Brown Bread: Gil Scott-Heron

(Source: Grauniad)

The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron – best known for his pioneering rap The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – has died at the age of 62, having fallen ill after a European trip.

Jamie Byng, his UK publisher, announced the news via Twitter: “Just heard the very sad news that my dear friend and one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, the great Gil Scott-Heron, died today.”

Scott-Heron’s spoken word recordings helped shape the emerging hip-hop culture. Generations of rappers cite his work as an influence.

He was known as the Godfather of Rap but disapproved of the title, preferring to describe what he did as “bluesology” – a fusion of poetry, soul, blues and jazz, all shot through with a piercing social conscience and strong political messages, tackling issues such as apartheid and nuclear arms.

“If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating ‘hooks’, which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion,” Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems.

He was best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the critically acclaimed recording from his first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and for his collaborations with jazz/funk pianist and flautist Brian Jackson.

In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, first recorded in 1970, he issued a fierce critique of the role of race in the mass media and advertising age. “The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people,” he sang.

He performed at the No Nukes concerts, held in 1979 at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organised by a group called Musicians United for Safe Energy and protested against the use of nuclear energy following the meltdown at Three Mile Island. The group included singer-songwriters such as Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt.

Scott-Heron’s song We Almost Lost Detroit, written about a previous accident at a nuclear power plant, is sampled on rapper Kanye West’s single The People. Scott-Heron’s 2010 album, I’m New Here, was his first new studio release in 16 years and was hailed by critics. The album’s first song, On Coming From a Broken Home, is an ode to his maternal grandmother, Lillie, who raised him in Jackson, Tennessee, until her death when he was 13. He moved to New York after that.

Scott-Heron was HIV positive and battled drug addiction through most of his career. He spent a year and a half in prison for possession. In a 2009 interview he said that his jail term had forced him to confront the reality of his situation.

“When you wake up every day and you’re in the joint, not only do you have a problem but you have a problem with admitting you have a problem.” Yet in spite of some “unhappy moments” in the past few years he still felt the need to challenge rights abuses and “the things that you pay for with your taxes”.

“If the right of free speech is truly what it’s supposed to be, then anything you say is all right.”

Scott-Heron’s friend Doris Nolan said the musician had died at St Luke’s hospital on Friday afternoon. “We’re all sort of shattered,” she told the Associated Press.

The title track from his last album I’m New Here contains the line “I’m hard to get to know, impossible to forget”, which pretty much sums up the man and his music.

An interesting fact is that his father, also called Gil, or more properly Gilbert, played football for Celtic in 1951, becoming the first black player to play for Celtic and I think the second ever black player to play in the Scottish football league.

R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011

Protesters disrupt Jerusalem Quartet Wigmore Hall broadcast

BBC Radio 3 pulled the plug on the broadcast of this recital, announcing a “disruption” at the Wigmore Hall. Listeners were startled to hear singing interrupt Mozart’s String Quartet in D major K. 575. I think the broadcast should have continued, but of course it is typical of the craven cowardice of the BBC that it did not.

Within an hour, the incident was reported in the Jewish Chronicle (and nowhere else):

A lunchtime performance by the Jerusalem Quartet at London’s Wigmore Hall, being broadcast live on BBC Radio Three, was taken off air partway through the concert on Monday afternoon after protesters disrupted the event. But the musicians played on and completed the Mozart and Ravel concert programme.

The clash came after four or five pro-Palestinian protesters bought tickets for the concert, and, about five to ten minutes into the music, began shouting and heckling the Israeli musicians. They shouted: “The Quartet, who are cultural ambassadors for the state of Israel, are promoting the interests of Israel and all its policies against the Palestinians, to the British public.”

The demonstrators were taken away by Wigmore Hall security officers and a decision was taken by the concert hall management to take the broadcast off-air “in order to deny these people publicity.”

A clearly shaken John Gilhooly, director of the Wigmore Hall, told the JC: “It is such a pity that music has become politicised.”

John Gilhooly should sit down and have a chat with the members of the Jerusalem Quartet about politicising music.

No doubt the protestors are feeling very pleased with themselves (they organised the demonstration through Twitter), but beyond making John Gilhooly sweat and irritating a couple of hundred people who couldn’t care less about the plight of Palestinians, what did they achieve?

Absolutely … nothing.

Related:

7 ways to stop musical “ambassadors” for Israel

Save BBC 6 Music

More than 100,000 people have joined a Facebook campaign as David Bowie and Emily Eavis appeal for threatened BBC 6 Music to be saved.

David Bowie has thrown his weight behind efforts to lobby the BBC over the closure, saying: “For new artists to lose this station would be a great shame.”

Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis urged music lovers to join the campaign, urging her followers on Twitter to contact the corporation’s trust, adding: “Don’t let them do it.”

BBC 6 Music is considerably less concerned with the commercial mainstream than any other station you could mention. Its disappearance would leave a gap which none of the BBC radio stations would be able to fill, most critically removing a valuable platform for the exploration of the more thoughtful and musical exponents of the pop music genre and those newcomers who seek to eschew the vapidity of much of today’s chart output.

There is as wide a gap between these and the playlist pop of the mainstream channels as there is between what most of us would consider “classical” music and the light, disposable “crossover” material which has recently been similarly labelled by the commercial media.

To those who have a deeper interest in contemporary culture, the suggestion that BBC 6 Music could be replaced in any way by other BBC or commercial stations is as misleading as an assertion that since Classic FM is classical music station, BBC Radio 3 is obviously redundant.

BBC 6 Music offers something extra to mainstream pop music which isn’t available anywhere else, with presenters who seem very knowledgeable indeed. The station has given new British artists a platform when perhaps they wouldn’t have got a foothold otherwise; Florence and the Machine being just one example.