"Gil Scott-Heron"
His old albums available again, he's on
the road with new band, Amnesia Express
By Farhan Haq
Special to the Michigan Citizen 3/28-4/3/ 99
New York - U.S. musician Gil Scott-Hron earned lasting fame in the turbulent 1960's by
coining the phrase, "The revolution will not be televised." Today, however, he has had
to eat his words somewhat dut to the fact everything appears fit for television - even
testimony about the sex life of the U.S. president.
"There are strange voices in peoples' houses nowadays," says Scott-Hron, a singer,
jazz pianist and the forefather of rap music.
"People keep saying, 'Oh, I get my information from TV', like there's a person in
there...Well, you better try to find out who's in there."
Scott-Heron, whose uncompromising songs have struck out at political hypocrisy of
all stripes over the years, always has been fond of puncturing the lies that form
conventional wisdom.
Whether attacking, the skewed logic of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in songs like
"Re-Ron' and "H20-Gate Blues' or mocking fake black revolutionaries in 'Brother', the
acerbic jazz technology based artist has never accepted anything at face value.
Part of the price of that forthright stance is that Scott-Heron's records had
quietly disappeared over the years, even as rap music has taken his angry, fast-paced
spoken poetry and turned it into a multi-billion dollar business.
Rappers like Chuck D of Public Enemy often cite Scott-Heron as an inspiration, but he
and his longtime collaborators, including pianist Brian Jackson and saxophonist Bilal
Sunie Ali, still make their living by performing concerts in small clubs. Their band ,
currently called Amnesia Express, remains one of the most soulful, topical and yet
whimsical music groups in the country.
Now, for the first time in more than two decades,the albums that Scott-Heron and his
colleagues recorded at their peak in the mid1970's are available again, in a set of
albums made available by Rumal-Gia/TVT records.
The albums - recorded by The Midnight Band and credited to Scott-Heron and Jackson,
funny and uncompromising as they depict a United States divided by racism, class
divisions and deceitful politicians. The songs on "Winter in America.", "The First
Minute of a New Day," and "From South Africa to South Carolina" take on Watergate and
Nixon's ouster, nuclear power plants, apartheid, alcoholism and the turmoil of
everyday life.
That may sound didactic, but as Scott-Heron showed during Amnesia Express' recent
tour of New York, the band remains as sensitive and wry in its insights as ever. In
concert, Scott-Heron is as much a comedian as a musician, poking fun at obvious
targets like racist police and odd ones like meterorologists and the month of February.
More importantly, Scott-Heron's focus is on the normal lives of ordinary people,
not necessarily on the news. "The Bottle" depicts down-and-out people turning to
alcohol to escape their troubles.
Songs like, "Your Daddy Loves You" and " Pieces of a Man," show warmth and love even
as they trace the lives of people facing marital woes and uemployment. Yet the basis
for Scott-Heron's continuing popularity is his keen eye for the distance between truth
and power, and his exploration of how lies infect most of politics.
"Johannesburg," a 1975 hit with boiterous, stomping energy, might sound dated with
the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, but not the key line "Freedom ain't
nothing, freedom ain't nothing but a word."
Similarly, "South Carolina" (Barnwell) was written at a time of a growing movement
attacking nuclear power plants, such as the Barnwell plant located near poor black
communities in South Carolina. Now, long after the anti-nuclear power movement's peak,
the song's chorus "Whatever happened to the protests and the pain" "What about all the
people who gave a damn ?" neatly sums up liberal trendiness.
For Gil Scott-Heron, the point about changing the world is exactly as he said it in
his pioneering rap in the 1960's: "the revolution will not be televised," but rather
occurs within people as they change the way they see the world.
With his band on the road again, his records finally back in stores and a new album
slated to come out this year - and even a few of his out-of -print novels, like _The
Nigger Factory_ being reprinted, Scott-Heron again is on a quietly insurrectionary
mission. Or as he put it a long time ago, "The revolution , brother and sisters, will
be live !"
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Charles Brown
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