You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised
Gil Scott-Heron was no ordinary performer. Many will cite his work as the forerunner of much of what we know now as Rap. In fact, many would refer to Scott-Heron as the Godfather of Rap – as James Brown was ordained the Godfather of Soul or George Clinton was the Godfather of Funk.
Gil Scott-Heron was an original. He used poetry over musical beats in a way that was novel, different and ground-breaking for its form of street-wise expression, political protest and socio-conscious narration.
Born into a singing family (Scott-Heron’s mother was an opera singer from Harlem) and a football-playing Jamaican father, Gil was the right person at the right time – a zeitgeist moment I guess – amid the late 1960s and early 1970s rise in political activism and protest from the African-American community. Indeed, on the sleeve notes of his debut album, he described himself thus:
“…a Black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of Blackness.”
That perhaps Gil Scott-Heron isn’t the name people most associate with politically and culturally sensitive artistry of the spoken word is perhaps the thing we should be more aware of. Sure, Billie Holliday and then, Nina, Marvin, Stevie, and Curtis are of the same ilk and are spoken of reverently in their pursuit of socio-conscious songwriting and performing but Scott-Heron was a warrior.
An artistic warrior though. His grandmother, Lily, bought him his first piano and he namechecked her on his 2010 album and her introduction to him of novelist and jazz poet Langston Hughes – undoubtedly one of his biggest musical style influences. But there was no one like Scott-Heron and probably there never will be anyone like him ever again. It’s this which is truly worthy of his status as a true ground-breaker for all that we see in the world of Jazz, Hip Hop and soulfully-oriented music of now and the foreseeable future.
Even Scott-Heron’s route to being a recording artist wasn’t conventional. Through his writing at school, he was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Fieldston school. From there he won a place at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, where Langston Hughes had, ironically, also studied.
Whilst there, he met a flute player – Brian Jackson – who was to be a significant musical collaborator with Gil. It was 1968 when Scott-Heron dropped out in order to write his first novel, a murder mystery called The Vulture – set in the ghetto and reflective of his upbringing in the Bronx and Chelsea areas of New York. He turned this published work into an album. And in 1971 the Pieces of a Man album demonstrated his talents for all to experience; With the title track, and the iconic The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, alongside the epic Lady Day and John Coltrane all showcased his proficiency, realism and ability to narrate the tribulations of life’s unfairness, inequity and struggles.
Many people will know of Clive Davis’s Arista record label (famed for Whitney Houston’s rise to fame) and Scott-Heron was one of Davis’s first signings on the newly formed label. And in 1975 Scott-Heron scored a big R&B chart hit with Johannesburg – an anti-apartheid song from the album South Africa to South Carolina and featured his friend Brian Jackson on keyboards with the Midnight Band. Scott-Heron continued to write and record songs about injustice and social inequality and have them sell AND raise consciousness.
Collaborations with Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers of Chic fame came in the 1980s with a scathing attack on then US President Ronald Reagan and his Reaganomics in the song B-Movie. He then joined forces with Stevie Wonder to bring Martin Luther King Day (via 6 million signatures on a petition) to become a Federal Holiday in 1983. Scott-Heron and Wonder toured together raising awareness and support for the bill. Sadly, before the first incarnation of the national holiday, Scott-Heron was dropped by Arista. It was the beginning of a barren period for Gil.
And all of this despite Rap taking the US music world by storm in the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t until 1994 that Scott-Heron was re-signed and recorded new material. Ironically, it was the interest in his classic 1974 outing The Bottle (adopted by both of the British night-time music cults, Northern Soul and Rave) that brought more people to Scott-Heron’s brilliance in writing, performing and recording.
A regular at Glastonbury’s Jazz stage and frequent sell-outs at niche venues like Camden’s The Jazz Cafe showed the British public’s regard for this iconic performer.
In the late 1990s, he had a troubled period with a restraining order filed by his then partner and an arrest and incarceration for cocaine possession. Regular addiction battles and further imprisonment tainted Gil’s life in the early 2000s, and a brief renaissance with Rave label XL saw him produce 2 more albums before he slipped away from the recording life.
Gil Scott-Heron died in Harlem, aged 62 in 2011.
But he left SUCH a mark on the musical world and changed minds, brought about increased consciousness of what it meant to be of African descent, and stood strongly for positive change in how people experienced life.
An influencer, an activist and yes, a revolutionist. We owe a lot more than we think to Gil Scott-Heron.
He was right: The Revolution WILL NOT be televised.
3 January 2023
Perry is the Founder and Chief Energy Officer of People and Transformational HR Ltd (PTHR) and is a Chartered Member of the CIPD, a fellow of the RSA and Visiting Professor at 4x Business Schools in the UK. Perry is a 3x published author; a 2x TEDx Speaker and 5x Member of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers List ranking Number 1 in 2022.
Perry’s musical heritage lies most deeply in 1960s American Soul/R&B and British Soul & Funk from the 1980s-date.