CHICAGO — Public Enemy’s Chuck D once said hip-hop
was black America’s CNN. If so, Gil Scott-Heron was the network’s first
great anchorman, presaging hip-hop and infusing soul and jazz with
poetry, humor and pointed political commentary.
His songs, including “The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised,” “The Bottle” and “Johannesburg,” were hard-edged yet
melodic, influencing subsequent generations of soul and hip-hop artists
who revered him as a pioneer, including Common, Erykah Badu, Public
Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Kanye West.
Scott-Heron, who died Friday at the age of 62, was
born in 1949 in Chicago and spent most of his childhood in Tennessee and
then New York. He showed an affinity for writing at an early age. His
first novel, “The Vulture,” was published when he was 19, then he
shifted to music in an effort to reach a wider audience. He teamed with
Brian Jackson, a gifted musician he met while attending Lincoln
University in Oxford, Pa.
“I had an affinity for jazz and syncopation, and the
poetry came from the music,” Scott-Heron told the Chicago Tribune 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
molded them.”
Together they crafted jazz-influenced soul and funk
that brought new depth and political consciousness to ’70s music
alongside Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. In classic albums such as
“Winter in America” and “From South Africa to South Carolina,”
Scott-Heron took the news of the day and transformed it into social
commentary, wicked satire, and proto-rap anthems. He updated his
dispatches from the front lines of the inner city on tour, improvising
lyrics with an improvisational daring that matched the jazz-soul swirl
of the music.
Though celebrated for his political broadsides,
Scott-Heron was a master of many styles. He could be playful and
mischievous, and he found joy in the power of words and their ability to
transform the tragic and tawdry into the comical and uplifting.
His “H20gate Blues,” for example, took President
Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew to task as the Watergate
scandal was unfolding: “If Nixon knew, ‘Ag’ knew/But ‘Ag’ didn’t know
enough to stay out of jail.” On “Jaws,” he identified with the shark in
the Steven Spielberg movie; common sense and trespassing laws were on
the big predator’s side, Scott-Heron argued. Mixed in with the laughs
were songs about love, addiction, childbirth, spirituality.
“If you only focus on the political aspects of our
work, you change us,” Scott-Heron said in the ’98 Tribune interview.
“We’ve done 20 albums and not all of the songs on them are political. We
acknowledged politics, just like we acknowledged the existence of
condoms, guns, family, neighborhood issues. We were songwriters who
tried to represent all the different aspects of the community.”
After nearly a decade away from the record business,
Scott-Heron returned in 1994 with the album “Spirits,” in which he
addressed a new generation of rappers and urban poets who were in his
debt with tracks such as “Message to the Messengers.”
His work slowed to a trickle in recent years as he
battled drug addiction and spent several years in prison for
drug-related crimes. A 2010 album, “I’m New Here,” received acclaim, but
also offered aural evidence of his declining health.
Scott-Heron never had any chart hits, but his work
never really went out of style. Kanye West closed his latest album by
including an excerpt from Scott-Heron’s spoken-word piece, “Comment No.
1,” on the track “Who Will Survive in America?”
“We never had a lot of airplay, so I never miss it,”
Scott-Heron told the Tribune. “I wrote my first book before I knew how
to get it published, and we started making music before we knew there
was a marketplace for it. I have always worked like that, because the
work itself should be motivation enough.”
Check out 12 essential Gil Scott-Heron songs.
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