From
February 13, 2010
Gil Scott-Heron is back — and as challenging as ever
Despite reissued novels and his first new album in 16 years, the old rebel has hardly mellowed
to not show photographer information --> to not show image description -->to not show enlarge option -->GIL SCOTT-HERON
And what will you have to show for your kind heart and good will? A stone marker saying ‘Here lies a man with a kind heart and a good will.’ ... All the nice comments that were whispered about you ... were as worthless as the air that transported them from mouth to ear.”
Forty years since Gil Scott-Heron wrote those words, aged 19, for IQ, the most evidently autobiographical narrator of his debut novel, The Vulture, they fairly spring off the page as I try to negotiate my way into a conversation with their author. ScottHeron is a tricky so-and-so and it’s hard not to suspect that he shares IQ’s opinion. The Vulture and its successor, The Nigger Factory, are being republished to coincide with the launch of his first studio album in 16 years (the ironically titled I’m New Here), but he still seems reluctant to play nice.
I’m talking to Scott-Heron on the phone in his New York apartment that doubles as his office (or vice versa). It’s late on Saturday evening and he’s just returned from performing in Philadelphia and Durham, North Carolina. He’s promised me ten minutes of his time, but spends at least that querying my credentials. I know he has a reputation for truculence. In fact, the DJ Gilles Peterson told me that he flew to New York a couple of weeks ago to present Scott-Heron with a Worldwide Music Lifetime Achievement Award only to have the phone put down on him at first contact. However, in this instance, it’s hard to tell whether Scott-Heron is genuinely hostile or simply playing a joke at my expense. At one point he asks, “Are you stressed? You sound stressed.” I tell him I’m not. I’m lying. “If you’re not stressed, I’d hate to hear you in a difficult situation.” He laughs. In spite of myself, I’m warming to him.
Besides, his recalcitrance is understandable, since two prison sentences (for possession of cocaine and violating the terms of his parole) have eaten much of the past decade. This is a man who knows a difficult situation and he doesn’t want to talk about it, allowing only oblique reference to his troubles as he chuckles, “I guess people are glad to see you because they never thought you’d make it”.
Over the years Scott-Heron has been lazily dubbed the “Godfather of rap” and one of the founders of hip-hop music, but these are labels that take little account of his prodigious output throughout the Seventies and Eighties, including classic albums such as Pieces of a Man and Winter in America. The Revolution Will Not be Televised, the radical anthem for which he remains best known, is a track that has graced every student stereo in the past four decades and produced endless reams of comment and whisper, but it seems worthless as an introduction to Scott-Heron’s extraordinary body of work. In fact, it’s hard to think of another artist simultaneously so influential and so consistently overlooked. As the man himself remarks dryly, he’s more used to people hearing about him than hearing what he’s saying.
At the height of his powers Scott-Heron was a writer of extraordinary range, from the effortless soul of Lady Day and John Coltrane to the righteous call to arms, Johannesburg. He was never afraid to mix the political, personal and poetic, as in the heartbreaking first verse of Pieces of a Man — “Jagged jigsaw pieces/ Tossed about the room/ I saw my grandma sweeping/ With her old straw broom/ She didn’t know what she was doing/ She could hardly understand/ That she was really sweeping up/ Pieces of a man” — but he also made some of the most ineffably funky records of the time, such as The Bottle.
Perhaps most surprising (even depressing), however, is the way in which Scott-Heron’s lyrics, typically threaded on contemporary issues and a profound sense of racial and social injustice, sound every bit as relevant today. Look at B Movie, for example, his excoriating and hilarious tirade against Reaganism: “As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here’s a look at the closing numbers — racism’s up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot . . .”
When I suggest to Scott-Heron that his work has been a victim of his convictions, he responds with enthusiasm: “Did we make people feel uncomfortable? Maybe we did, but that’s for them to judge. Like I say, we’ve been heard of more than we been heard. So, if they felt uncomfortable, at least that would mean they heard it.
“As far as I’m concerned, what we were doing was necessary. When we released Johannesburg, people didn’t want to talk about South Africa; so we were taking a chance. I felt somebody’s got to bring it up, but I didn’t necessarily intend it to be me. I would have rather it was congressmen or those intended to talk about these things, but they wouldn’t. But if my children were to ask me what I’d said, I wanted to have an answer. Nowadays, there are more artists prepared to address these issues and that makes it harder to control. But then they could control it simply by removing my stuff from the shelves. And they did. Now they’d have to take out half the f***ing store.” He laughs heartily.
I’m New Here is certainly a remarkable achievement with a remarkable genesis. Jamie Byng, Scott-Heron’s publisher at Canongate and a longstanding friend and fan (Scott-Heron is godfather to Byng’s son) introduced him to Richard Russell, the producer and head of XL Recordings, in 2006. When they first met, Scott-Heron was still in prison on Riker’s Island, so the record has been four years in the making. But it was worth the wait.
Scott-Heron’s voice has lost some of its beauty, but none of its emotion. His intelligence, passion and poetry are still crystalline and ideally complemented and contemporised by Russell’s sparse production that nods to modern styles such as trip-hop and dubstep, but always gives precedence to the vocal. At less than 29 minutes, it is too slight to be considered a masterpiece, but perhaps that’s not the point. Scott-Heron says: “This record will give people a chance to look back and see exactly what made me such a pariah.” That’s the point.
Peterson puts it like this: “Being on XL, produced by Richard Russell, having the sound that it’s got ... for me, it’s not about Gil’s existing fans but people who’ll hear him as a brand new artist and go back to all those old records. He’s a genius.”
Frankly, Scott-Heron’s youthful novels wear their age less elegantly than their musical siblings. The Nigger Factory feels particularly dated, though its purposeful intelligence still grips. The Vulture fares better: a politicised whodunnit set in the drug-driven, boundaried world of young black men in Lower Manhattan. Yet both are meaningful exemplars of a restless intellect at the height of his passion if not his powers and are well worth reading.
Of The Vulture, its author says: “I don’t have anything new to say. It’s a murder mystery, and the son of a bitch is still dead.” Typical Scott-Heron: blunt and true. In the closing pages of The Vulture, IQ puts his philosophy like this: “There will be no thoughts of clean, wholesome America as long as sex, dope and discord are your next-door neighbors.” As it turns out, this could be the younger Scott-Heron writing to his elder self. Hopefully, he’s finally moved to a better neighbourhood: if not for his nation or his art, for himself. After all, he is, I think, a man of kind heart and good will.
The Vulture and The Nigger Factory are published by Canongate at £7.99 each. To buy them for £7.59 inc p&p visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst or call 0845 2712134. I’m New Here is out on XL
Patrick Neate’s latest novel, Jerusalem, is published by Penguin
