"The ghetto was a haven/ for the meanest creature ever known," Gil Scott-Heron reported on "Your Soul and Mine," a song from his 2010 comeback album "I'm New Here." For four decades, Heron stared that creature down. He stalked it through the alleyways and mean streets of Chicago, Jackson, Tennessee, and the Bronx, and filed unflinching dispatches as he did. He heard rumblings of insurrection and cries of discontent; he confronted poverty, addiction, government neglect and sheer, unmotivated cruelty. Then, with his poise, his outrage, and his sense of humor intact, he spun all he had seen into poetry and song.
Gil Scott-Heron's influence on hip-hop is enormous, and as long as there are rappers with social consciences to prick, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," his best-known track, will continue to be sampled. But in 1970, when Scott-Heron recorded his live debut "Small Talk at 125th and Lenox," there was no such thing as hip-hop. And the vocalist wasn't rapping; not exactly. He was reciting vibrant poems like "Revolution," "Evolution (and Flashback)," and "Whitey on the Moon," all of which ridiculed America's priorities from the angry but philosophical perspective of a poor African American trapped in the ghetto. On "Who'll Pay Reparations?" -- the best indicator of where he was headed as a recording artist -- Scott-Heron sang raw soul over a piano and conga drums.
When Gil Scott-Heron died on Friday at the age of 62, much was made of how far his '70s work looked forward. That it did: albums like "Small Talk," "Free Will," and "Winter in America" anticipated the lyrical intensity of hip-hop and the social engagement of neo-soul. Scott-Heron's amalgam of jazz, blues, African music, spoken-word poetry, and black activism was uniquely his own, and while rappers from KRS-ONE to Kanye West have borrowed from it, it still sounds like music that could have been made by nobody else. But Scott-Heron also looked backward: to spirituals and work songs that challenged the domination of oppressors, and to the long tradition of protest folk. Like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, Gil Scott-Heron demonstrated that popular music could be as effective a vehicle for serious ideas as a broadside or a political speech. To listen to Scott-Heron was to be challenged by a voice profound and deep; one that, once heard, could not easily be ignored.
The arrangements on Gil Scott-Heron's early recordings were consistent with the conventions of jazz poetry -- the movement that sought to bring the spontaneity of live performance to the reading of verse. Jack Kerouac and other Beat poets, for instance, often read while accompanied by percussionists. But it was Langston Hughes, the star of the Harlem Renaissance of the '20, who exerted the most profound influence over Heron, and it is not an exaggeration to see Heron as Hughes' direct successor. Like Hughes, Scott-Heron was fiercely proud to be black, and forged his cadences from centuries of African-American traditions; like Hughes, he took as his great subject the everyday struggles of the poor and dispossessed. Langston Hughes never feared controversy; nor did Gil Scott-Heron.
Scott-Heron always acknowledged this inspiration. Upon graduation from the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he'd been schooled on scholarship, he chose to enroll at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the same college that Hughes had attended. But Scott-Heron was also compelled by popular music. With composer Brian Jackson -- whose Rhodes electric piano and flute-driven arrangements still echo through contemporary soul -- Scott-Heron recorded a string of arresting mid-'70s sets on which he sang as often as he spoke. "Winter in America," their 1974 collaboration, was a plea for compassion and humanity released at the height of the Watergate scandal, and it remains a formidably intelligent document of that time. "Rivers of my Fathers," an eight-minute jazz-soul journey, evoked the pained spirit of Hughes' landmark "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Another track, "The Bottle," explored the intersection between inner-city poverty, alcoholism, and the culture of incarceration. Funky and propulsive, "The Bottle" became a block party favorite and Billboard chart success.
Not all rappers have been drawn to the poet. But those interested in extending the legacy of social engagement through music invariably turned to Gil Scott-Heron's records for inspiration, and often much more. De La Soul sampled "The Bottle," Chuck D of Public Enemy occasionally mimicked Heron's delivery, Dr. Dre and RBX quoted him at length on "Blunt Time." And Kanye West devoted the entire final track of "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" to a re-framing of Scott-Heron's "Comment No.1," first recorded on "Small Talk," all the way back in 1970. "Who will survive in America?," Scott-Heron asked, over and over. It's a question that remains as relevant today as it was when he first posed it.
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