Jamie Byng, publisher of Canongate Books, was a friend of Gil Scott-Heron for more than 20 years. During 2010 they recorded this interview in London where the rapper-poet talked about his life and work, interspersed with intimate performances of his music.
Listening to
Gil Scott-Heron, Again
— By Michael Krimper | June 9, 2011
I heard the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death while visiting friends in New York. We spent much of our evenings waxing intoxicated under the violet canopy of early mornings, yelling and laughing, talking The Watts Prophets and Melvin Van Peebles, bumping jazz and hip-hop, falling silent and being silent, listening to Jamie xx’s remix record of Scott-Heron’s latest and last effort, I’m New Here. Our own peculiar brand of mourning.
Over cartons of dumplings, we entertained alleged causes of death. Weakness stirred by drugs? Complications from HIV? Exhaustion? I saw Scott-Heron perform in San Francisco two years ago, I professed, and he warned us not to trust the many rumors circulating about his ill health. Was it just a strategy for the satirist to protect himself?
But then a year afterward, the New Yorker published Alec Wilkinson’s haunting profile of Scott-Heron’s struggle with crack. He smoked openly in front of the reporter. His body was thin and twisted, his face gaunt, and his voice, once a sweet baritone, now battered and gruff.
Scott-Heron took no credit for the album on XL Recordings, the brainchild of former UK rave producer Richard Russell. He may have wanted to give Russell due credit for organizing the deeply evocative record, pairing Scott-Heron’s gravelly lyrics over sparse beats and menacing bass; but even so, he would neglect to mention that many of those recorded words were indeed his own–a collage of poems culled from his early 1970s book, The Vulture, captured asides in the studio, covers of blues and fettered demons that he made his own, that were his own.
In a radio interview last year on BBC, host Mark Coles attempted to address the subject of Scott-Heron’s personal trials. Scott-Heron interrupted, “Very few things have been autobiographical that have been included in my work … If you do a good job on a song and convince people of it, they’ll attach it to your biography as though it’s actually something that’s part of your life instead of a good acting job…. And so we’ve made a lot of characters come to life for people, because they needed them to come to life.”
At one point during those drunken evenings, during the first humid wisps of summer in America, Edgar wondered why Scott-Heron didn’t own it. He could have owned it; whether he suffered from HIV, or became a victim of the crack epidemic that still plagues our inner cities, or however he might have spiraled down the caverns of his own troubled soul.
It’s reasonable to wonder why the bluesologist infamous for tapping into spiritual and political unrest, known for “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Angel Dust,” remembered still for his masterpiece recording in 1974, Winter in America, didn’t openly reckon with his transfiguration into the protagonist of his own cautionary tales. And maybe we would have listened. Maybe the time had come that we would have paid attention to Scott-Heron, again. That he would not be just another black musician, poet, shaman, political defiant, visionary, tossed to the history books or the hip-hop samples, the category of dead before they’re dead, and then when they’re really dead, we can finally remember again.
Greg Tate wrote for the Village Voice of the spells of ruin, momentary rejuvenation, and ghostly disappearance of Scott-Heron. He was wiped away in prison, became a drugged hermit in his Harlem apartment, showed mere glimmers of life as a passerby in the New York subway. Tate saw Scott-Heron locked in the all-too-familiar story of American musicians ”who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild.” He was caught in a gyre of self-destruction and renewal, as we sat by idly, just hoping he would find his way out of the tragic cycle. Whereas white musicians like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards mustered popular support for their healing and peace of mind, black musicians like Hendrix and Scott-Heron and James Brown vanish to the wayside.
Strangely, Scott-Heron prophesied it all in his songs. He spoke and sung seemingly from a distance, sketching out the horrors and demons that haunted a scourged American dream. But he always implicated himself, quietly and sometimes secretly, in these songs. In “The Bottle,” he sang, “If you ever come looking for me/ You know where I’m bound to be — in a bottle. / If you see some brother looking like a goner/ It’s gonna be me.” Scott-Heron spun private confession into the appearance of political protest.
Many of Scott-Heron’s older songs now feel more damning, fresher and more troubling than before. He sings of the sick redemption found in drugs in “Home is Where the Hatred is,” and revisits the pain of being uprooted, of not finding a place of rest, and of not coming from a place of settled warmth, in “Home.”
Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die“Because I always feel like running,” Scott-Heron intones on his latest, “Not away, because there is no such place/ Because if there was, I would have found it by now.”
