?” neatly sums up liberal trendiness.

For Gil Scott-Heron, the point about changing the world is exactly as he said it in his pioneering rap in the 1960s: “the revolution will not be televised”, but rather occurs within people as they change the way they see the world.

With his band on the road again, his records finally back in stores and a new album slated to come out this year – and even a few of his out-of-print novels, like ‘The Nigger Factory’ being reprinted – Scott-Heron again is on a quietly insurrectionary mission. Or as he put it a long time ago, “The revolution, brothers and sisters, will be live!”