Interviewer in 2009, “Have you ever found yourself or heard of yourself put on a black list?”
Scott-Heron, “Nobody ever shows you the black list.”
By the time he was 21 years old, Gil Scott-Heron had released a book of poems, a novel (The Vulture), and released his first album – Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. That first album, filled with spoken word and bongo pieces, featured his magnificent “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a withering criticism of contemporary American popular and political culture. Scott-Heron was one of the most powerful music voices of the 1970s, often addressing social and racial issues in a direct and uncompromising fashion. He never performed on The Tonight Show.
While it took no time for Scott-Heron to find his lyrical voice, his collaboration with flutist Brian Jackson would help him develop his true musical identity. Scott-Heron and Jackson knew there was a stronger universal truth than could be told by the spoken word, which was hips don’t lie. On what might be Scott-Heron’s finest album, the 1976 live It’s Your World, the band integrated sophisticated free jazz techniques and Latin rhythms, while Gil pontificated on top using hip hop phrasing, sounding like the coolest soul brother in the universe. It’s music for both the intellect and the dance floor. However, one of the strongest pieces on the album is the almost nine minute long spoken word piece “Bicentennial Blues,” where Scott-Heron reminds the audience that in the land of the free and home of the brave, capitalism had been trumping equality for 200 years.
1981 was almost Scott-Heron’s artistic last gasp. His song “B Movie” from the Reflections album begins with the statement, “The first thing I want to say is: Mandate, my ass” and then deconstructs the Reagan Revolution as the ultimate triumph of image over substance. (Scott-Heron was an equal opportunity critic; he simply referred to Jimmy Carter as “Skippy.”)
By 1985, Scott-Heron was dropped from Arista Records and his later life was marked by repeated drug arrests and prison time, a tragic cycle for such a gifted artist. Ironically, in 2009, he was asked about one of his most famous songs, “The Bottle,” and had this to say about people he had met that were alcoholics. “(One was) an ex-physician who was dumped because he was found performing abortions…a schoolteacher who had somehow juggled her grades to get somebody promoted that shouldn’t have been…an Air Traffic Controller who made a mistake while on duty and ran a flight into a mountain. These were not people whose ambition was to be an alcoholic; they could have gotten into that career much earlier.”
Scott-Heron did return in 1994 with the Spirits album, his always limited singing voice had become even less flexible, yet he addressed the rap generation adroitly on “Message to the Messengers.” He released his final record in 2010 (I’m New Here) and passed away in 2011 at the age of 62.
Scott-Heron’s catalogue is a mess, many of the albums he recorded for Arista from 1974 to 1983 are no longer on the market and there are too many bargain bin compilations to address. It’s hard to know in retrospect if Scott-Heron was a brilliant artist that never had the opportunity for the following he deserved or if he was a self-destructive man that never achieved his potential. Most likely, it’s a combination of both. At his best, he was Michael Jordan on the court, Muhammad Ali in the ring, and Langston Hughes with a groove.