Gil Scott-Heron, Voice of Black Culture, Dies at 62
Gil Scott-Heron in his Harlem home in 2001. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
By BEN SISARIO Published: May 28, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.
In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100. Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The Nigger Factory,” soon followed.
Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Talk_at_125th_and_Lenox ],” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.
“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the gullibly dominated:
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.
During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult popularity [ http://twitter.com/#!/UsherRaymondIV/status/74305638540382209 ]. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”
Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.
That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”
Information on his survivors was not immediately available.
Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired figure in music [ http://twitter.com/#!/radiohead/status/74499577146912768 ], and he made occasional concert appearances and was sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,” his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.
Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.
“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids, so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to the jazz station.”
Gil Scott-Heron: music world pays tribute to the 'Godfather of Rap'
Gil Scott-Heron in the early 1970s. Photograph: Echoes/Redferns
David Sharrock The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011
The music world was mourning Gil Scott-Heron, the troubled poet and musician whose ground-breaking The Revolution Will Not Be Televised became a beacon for emerging rap and hip-hop culture.
Scott-Heron, who last year released his first album in 16 years to critical acclaim, died in a New York hospital after returning from a European trip. He was 62.
Richard Russell, founder of the British label XL Recordings, who produced and published Heron's final work, said: "Gil was not perfect in his own life. But neither is anyone else. And he judged no one. He had a fierce intelligence, and a way with words which was untouchable; an incredible sense of humour and a gentleness and humanity that was unique to him."
Russell added that the Chicago-born artist, who never achieved chart success in spite of a loyal global audience for songs including the dance-floor favourite The Bottle, had shunned all the trappings of fame and success.
"He could have had all those things. But he was greater than that. He seemed wholly uninterested in money. His talent was immense. He was a master lyricist, singer, orator and keyboard player. His spirit was immense. He channelled something that people derived huge benefit from."
Scott-Heron was a gifted child, raised in Tennessee by his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, after his parents – a Jamaican father who became the first black footballer to play for Celtic and a talented teacher mother – separated.
His grandmother bought a beaten-up piano from the funeral parlour next door and paid a neighbour to teach eight-year-old Gil how to play hymns for her sewing circle, including Rock of Ages and What a Friend We Have in Jesus. When at the age of 12 he discovered his grandmother dead one morning he moved to New York to be reunited with his mother.
His intelligence propelled him into an academy and from there to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, where he met his long-term collaborator Brian Jackson. He published his first novel at 19 and by 23 his output had swollen to three books, a volume of poetry and three albums.
From his inner-city viewpoint Scott-Heron took the news of the day and spun it into hard-edged social commentary on issues as diverse as apartheid and nuclear energy. But the acid observational wit was sweetened by jazz-tinged soul and funk. His most famous composition, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, has been heralded as the birth of rap – a claim the artist himself rejected.
"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks', which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems. In fact a contemporary of Scott-Heron at university recalls how he was mesmerised by a performance by the Last Poets, a group inspired by the civil rights movement who performed their poems to a sparse drum backing.
Borrowing from their style he recorded The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in 1971 with Brian Jackson. It was a fiery critique of the role of race in the mass media age. "The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people," he recited.
He preferred to describe what he did as "bluesology". "I had an affinity for jazz and syncopation, and the poetry came from the music," he explained in a 1998 interview. "We made the poems into songs, and we wanted the music to sound like the words, and Brian's arrangements very often shaped and moulded them."
Scott-Heron's prodigious output – he recorded 13 albums between 1972 and 1980 – succumbed to a growing crack cocaine habit. In 1999, he was convicted of assaulting his partner Monique de Latour and he was twice found guilty of possession, serving time in the notorious Rikers Island prison in New York. With the success of his recent collaboration with Russell on the album I'm New Here, there was renewed optimism that Scott-Heron was finally back on track.
Gil Scott-Heron - intimate audience with the legend - exclusive video [embedded] Jamie Byng, publisher of Canongate Books, was a friend of Gil Scott-Heron for more than 20 years. During 2010 they recorded this interview in London where the rapper-poet talked about his life and work, interspersed with intimate performances of his music. A fuller version of the film is to be released later in 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2011/may/28/gil-scott-heron-video
Publisher Jamie Byng recalls the moral courage, wit and warmth of the poet and musician, who has died aged 62
Jamie Byng The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011
For a number of years I have feared that I would receive a call from someone out of the blue to tell me that Gil Scott-Heron was dead. That call came late last Friday night. Gil's name appeared on my phone. But it wasn't Gil calling. He had died three hours earlier in St Luke's-Roosevelt hospital in New York. He was 62 years old.
Last year I wrote a piece for the Guardian [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/17/gil-scott-heron-byng ] in anticipation of an event that Gil and I had agreed to do together at the South Bank. The Icelandic volcano put paid to that, preventing Gil from flying into the country on time, but we did end up sitting down later that week and we made a short film of the session [excerpted in the video embedded in this article and linked above].
Watching the film again yesterday morning, I wept. I remember showing it to Gil in a hotel room in Rome and his happiness with the film, a film that he felt captured part of who he was and what he stood for, mattered a great deal to me. For he was someone who had had, and continues to have, a huge impact on my moral code, my sense of what matters and why. It's impossible to articulate fully why this is so but if you watch this film then I think you will partly understand why he meant as much to me as he did. And why he meant so much to so many people.
At one point in the interview, Gil says: "If someone comes to you and asks for help, and you can help them, you're supposed to help them. Why wouldn't you? You have been put in the position somehow to be able to help this person." That undeniable truth and his simple expression of the importance of taking care of those around you who need help and ask for help was not some empty statement. Gil lived by this creed and throughout a magnificent musical career, he helped people again and again, with his willingness and ability to articulate deep truths, through his eloquent attacks on injustices and by his enormous compassion for people's pain.
But Gil was also one of the funniest men I ever met. Our friendship began back in 1990 in Edinburgh when I went backstage after I had witnessed the first of many remarkable performances I was lucky enough to see. His openness towards me from the word go typified the generous manner in which he engaged people throughout his life. I was a young white guy he didn't know from Adam, but he welcomed me into his world and over the years we came to spend many hours together, and I always came away from these meetings altered. Wiser but happier.
One thing led to another and by 1996 I had become his publisher, reissuing two novels (The Vulture and The Nigger Factory) that he had written in his early 20s and which revealed his talents as a prose stylist. In that same year my first child was born, my daughter Marley, and a week after her birth I received a fax from Gil entitled A.M Revelations: "Sincere congratulations and standing ovations are due to you and your lovely lady and 'wee female baby' as they might put it somewhere near your part of the planet.
"As the proud father of at least one of each of the two possibilities, let me tell you this: 90% of all men seem to want a manchild if pressed into picking one. Believe me, 'to heir is human, but little girls are divine.' You will never have any experience that compares to the way little girls are and how devoted they are to you.
Their love comes totally without reservation
Without pretence or nonsense, a brand new sensation
Little girls trust their fathers through all situations
This is how the dreams of an ultimate destination.
Maybe they don't know how they link generations
And carry your immortality on to yet another station
But somehow they must hear and feel god's vibrations
And know that you are their connection to creation.
"Not as good as I used to be at throwing words at things and having them stick to the sense of it. I think I've been working on this f'n book too long and prose doesn't demand the same syllable-for-syllable metric discipline that song writing and poetry does. What the hell? You pick up a nickel, but you dropped five cents. It's too bad you can't have them both, but if you had both of them you'd still want something else, wouldn't you? That's my problem too. Enjoy your miracle. Help the wife. Spend as much with the child as honesty provides. That is how you show your appreciation to 'the spirits'. You have been blessed."
Six weeks later Gil met Marley in Edinburgh and he ended up dedicating to the two of us a beautiful performance of his song Your Daddy Loves You. I truly feel I have been blessed by the friendship and love of this deeply spiritual and joyous human being.
Hundreds of thousands of people saw Gil perform live over the decades, always with remarkable bands, and few came away untouched by his magnetism, humility, biting wit and warmth of spirit. He was the most generous of bandleaders, inspiring great loyalty and love in his fellow musicians, infecting everybody on and off stage with his singularity of vision, his charismatic personality, his moral beauty and his willingness to take his fellow travellers through the full range of emotions.
Just listen to Work for Peace, from his penultimate album Spirits, to be reminded of just how consistently relevant and incredibly sharp his vision was and will remain. If you want to relive the joy and empathy he felt towards people and music, just play Lady Day and John Coltrane. If you want to hear again his railing against social injustice, replay Johannesburg. Who else was decrying and condemning apartheid in 1974? If you want to remember his lyrical genius and profound understanding of his own country's tragic and troubled history, then Winter in America is essential listening. If you want to appreciate his withering assessment of the perpetually bankrupt politics of Republicanism, then listen to the H2O Gate Blues or B Movie, two remarkably prescient records that not only put Nixon and Reagan in the dock and found them guilty as charged, but do so with dark humour and wickedly barbed putdowns that few people can match. B Movie, like his top 10 hit The Bottle, also manages to be a very heavy dance groove to which I have seen whole dance floors erupt.
Pieces of a Man, New York is Killing Me, We Almost Lost Detroit, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, We Beg Your Pardon, America, Ain't No Such Thing as Superman, Jose Campos Torres, I Think I'll Call it Morning, Whitey on the Moon, New York City, Is that Jazz? ... the range and quality of the Gil Scott-Heron songbook [ http://www.youtube.com/artist/Gil_Scott-Heron?feature=watch_video_title ] will only come to be fully appreciated over the years to come. If one good thing comes out of his death, it might be that it sends people back to his music quicker than they might otherwise have gone and his body of work will be properly assessed, enjoyed and shared.
Robert Bresson once said: "Make visible, what without you, might never have been seen." This is what Gil Scott-Heron did, but he also made us feel and hear and understand things in ways that very few are brave enough, uncompromising enough, or brilliant enough to manage. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks beautifully captured his essence in her poem, Gil Scott-Heron:
Chance-taker
Emotion voyager
Street-strutter
Contemporary Spirit
Untamed Proud Poet
Rough Healer
He is His.
Gil was a giant of a man, a truly inspirational figure whom I loved like a father and a brother and who was a godfather to two of my children. I can't quite believe he is gone but I am consoled by his belief in the spirits and by the fact that in this most important sense he is still with us. Peace go with you, brother.
Jamie Byng is publisher and managing director of Canongate Books. The Vulture, The Nigger Factory and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron, are all published by Canongate.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
