Gil Scott-Heron
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised.
Gilbert "Gil" Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011) was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a Spoken Word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson featured a musical fusion of Jazz, Blues, and Soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist", which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues".[1] His music, most notably on Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as Hip Hop and Neo Soul.
He was also an author, having published The Vulture (1970), The Nigger Factory (1972), So Far, So Good (1990), Now and Then (2000), The Last Holiday (2003), and Pieces of a Man (2004).
He had an admitted drug problem, and in the early 2000s served time in both jail and a drug rehabilitation center for possession of cocaine and paraphernalia. He confirmed that he was also HIV-positive in 2008. While he died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City, the exact cause of his death has never been revealed.
Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and in 2010 released his first new album in 16 years, entitled I'm New Here. A memoir he had been working on for years up to the time of his death, The Last Holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012.
His recording work received much critical acclaim, especially one of his best-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".
Studio albums
- Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970)
- Pieces of a Man (1971)
- Free Will (1972)
- Winter in America (1974)
- The First Minute of a New Day (1975)
- From South Africa to South Carolina (1976)
- It's Your World (1976)
- Bridges (1977)
- Secrets (1978)
- 1980 (1980)
- Real Eyes (1980)
- Reflections (1981)
- Moving Target (1982)
- Spirits (1994)
- I'm New Here (2010)
- We're New Here (2011)
- Nothing New (2014)
Live albums
- It's Your World (1976)
- Tales of Gil Scott-Heron and His Amnesia Express (1990)
- Minister of Information: Live (1994)
- The Best Of Gil Scott-Heron Live (2004)
- Tour De Force (2004)
- Save The Children (2004)
- Winter In America, Summer In Europe (2004)
- Greatest Hits Live (2005)
- Live At The Town & Country 1988 (2008)
Compilations
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974)
- The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron (1979)
- The Best of Gil Scott-Heron (1984)
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1988)
- Glory: The Gil Scott-Heron Collection (1990)
- The Gil Scott-Heron Collection Sampler: 1974–1975 (1998)
- Ghetto Style (1998)
- Evolution and Flashback: The Very Best of Gil Scott-Heron (1998)
- Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson – Messages (Anthology) (2005)
- The Best of Gil Scott-Heron (2006)
- Storm Music (The Best of Gil Scott-Heron) (2009)
- The Revolution Begins: The Flying Dutchman Masters (2012)
Collaboration albums
- Rhythms of the Diaspora Vol 1 & 2 Ft. Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets (2015)
- The Resolution Will Not Be Identified
- The Resolution Will Not Be Televised
- The Revolution Will Not Be Bureaucratized
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized
- The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified
- Angry Black Man: Scott-Heron sometimes comes across as a surprisingly relaxed version of this trope in works like "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".
- Author Tract: Well, yeah. You can't invent Political Rap without indulging in this.
- Cool Shades: He wears a pair on the cover of his album Reflections.
- Deadpan Snarker: In some of his spoken-word pieces.
- Full-Circle Revolution: An awareness of this trope underlies some of his early criticism of Black "revolutionaries".
- Genre Popularizer: For rap in general, but Political Rap especially.
- Gentleman and a Scholar: Attended an Ivy League-prep private school in Manhattan, one of only five black students there at the time. For college he followed in the footsteps of his idol, Langston Hughes, and attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
- Lowest Common Denominator: The theme of some of his early works, especially regarding the banality of television.
- Melismatic Vocals
- Memetic Mutation: "The X Will Not Be Televised" has thoroughly infiltrated American pop culture (and troping -- see the Trope Namer section above!), but remarkably few people seem to even know there was an original work from which the phrase came.
- N-Word Privileges: He laid claim to them, especially with his novel The Nigger Factory.
- Political Rap: Essentially invented the genre before Rap actually existed.
- Protest Song: No small part of his work, including such pieces as the anti-Apartheid "Johannesburg", and "We Almost Lost Detroit", written for the 1979 "No Nukes" concert at Madison Square Garden.
- Screwed by the Recording Company: Dropped unceremoniously by Arista Records in 1985. (In response he simply stopped recording and toured for more than a decade.)
- The Seventies: His iconic look and works mostly come from this era.
- Shout-Out: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" includes a section made up of a rapid-fire series of references to then-contemporary advertising campaigns and other Pop Culture references.
- Spoken Word/Rap: Some of his most famous pieces were not sung, but spoken to music. He is in fact considered the "The Godfather of Rap" and one of the genre's founding fathers.
- Unintentional Period Piece: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" has become this over the years.
- ↑ Onstage at the Black Wax Club in Washington, D.C. in 1982, Scott-Heron cited Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay as among those who had "taken the blues as a poetry form" in the 1920s and "fine-tuned it" into a "remarkable art form".