How Anger, Humour and Politics Shaped and Shattered Gil Scott-Heron
Wednesday is about books and/or writing. Today it's both. Here's an academic essay I wrote recently about the (printed) words of Gil Scott-Heron and the poetics of his work.
I know I’ve mentioned this previously, but I’m studying at uni again, doing a paper towards an Honours degree in English. The paper is around modern poetry, both the writing of our own original work and the analysis of 20th and 21st Century poetic forms. I wrote my first essay about the poetry of Gil Scott Heron and the poetics that informed his work. I wanted to draw a throughline from Langston Hughes to Gil and then on to rap of Chuck D of Public Enemy and Michael Franti of The Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. (Among others). I was pleased with how this turned out and wanted to share it here too - now that it’s been handed in, and graded (and I passed!)
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The best of the work by Gil Scott-Heron is aimed, always, at the heart. Whether meant primarily for the page, or arriving via musical adaptation for the stage, it is the poetry of the soul, a type of ‘soul’ music that has been wrenched deep from that bodily location.
As an acknowledged ‘Godfather of Rap’, Gil Scott-Heron is the bridge between the poetry and ‘race’ novels of Langston Hughes and the gritty-smart hip-hop of Public Enemy. Indeed, Chuck D’s proclamation that “rap music is the black CNN”[1] is a continuation of the thoughts expressed in Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem/song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised[2]. Chuck D’s proclamation from his manifesto suggests such evolution would indeed be evangelised.
There are three components that combine to make the best work in Scott-Heron’s canon. Those same three themes are there in the printed works of Langston Hughes and the recorded music of Public Enemy. In all three cases it is about the combination of politics, humour, and anger.
Gilbert Scott-Heron (1949-2011) was raised in Chicago and Tennessee. He chose to attend the historically black Lincoln University because it was where his literary hero Langston Hughes had been educated. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) were created, pre-Civil Rights, to give black students a chance at an education in a world where white people thrived.
James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) wrote poetry, plays, novels, columns and was a social activist. He was also dubbed a jazz poet, reciting his works with live musical instrumentation. All of this impressed upon the young Gil Scott-Heron. (“I admired Langston Hughes, a man who set no limits on himself. And I didn’t want to get stuck doing one thing, either”, Scott-Heron would write in his posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday[3]).
The writing voice that Hughes perfected with his scathing poem, Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria[4] which satirises a Vanity Fair advertisement and directly addresses the race/class divide in America at that time, can be seen as a definitive poetic antecedent for much of the work Gil Scott-Heron offered in his most prolific period (1970-1977).
Hughes’ poem uses advertising language to celebrate “All the luxuries of private home…” before drilling home a hypocrisy with its penultimate verse:
Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.[5]
We could view this as a near-blueprint for the voice Scott-Heron would perfect across his own early recordings of poems, perhaps most notably Whitey On The Moon[6]. Written (and recorded) in 1970, in opposition to the amount of money spent on the Space Race and Moon Landing when compared with the scarcity of resources for black communities, Scott-Heron builds a chant of the repeated title – a sarcastic justification that offsets the poverty he is reflecting in the lines that weave around the title’s cold fact:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the Moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the Moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the Moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the Moon)
Which then sets up the punchline that he’ll be sending the doctor bills, “Air Mail Special…to Whitey on the Moon”.[7]
The politics, humour and anger all flow, informing one another, eventually effectively falling in on each other. It is the humour of incredulity. And Scott-Heron passed it on to a generation of rap musicians, most notably Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. Their 1990 album, Fear of A Black Planet[8] takes the worlds surveyed by Hughes and Scott-Heron and documents the pre-LA Riots racial tension using that same satirical triple-stack of humour, anger, and politics. The politics of rage. An anger informed by sage wisdom, and a humour ripe for the stage with fierce and funny raps that sit under titles such as 911 Is A Joke, Welcome To The Terrordome, Meet The G That Killed Me, Burn Hollywood Burn, and Fight The Power.[9]
It is possible to listen to Gil Scott-Heron just for the words; he is a writer first and foremost, a poet of the page and for the stage. But it is also possible to listen to his poems and songs for the music; for the arrangements and playing of bandleader and co-writer Brian Jackson, of Gil himself (a very soulful singer and a talented composer/pianist) and of the jazz and funk musicians who contributed to the records. Then there is the musicality of his spoken pieces, the sound of his voice telling you the words. The rhyme, and rhythm and timbre of his voice, the richness that curls the words into deceptive missives. He was compared to his friend, the comedian Richard Pryor.[10] Members of Scott-Heron’s 1970s’ audiences recall long, funny monologues and banter to segue between the songs.
Prior to Richard, comedians told jokes. Setup, story, punchline. Richard Pryor’s monologues set the tone for 1970s political comedy – the deft combination of rage and humour – that is instantly comparable to the music of that era as offered by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, and Gil Scott-Heron. Voices that came of age as the Civil Rights movement turned teenage, felt funky and alive, having first learned to walk it was now time to strut. They were black. And they were proud.
The politics at work in a Stevie Wonder song (You Haven’t Done Nothin’[11]) or any of the contemporaries mentioned above was expounded on by Gil Scott-Heron, swearing aggrievance in his swag, taking the terror of systemic racism and the discrimination his community faced and marrying it to hip pop-cultural references within his scathing critique.
The most famous, and enduring example is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised[12]. Originally written and performed in 1970, Scott-Heron’s voice accompanied by the percussionists Charlie Saunders, Eddie Knowles and David Barnes, it was reworked a year later into its even more famous ‘song’ version[13]. But whether spoken in bemused rage, or passionately crooned, the voice that Gil Scott-Heron uses to send the words to the listener is in service to the political rage (frustrated by complacency and apathy) and the dark, prodding humour that drops pop-cultural (Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Natalie Wood) and political (Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, John N. Mitchell) names and seeks to challenge the blind-eye mentality.
“You will not be able to stay home, brother”, he begins[14]. The use of the term ‘brother’, politically and racially driven. He then mocks the hippie-culture terms of the day (Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune, drop out” reference[15] is both the title of his 1967 spoken-word album and was used in a very public rallying speech[16]) suggesting that to ‘drop out’ would be to trivialise the struggles of the black people. Television is used as a motif and motive in the song. An urgent plea to be present, rather than
lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised[17]
The references to commercials, the use of ad-speak (satirical; a tribute again to Hughes)
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre
And will not star Natalie Woods 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
pushes the rhythmic drive of the piece, a trademark of Scott-Heron’s style, repetition allowing him to bite down on the words as if to push them in even harder, as well as satirising the medium through which people get their news. His argument is that the black revolution, the rising up to stand against the hypocrisy, systemic racism and discrimination will not be deemed ‘newsworthy’ in a mainstream sense because it is not of commercial value. His punchline reminds the listener of the need to be present – “the revolution will be live” – and hammers home the race/class divide with his use of the black slang “brother”:
The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live[18]
The humour of incredulity is the other driving force to this poem – Scott-Heron’s narrator is deliberate and scathing in his choice of white names to drop (Steve McQueen, Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Jimmy Webb, Jackie Onassis[19]). That uneasy, politically motivated humour sets up the rage that we feel through the urgency in the title’s chanted repetition.
The recorded song version[20] became the obvious antecedent for the 1992 single, Television, The Drug of a Nation[21] by the Michael Franti-led musical group, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Franti’s deep timbre, tall stature, activism, poetic lyrics and social consciousness all point to the influence of Gil Scott-Heron, but in his breakout single it was never clearer:
Where straight teeth in your mouth
are more important than the words
that come out of it
Race baiting is the way to get selected
Willie Horton or
Will he not get elected on…
Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation[22]
That same mocking of ad-speak filtered down through Hughes, via Scott-Heron, and another grab from Gil is the way Franti wordplays around a real name (“Willie Horton or/Will he not get elected…). In 1981’s B-Movie, Gil Scott-Heron refers to then president, Ronald Regan as “Ronald The Ray Gun”[23] (another piece from the same era is called Re-Ron, further punning on Regan’s name and both Re-Ron and B-Movie poke satirical fingers in the direction of Regan’s previous fame, as a B-grade movie actor; perhaps moving from forgettable westerns to running the White House was seen at that time as the ultimate in white privilege?)
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“[…] I just thought I was funny and that funny would fix everything, change every flat tire, arguably without even stopping; no time on the side of the road.” [24]
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Gil Scott-Heron’s humour of incredulity was a coping mechanism. Ripped from his birth mother, raised by his grandmother until a teenager (Lily Scott was memorialised by Gil several times, most overtly in the poem Coming From A Broken Home[25]) and with “NO STRONG MALE FIGURE? RIGHT!”[26], he learned from an early age to observe the world around him, to analyse and strike all at once. In this, he is linked, once again, with Richard Pryor. They turned to truth-telling to try to make sense of the hypocrisy they faced.
In his second novel, The N*gger Factory[27] (my asterisk), Gil Scott-Heron draws directly on his own experience at Lincoln University, satirising/exposing the historical black university experience as being a chance for white men of influence to further their political ambitions and line their pockets as much as it was ever about black empowerment.
The humour of incredulity. The politics of rage. The anger of disenfranchisement.
Gil Scott-Heron’s poetics were shaped by his direct experience. They were his personality, in a written sense. They were the tools he sharpened to place his experience on the page, and to perform that attitude across the stage. The use of humour, anger and politics was how he addressed the social/political issues that divided America in the 1970s. His anger was directed at the systemic injustices, but tempered with the humour it gave chance for a broader perspective on the world he inhabited. He used his words to challenge power structures and the institutions that were set up or grew into protecting and promulgating the hypocrisies and injustice. His lasting influence is giving the word – and a particular way with it – to future generations for their own creative exploration in hopes to effect social change.
One recent example of the timelessness of Gil Scott-Heron’s themes – where the content itself might appear to be rooted in a particular time and space – is the use of Whitey On The Moon by rapper, author and podcaster Propaganda. In a 2021 episode of his Hood Politics podcast[28], Propaganda directly recites Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem as a preamble to the discussion of the 2021 “Space Race”, where the tech oligarchs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were in direct competition for the newest version of the ultimate in white privilege: A race to colonise the moon. Propaganda even bends Scott-Heron’s title to call his podcast episode, Whiteys on the Moon[29], and later in the episode delivers his own modern take on the situation, informed directly by Scott-Heron’s poetics. Anger, humour, politics. The tools for the job. The humour of incredulity, shaped by the situation that grew up tall around him.
There is a pathos in all of this, inherent given the disbelief, the stunned frustration, the battle so big and so far beyond just any one person. Sometimes that pathos hits hardest when the humour is removed.
“And what would Karen Silkwood say to you/If she was still alive?/That when it comes to people’s safety/Money wins out every time”, is a line from the poem We Almost Lost Detroit[30]. In 1966, a partial nuclear meltdown was caused when a breeder reactor (Fermi 1) exploded. It was stationed just out of Lake Eerie and south of Detroit. The predominantly black community was nearly destroyed as a result. We Almost Lost Detroit was the name of a 1975 Reader’s Digest magazine that first chronicled the fiasco. Two years on, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson had taken the title for the poem/song on their album, Bridges[31]. (The reference to Karen Silkwood is from a 1970s nuclear contamination incident where Silkwood became a highly politicised whistle-blower).
Sometimes there could be no humour.
Pieces of A Man[32] is not autobiographical but tells a story that Gil Scott-Heron could relate to. The man in the poem is laid off and goes to metaphorical pieces, but the narrator is his child watching the impact.
I saw my grandma sweeping
With her old straw broom
But she didn't know what she was doing
She could hardly understand
That she was really sweeping up
Pieces of a man[33]
The shame this man feels in the wake of being laid off (“I saw my Daddy meet the Mailman/And I heard the Mailman say/‘Now don’t you take this letter too hard now, Jimmy, coz they’ve laid off nine others today”) manifests in rage, and the scene of domestic violence projects directly to the future generation.
I saw the thunder and heard the lightning
And felt the burden of his shame
And for some unknown reason
He never turned my way
Pieces of that letter
Were tossed about that room
And now I hear the sound of sirens
Come knifing through the gloom[34]
It’s a horrifying, but utterly compassionate account, which concludes:
But they don't know what they are doing
They could hardly understand
That they're only arresting
Pieces of a man[35]
Gil Scott-Heron similarly tackled the issues that arise from systemic racism and discrimination through poems The Bottle[36] and Home Is Where the Hatred Is[37], where alcohol and drug addiction are explored directly through the compassionate lens of shame; the flow-on effect of community damage and inherited genetic disposition the extra regrets of a society corrupted against true political equity.
Rage, anger, hurt, frustration, guilt, shame – they were pieces of the puzzle that was swept up and away from the main picture. That’s how Gil Scott-Heron saw it. So, how he said it, wrote it, and read it, was to address this directly. His use of humour gave both the chance to dig deeper, with further barbs, and to explore the politics of the situation. He was writing directly about his life most often, and always about his experience. He moved from autobiographical narrator, to journalist, and back again. He became the subject of some of his own works only after he created them. The objectivity of Pieces of A Man, The Bottle and Home Is Where The Hatred Is would all become snapshots of his later life. He would succumb to the problems he wrote about – addiction, dependence, shame, guilt, violence, and petty larceny – in the later years, giving an added pathos and poignancy to many of his words.
In the end he was his word. So true to his word as to be crippled by it. The anger, humour and politics that were his poetics were both formed by and then in turn further informed his personality. He lived his word. For better. And then, in the very end, for worse.
Sources
books/journals:
Fight The Power: Rap, Race, and Reality, Chuck D w/ Yusuf Jah, Random House Publishing Group; 1998.
New Masses (literary magazine), Michael Gold, Walt Carmon, Whittaker Chambers, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks (eds), 1931
The N*gger Factory, Gil Scott-Heron, Canongate; 1972 (republished 1996).
Now And Then, Gil Scott-Heron, The Canons/Canongate; 2000 (republished 2019).
The Last Holiday: A Memoir, Gil Scott-Heron, Grove Press; 2012.
albums:
Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 4th & B’way/Island/Polygram; 1992.
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Timothy Leary, Mercury, 1967.
Fear of A Black Planet, Public Enemy, Def Jam/Colombia; 1990.
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A New Black Poet, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman/RCA; 1970.
Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman; 1971.
Winter in America, Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson, Stata-East; 1974
Bridges, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, Arista; 1977.
Reflections, Gil Scott-Heron, Arista; 1981.
Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Stevie Wonder, Tamla/Motown; 1974.
podcasts/speeches:
BBC Radio 4 Great Lives, Gil Scott-Heron episode, Joe Swift; 2022.
Hood Politics Podcast, Propaganda, IHeartRadio, Episode: Whiteys On The Moon; 25 Aug 2021.
The Human Be-In, Public Gathering: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, January, 1967
[1] Fight The Power: Rap, Race, and Reality, Chuck D w/ Yusuf Jah, Random House Publishing Group; 1998.
[2] Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A New Black Poet, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman/RCA; 1970.
[3] The Last Holiday: A Memoir, Gil Scott-Heron, Grove Press; 2012.
[4] New Masses (literary magazine), Michael Gold, Walt Carmon, Whittaker Chambers, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks (eds), 1931
[5] Ibid.
[6] Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A New Black Poet; 1970.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Fear of A Black Planet, Public Enemy, Def Jam/Colombia; 1990.
[9] Ibid.
[10] BBC Radio 4 Great Lives (Podcast), Gil Scott-Heron episode, Joe Swift; 2022.
[11] Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Stevie Wonder, Tamla/Motown; 1974.
[12] Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A New Black Poet; 1970.
[13] Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman; 1971.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Timothy Leary, Mercury, 1967.
[16] The Human Be-In, Public Gathering: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, January, 1967.
[17] Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A New Black Poet; 1970. / Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman; 1971.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Pieces of a Man; 1971.
[21] Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 4th & B’way/Island/Polygram; 1992.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Reflections, Gil Scott-Heron, Arista; 1981.
[24] The Last Holiday: A Memoir; 2012.
[25] Now And Then, Gil Scott-Heron, The Canons/Canongate; 2000 (republished 2019).
[26] Ibid.
[27] The N*gger Factory, Gil Scott-Heron, Canongate; 1972 (republished 1996).
[28] Hood Politics Podcast, Propaganda, IHeartRadio, Episode: Whiteys On The Moon; 25 Aug 2021.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Now and Then; 2000/2019.
[31] Bridges, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, Arista; 1977.
[32] Pieces of A Man; 1971
[33] Ibid. / Now and Then; 2000/2019.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Winter in America, Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson, Stata-East; 1974
[37] Pieces of A Man; 1971