Gil Scott-Heron: A New Popular Musician with Less Glitter, More Politics

See that black boy over there, runnin’ scared, 

His old man in a bottle. 

He done quit his 9-to-5, he drinks full time, 

Now he’s livin’ in a bottle.

Gil Scott-Heron is a musician with politics. ​“The Revolution will not be televised,” he sang five years ago, at a time when more than a few musicians were writing and playing songs with meaning that didn’t just go ​“Oooh wah, oooh wah, ooo wan,” as Bob Dylan chuckled in his ​“115^th Dream.”

Now when popular music with political lyrics is about as scarce on the radio and in the conceit halls as radical novels are in bus station libraries, Gil ScottHeron has a wider audience than ever.

“The Bottle” with its building rhythm and the Doctor’s conga solo is a surprise disco hit, while ​“Johannesburg” was popular on Top 40 as well as soul stations months before the liberation struggles in Southern Africa were splashed across the newspapers.

Too many singer-songwriters in the subculture of left-wing music are so consciously ​“political” that they separate out the music and lose their audience. ​“If you get lost in your own rap,” laughs Gil Scott-Heron, ​“you lose the whole game. Anybody can make it more complicated.”

Scott-Heron is ​“about making things simpler.” His songs (many of them co-written with composition man Brian Jackson), are about the real problems of real people. They are accessible, and people understand. Little glitter and few rock ​‘n’ roll nightmares shine through.

“What’s the word? Johannesburg!” the chorus line of his hit, was an acknowledged replay of the street line, ​“What’s the word? Thunderbird!” ​“Home Is Where the Hatred Is” runs down junk. ​“Whitey on the Moon” ends with the suggestion that the bill for Sister Nel’s rat bite be sent to Whitey on the moon. In ​“Bicentennial Blues” Gerald Ford becomes ​“oatmeal man,” Ronald Reagan comes out ​“Hollyweird,” and Jimmy Carter is just plain ​“Skippy.”

“I don’t consider myself in any party, Democratic or Republican,” Scott-Heron says. ​“I’m not really a student of political science. I’m a student of more-or-less logic because most people look at things in terms of common sense — whether everybody gets a fair shake.”

“I’m not a protest singer,” protests Gill Scott-Heron. Sometimes ​“the songs that people want to talk about are the ones that are more personal than political, more private than public, more of an emotion than an issue. I like the fact that my mother is one of my biggest fans. It’s important to me that she understands what my songs are about, because it proves to me that what I’m talking about ain’t crazy.”

Gil Scott-Heron’s mother is a librarian. His father was a Jamaican soccer player. Raised by his grandmother in Jackson, Tenn., he was accepted at the Fieldston prep school and later went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Few black musicians get this kind of training, but for Scott-Heron there was no break in stride between Fieldston and the Midnight Band. In school he discovered poet Langston Hughes, then published two novels, The Vulture (when he was only 19) and The Nigger Factory. He put out a third book (of poetry) called Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox. Small Talk found its way onto a talking record, and Scott-Heron was a recording artist.

“What I do on records is more visible. It takes precedence in people’s minds but not necessarily in my life. I’m an artist who has several vehicles and I use whichever one most directly applies to the ideas I’m presenting. If it should be a play, I don’t try to sing it.” Scott-Heron laughs at this. He seems to be the sort of serious person who laughs a lot.

Many record artists, like Isaac Hayes or Elvis Presley, lose their roots when they begin to make it. I don’t know that having two novels and a book of poetry under your belt gives you a perspective beyond chest-chains and pink Cadillacs, but I think it could help. Some artists, like the Persuasions, bring their past into their present and manage to survive anyway, but it’s harder when the times are not reeling and rocking politically as they were a few years back.

At the moment there is a ​“hesitancy toward dealing with politics,” says Gil Scott-Heron, ​“because things have been so tentative and paranoid that people are, you know, sometimes afraid to comment on it.” When there is no mass movement for change to support a songwriter calling for an end to ​“winter in America,” the only way to stay solid with the past, with the audience and the community, is to work against the isolation the music industry brings. The Midnight Band plays the benefits and the small clubs along with the big money concert halls.

Where is Gil Scot-Heron politically? Does he support, in the end, a movement of black and white, poor and working people, against the corporations?

“I already support black and white, poor and working people in this country,” he laughs again. ​“I can’t say that I would join or support any specific organization until I saw it — saw what it was doing, saw who it was doing it for. But I’ll say that what I’ve been part of over the last six or seven years has contributed to everything from the NAACP to the Black Muslims, Shirley Chisolm to Dick Gregory to Joanne Little, to whoever, you know what I mean? In the prisons, in the streets, on the farms, where ever. I’ll continue to be part of that kind of thing ​’cause that’s where I’m coming from.”