People often talked about Gil Scott-Heron, the writer, poet and musician who died Friday at age 62, in terms of potential — what he could have been if he hadn’t become what he actually was.
As a charismatic 19-year-old living in New York, he wrote an alternately terse, comical and angry song called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which, like Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” seemed to presage a life on the front lines, wryly battling injustice, hypocrisy and cant. Like Dylan, though, he quickly turned that role down.
His albums in the 1970s, which came out almost yearly, contain some of the best soul music and modern jazz to be made in the last century (listeners unfamiliar with Scott-Heron’s work in this period would be advised to start with the songs “We Almost Lost Detroit” and “Winter in America” and then just keep going from there), but he dodged that legacy as well — unlike, say, the music of fellow radicals Sam Cooke, or Marvin Gaye, you will not hear anything written by Gil Scott-Heron on a wedding dance floor anytime soon.
And when hip-hop came to the forefront of avant-garde American pop, in the 1980s and ’90s, employing a rhythmic blueprint that seemed to descend directly from the spoken-word works of Scott-Heron’s early career, he declined to take credit for that, too, often vehemently. Those who attribute the birth of the genre to him, he told the New Yorker last year, “made a mistake.”
Then he stopped making music entirely, or at least releasing music. “I’m New Here” (XL), which came out last year, was his first album in 16 years, and only his second since 1982. His addiction to drugs over most of that period has been chronicled in heartbreaking depth. “It is hard to assess Mr. Scott-Heron’s creativity now, because so little of it has been made public of late,” the New York Times wrote in 2001.
When that creativity was finally made public again, on “I’m New Here,” which Scott-Heron made with and at the request of XL’s Richard Russell, it was undimmed. And though there are any number of uncomfortably prophetic moments on the LP, his last — “Yeah, the doctors don’t know, but New York was killing me,” Scott-Heron sang on one song — it was, at least to these ears, the product of an artist at peace with what he had become.
He wasn’t as famous as he could have been, nor as wealthy or culturally dominant as the rappers who followed him, often literally — Kanye West, who sampled (not for the first time) Scott-Heron on last year’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” was only one of many artists to acknowledge a debt to Scott-Heron — but he was, from start to finish, entirely his own man.
It’s tempting to imagine alternate paths for such a prodigious talent, especially one that was, over the last three decades, brought so publicly low. But Scott-Heron, by his own accounting, had lived the life he wanted to. On “I’m New Here,” he sang the words of songwriter Bill Callahan, in the gravelly, wrecked voice that had become his signature: “I did not become someone different, that I did not want to be.” That was Scott-Heron’s life in one sentence. Living it that way, however pyrrhically, was an accomplishment that ranks with any of his others.
As a charismatic 19-year-old living in New York, he wrote an alternately terse, comical and angry song called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which, like Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” seemed to presage a life on the front lines, wryly battling injustice, hypocrisy and cant. Like Dylan, though, he quickly turned that role down.
His albums in the 1970s, which came out almost yearly, contain some of the best soul music and modern jazz to be made in the last century (listeners unfamiliar with Scott-Heron’s work in this period would be advised to start with the songs “We Almost Lost Detroit” and “Winter in America” and then just keep going from there), but he dodged that legacy as well — unlike, say, the music of fellow radicals Sam Cooke, or Marvin Gaye, you will not hear anything written by Gil Scott-Heron on a wedding dance floor anytime soon.
And when hip-hop came to the forefront of avant-garde American pop, in the 1980s and ’90s, employing a rhythmic blueprint that seemed to descend directly from the spoken-word works of Scott-Heron’s early career, he declined to take credit for that, too, often vehemently. Those who attribute the birth of the genre to him, he told the New Yorker last year, “made a mistake.”
Then he stopped making music entirely, or at least releasing music. “I’m New Here” (XL), which came out last year, was his first album in 16 years, and only his second since 1982. His addiction to drugs over most of that period has been chronicled in heartbreaking depth. “It is hard to assess Mr. Scott-Heron’s creativity now, because so little of it has been made public of late,” the New York Times wrote in 2001.
When that creativity was finally made public again, on “I’m New Here,” which Scott-Heron made with and at the request of XL’s Richard Russell, it was undimmed. And though there are any number of uncomfortably prophetic moments on the LP, his last — “Yeah, the doctors don’t know, but New York was killing me,” Scott-Heron sang on one song — it was, at least to these ears, the product of an artist at peace with what he had become.
He wasn’t as famous as he could have been, nor as wealthy or culturally dominant as the rappers who followed him, often literally — Kanye West, who sampled (not for the first time) Scott-Heron on last year’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” was only one of many artists to acknowledge a debt to Scott-Heron — but he was, from start to finish, entirely his own man.
It’s tempting to imagine alternate paths for such a prodigious talent, especially one that was, over the last three decades, brought so publicly low. But Scott-Heron, by his own accounting, had lived the life he wanted to. On “I’m New Here,” he sang the words of songwriter Bill Callahan, in the gravelly, wrecked voice that had become his signature: “I did not become someone different, that I did not want to be.” That was Scott-Heron’s life in one sentence. Living it that way, however pyrrhically, was an accomplishment that ranks with any of his others.
