Shutem Down: Reflections on Ferguson and Gil Scott-Heron
by Michael A. Gonzales
After the Michael Brown decision in Ferguson, Missouri last week, amid the expected disgust about the so-called fairness of a legal system that allowed murderous police officer Darren Wilson to remain free and employed while pocketing cash for network news interviews, I was taken back to the days of yesteryear when Id seen so many scenes of racism played out on my childhood television screen. Memories of fire hoses and German shepherds used against peaceful marchers in the sixties, white Bostonians spitting on Black school children in the seventies, crazy cops killing us in New York City in the eighties and, on and on. Decades later, visions of a bloody teenaged Michael Brown sprawled in the streets have been connected to that collage of disturbing images in my mind that visually defines racism in my lifetime.
Continually haunted, I try to go about my days as a Black man in America, avoiding direct eye-contact with police least they suspect that I too am a cigar grabbing criminal who deserves death over dignity. Although I havent been a teenager in many years, it doesnt deter me from thinking that I too could be slain because of the color of my skin, because of the kink of my hair, because of the bop in my walk, because of the jungle music in my head.
While new school artists from J. Cole to The Game have written protest anthems for the millennial generation, Im an old head who came of age when James Brown was shrieking about being Black-n-proud, Marvin Gaye beautifully moaned, Whats Going On? and Curtis Mayfield broke down our Hard Times. Offering strength through lyrics and solace through rhythm, these musical men kept Black America focused on the revolutionary road that supposedly led to our inevitable freedom from stereotypes and senseless death.
Although I grooved to those tunes, as a boy at the time they were just regular songs to me, finger-poppin tunes whose true meanings my young mind didnt grasp. It wasnt until I heard Gil Scott-Herons revolutionary blues Johannesburg on Saturday Night Live in 1975 that I first got turned out by the possibilities politics in Black pop. Airing on December 13th, it was a gig I later learned hed gotten through his friend Richard Pryor, who guest-hosted the show that night.
Dressed in pajamas and sitting on the living-room floor of our Harlem apartment, my cool moms let me stay-up late on Saturday nights to watch the show; she and her friends Bubba and Herman sat on the couch. On the boob tube, Pryor (whose masterful comedy album That Niggers Crazy I completely memorized the year before) held up the cover of Gils upcoming album From South Africa to South Carolina, introduced the Afro wearing lanky cat standing next to him.
My moms friends were excited, but Id had never heard of the guy; I was more shaking my groove thang to the Ohio Players blazing Fire or getting down to Earth, Wind & Fires brilliant Shining Star. According to the recently released Scott-Heron biography Pieces of a Man by Marcus Baram, NBCs producers were peeved and hoped had that Pryor could bring in a more popular group. Still, with SNL producer Lorne Michaels giving Pryor permission to book whomever he wanted, the show also gave Gil, as Baram documents, free rein to play any songs he wanted.
After swaggering across the stage to his keyboard the then 26-year-old, Gils youthful face was untarnished and filled with the promise. Inevitably for me, it was a musical moment that changed my life. Sitting behind his keyboards sporting a beard, Heron wore a dashiki and blue jeans. Heron sang about a foreign land called Johannesburg, something else Id never heard of as his intriguing mix of revolutionary poetics, African percussion and bluesy backdrop was hypnotic.
Being twelve years old at the time, I had never heard of apartheid and had no idea what this Black Panther looking dude was even talking about, but whatever it was, I knew the subject was serious.
Gil Scott-Heron & Richard Pryor from Culture Cuts on Vimeo.
For the next few minutes, I was enthralled by the sound and spectacle, while being acutely aware that I was also learning something; for the next three decades, Gil Scott-Heron became one of my favorite teachers. Although not a real singer on par with Marvin Gaye, there was something enticing about Gils gravelly voice and heavy weather lyricism. Listening to his classic singles, the self-proclaimed bluesologist schooled a generation in the art of poetic protest.
As he did on his first hit single The Bottle, Gils blistering track about the bitter effects of alcoholism, Heron taught lessons without being preachy. As his musical student, Public Enemy leader Chuck D. once put it on Dont Believe the Hype, Gil knew how to, Rock the hard jams, but treat it like a seminar. In other words, the brother could drop science and still make you boogie.
Teaming with music man Brian Jackson, he introduced his listeners to various musical styles while also taking them on a brutal tour through the dark side of America as rapped about the corpse of Jose Campos Torres or the cultural signposts throughout The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, one of his most powerful and influential songs.
Heron and Jackson recorded one album on the indie label Strata East (Winter in America) until primo record man Clive Davis, who had worked with Miles Davis, Sly Stone and Janis Joplin at Columbia Records, signed them to his newly formed Arista Records in 1975.
Unlike other political minded singers who wrote material based on experience and/or emotion, when the Lincoln University educated Gil, who had also written two novels (The Vulture and The Nigger Factory) and a book of poems, riffed on subjects including ghetto strife, Watergate, mine workers and addiction; one got a sense that his knowledge was both book learned and street smart, while also maintaining a sense of humor that was wicked and wise. From South Africa to South Carolina was Gils second album for Arista, where he released nine albums total.
Although Gil Scott-Heron was the first artist signed to Arista, ten years later, soon after Davis released Whitney Houstons self-titled debut album, he was kicked to the curb. Gil continued to tour and occasionally made records, but it was also during this period that he sprawled into a long addiction that lead to health issues, numerous arrests and countless problems. When his friend Stevie Wonder volunteered to pay for Herons rehab, the singer refused.
With the introduction of crack in the mid-1980s, drugs were cheap and plentiful while simultaneously our communities were devastated. My old uptown Harlem hood, where Gil also lived, was soon transformed into a drug bazaar where coke and crack was sold openly.
One chilly winter night in 1995, I was hanging-out at a New York City bar called the Oasis. Located on the corner of a 149th Street and Broadway, it was an unofficial landmark that had been there since before I was born. Drunk on rum and cola, I stepped outside to get some air. A few of the patrons were drug dealers whose jittery customers often lurked under the blood red awning waiting for their pushers to exit through the glass door. It was then that I noticed Gil as he stood outside looking beaten down by life. It was brutal seeing Gil, all bummy beneath a dim street light with wild gray hair and a face that looked like a road map through hell.
At that moment, it was difficult to grasp that the man who wrote the addiction anthems Home Is Where the Hatred Is (1972) and The Bottle (1974) had become a junkie himself. However, when thought about rationally, one realizes its not difficult to become a dope fiend, because it always begins as something fun: sniffing a few lines with friends before the gig, freebasing with some fine soul sisters after the show and next thing you know, youve gone from partying to dreading the first rays of daylight as you smoke or sniff alone.
Perhaps, like many of us before and after Ferguson who see little promise in a system that constantly fails us while blaming the victims for their own brutal murders, Gil Scott-Heron was simply tired. How much racism can a man endure before he finally breaks? How much ignorance can a man take before he finally retreats into his own mind? How much bloodshed can a man take before he finally feels as though rock bottom is the best hiding place from the bullets with our race written on them?
After Gil finally scored a few hits of rock, he quickly disappeared into the night. Truthfully, if he had died soon after, I wouldnt have been surprised. Yet, he somehow managed to hold on for another sixteen years of problems, prisons and poetry. In the meantime, the brother was being rediscovered my a new generation, and Herons balance of intellectualism, musical diversity and cynical humor also inspired the next generation of musical wordsmiths and jazzy rebels including Gang Starr, Mos Def, Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Common and Kayne West, who he sampled on the brilliant Who Will Survive in America on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
In June of 2010, when Gil performed in Central Park, Common joined him onstage. The soul of his music
touched my heart and spirit, Common told XXL. His voice and his words and his songs were like the revolution being told in the freshest way…he will always be cherished and loved. In addition to rappers, Scotts fusion of soul, salsa and jazz also helped lay the foundation for trip-hop, neo-soul and spoken word enthusiasts.
That same year, brother Gil, whom many folks had simply written off as just another junkie loser, surprised the world with his last classic single Me and the Devil, a brilliantly spooky cover of a Robert Johnson blues song. HIV-positive and still crack addicted, Herons thirteenth studio effort Im New Here (XL Recordings) was a minor miracle and a worthy addition to his canon of classics.
Releasing the title track as the second single, the critically acclaimed album also contained the prophetic track New York is Killing Me. A year after making a comeback, one of the most influential voices of our generation was finally silenced when Gil Scott Heron died on May 27, 2011 in New York City. He was 62.
Although a few of my friends went to his funeral at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Kayne I opted to stay home with my friend Shelia, perhaps the biggest Gil Scott-Heron fan I know, as we drank, played spades and blared his music loudly.
Like Nina Simone before and Public Enemy afterwards, Herons hard truths has travelled widely touching the souls of our communities and beyond. Artistic folks (painters, filmmakers, intellectuals and poets) often cite Gil Scott-Heron for giving them courage and inspiring them to strive for more in their work.
Having joined that list of flawed folks I love including Charlie Parker, Dinah Washington, Sly Stone and Jean-Michel Basquiat, brother Gil was another imperfect artist who did more damage to himself than anyone else while also contributing greatly to that fire-breathing creature we call culture.
In a post-Ferguson world that negates any discussion of post-racial anything, Gil Scott-Herons aural bombs of race, rage and revolt are still relevant, still explosive and still needed as a soundtrack as we navigate through the war zone of racism hoping to escape death.