I was sad but I can’t say surprised to hear the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death on Friday, at the age of 62. Ever since I had researched his life for a KEXP documentary a few months back, and come across a New Yorker profile where he openly smoked crack in front of the interviewer, I wondered how long he could last. He had battled addiction for decades, and it showed. So striking in the 1970s, he had become withered and gaunt, with a bunch of missing teeth.
Scott-Heron was one of these people who seemed gifted with outsized talents. When Brian Jackson, his longtime musical collaborator, met him while they were at Lincoln University, Scott-Heron was already writing poetry and working on his two novels. Jackson thought, “OK, I’ve met my Langston Hughes.”
Scott-Heron wrote without apology, speaking out against the status quo. In “Whitey on the Moon,” he criticized the use of tax money to send “Whitey” into space when many blacks were struggling just to get by.
Was all that money I made last year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon)
You know I just about had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
As in that song, Scott-Heron was never just polemical. His work was subtler than that. He could be cutting and funny at the same time. He once said that people thought that the “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was militant. “But how militant can really be when you’re saying, “The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner?” he once said in an interview.
His “comeback” album, I’m New Here, which came out last year, came about because of Richard Russell of XL Recordings. Russell visited Scott-Heron when he was in prison on drug charges and got him to agree to make a new record. Scott-Heron hadn’t recorded anything for 15 years. Given the demons he struggled with, his version of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” gives me the chills. But I keep going back to the opener, a tribute to his grandma, called “I Came From a Broken Home.”
I want to make this a special tribute
To a family that contradicts the concepts
Heard the rules but wouldn’t accept
And womenfolk raised me
And I was full grown before i knew
I came from a broken home
Sent to live with my grandma down south
When my uncle was leaving
And my grandfather had just left for heaven
They said and as every-ologist would certainly note
I had no strong male figure, right?
But Lily Scott was absolutely not your mail order room service typecast black grandmother
I was moved in with her; temporarily, just until things were patched,
Til this was patched and til that was patched
Until I became at 3, 4, 5,6 ,7, 8, 9 and 10
The patch that held Lily Scott who held me and like them four
I become one more and I loved her from the absolute marrow of my bones
In the obituaries, people are calling Scott-Heron ”the godfather of rap” because of the influence he had on hip-hop artists. But he didn’t like the label. “I ain’t sayin’ I didn’t invent rapping, I just can’t recall the circumstances,” he once joked. He preferred to call himself a bluesologist. And when I think of his life, and what might have been if not for drugs and everything else, the blues seems about right.
RIP, GSH.
