S-H »

Vincent Dussol

Alphabet -Beginnings -Cane, Cats -Determinism ("No" to) / Daddy -Environment -Fast -Godfather -Heroin -Influences -Jamaica -Klansman, M.L. King -Lyrical Pauses -Modernism -Nostalgia -"Other Side (The)" -Presidentiad -Rhyme -Son, Spirits -Time -U. S. A. (State of the Union & Jeremiad) -Vulture -Washington, Whitey, Wind -X

A. Disposition (= prevailing frame of mind or spirit)

"Beginnings": Gil always kept an open eye for them. He wrote a song so entitled; gave the Midnight Band its name because "midnight," he said, can be regarded as the first minute of a new day; he prized the morning, had the most beautiful "Morning Thoughts," praised a "Western Sunrise" rather than nightfall, wrote (in "Sharing"): "Can't you hear my heart?/ It's singing as I wake to greet the day." Until the end, Gil's mood and mode remained inchoative: I'm New Here! N for "no-Nostalgia." The persona in "Back Home" sounds very nostalgic: Scott-Heron had no patience with nostalgia. In "B-Movie," he mocks America's nostalgia for the simpler and simplistic Manichean world embodied by Ronald Reagan This anti-nostalgia bend is present in the earlier "The Summer of 42," a song inspired by the movie with the same title and one that Scott-Heron thinks is pointing in the wrong direction: "Gotta move on, gotta see tomorrow, gotta move on, gotta get ahead. Can't look back there's nothing there but sorrow." The temptation to think that things can be undone is mistaken. "Time stay gone, we never saw it go" ("Speed Kills" on Free Will). T as in "Time": A theme that runs through Scott-Heron's work It is tempting to believe that it is Scott-Heron himself speaking when the narrator of The Vulture traces back the origin of his thoughts on time to a painful moment that seems an exact copy of one of utmost importance in the author's biography. "Time. The word comes through the turnstiles of your mind, ringing that bell that attracts your attention like the warning bell near the end of a line on a typewriter. Time is here; then it is gone. I remember the first day I learned the meaning of the word gone. I had found my grandmother dead. Gone meant over. Dead meant that you, who had been something, were now nothing." (The Vulture,p.56). Was it when he started running? Time is the central subject of the 1980 album: how should we look at the turn of a decade? How should we negotiate such "Corners"? The answer is unambiguous: "Sign posts are meant to shape your growing"; "They're not there to stop your flowing/ To somehow freeze you in the past" ("Corners"). "F" for "Fast": the fourth track on Free Will (1972) is entitled "Speed Kills." It's a slowtempoed song with a flute twittering in the background. Who the one "speed[ing] on by" is, is hard to tell. The children seem to be the only ones knowing how to "Slowly turn." Twentytwo years later, on Spirits, the poet makes this self-assessment: "My life is one of movement/ I been traveling as fast as I can" ("Give Her a Call"); "Grandma's hands used to issue out a warning/ She say, "Scotty why you run so fast." So he had been aware of the dangers of "Moving too fast." The addressee of "Fast Lane" (1982) may have been himself: "Crash landings always got the captain to blame/ But you're the captain driving in the fast lane." Was there a reason to his running?

Coming at the end of a lifetime of speeding in the "Fast Lane," the poem "Running" on the last CD, seems intended to answer the question but the listener's/reader's expectations of a definite answer are frustrated, even mocked. PLAY POEM. "Running" is self-analysis and meditation. It's the confession to an inability not to run and an attempt at finding out the reasons for this inability. Logically, 12 lines out of 21 start with "Because." But the logic of cause and effect falls apart as 'because" itself falls apart in various ways. First, it splits into two: "running makes me look like everyone else, though I hope there will never be cause for that" (emphasis mine). Then the poet specifies that he is running for something of "more value" than just his life while admitting that he is running in fear. So it can't just be death, or can it? Then from a mysterious signified, "cause" becomes a signifier you can play with, pun on, thus shake loose and lose sight of the embarrassing signified: "Because closer, clearer, no sir, nearer/ Because of you and because of that nice/ That you quietly, quickly be causing." "Nice" here becomes a noun and it is something the poet is "be causing." In a gesture of ironical deferment, Gil postpones the revelation of the definitive clues to an indefinite "then," which contrasts with the final "now" as the moment when he's not going to tell us anything. So we'll never know why he was running all the time. In his novel The Divine Song (The Africa List), Abdourahman Waberi has three pages about "the unnamed and unnameable Thing" which musicians have been on a quest to find. A reader of Kerouac will immediately think of the elusive "it" reached by the sax-player in the climactic moments of a solo. The chapter "From Mississippi to Montmartre" (in The Divine Song) ends like this: "on full moon nights, the world is hanging by a thread. He feels nostalgia for this Thing. He wants it back. Rather, he is waiting for it as if it were a messiah." (My translation). O as in "Other Side." The song "Spirits" ends on a line about "seek[ing] the answers beyond our sight". Scott-Heron was a seeker. The most poignant account of his search is probably the "The Other Side" trilogy, featuring himself as the protagonist desperately seeking his home from the other side where he finds himself in a private hell of addiction. One is reminded of Emily Dickinson's experimenting "Some Polar Expiation," as described in #570: "I plucked at our Partition/ As One should pry the Walls -/ Between Himself -and Horror's Twin -/ Within Opposing Cells -". Reaching the other side was conditional on his kicking it/ quitting it, an endlessly postponed "tomorrow," as climactic and shot through with pain as Lady Macbeth's. Another elusive object of his quest was his father… S as in "Son": Gil Scott-Heron's virtually absent relationship with his father is welldocumented by outside sources and his autobiography. The intention not to appear as moaning or to become material for an 'ologist of some kind is clear in view of the spare manner in which the son refers to this relationship in his lyrics. He actually mentions it only twice. First, in "The Needle's Eye": "So I went to see my father/ Many questions on my mind/ But he didn't want to answer me" (Pieces of a Man). The second time, in the upbeat-tempoed and joyful "Hello Sunday! Hello Road!": "And it was on a Sunday that I met my old man/ I was twenty-six years old/ Now but it was much too late to speculate." (Bridges) J as in "Jamaica": Gil's father, Gil St Elmo-Heron, was born in Jamaica. I believe that the three tracks written by Gil in the reggae genre may have been a way to reconnect with his roots: "Storm Music," on Reflections, "No Exit" and "Ready or Not," on Moving Target. "i like to introduce you to some feelings from Jamaica." There is more than the blues to "the music that forms [G S-H's] historical biography" ("Morning Thoughts" on Reflections).

Here is an extract from "Ready or Not" to conclude this first part: PLAY SONG B. Politics (But the personal too is political.) "D" as in "No to Determinism" or as in "Daddy." The subject of his father is linked with G. S-H's obsession with freedom. Gil vehemently denied sociologists the right to hem him in/ hem anyone in within the bounds of a narrow version of social Determinism. "On Coming from a Broken Home" makes this quite clear: "I want to make this a special tribute/ To a family that contradicts the concepts/ Heard the rules but wouldn't accept [when]/They said and as every-ologist would certainly note/ I had no strong male figure right?" No-one and nothing could solely account for what he, Gil Scott-Heron, was. The poet's virtual absence of a relationship with his father didn't stop him from acknowledging features of his own personality as "inherited": "I've inherited trial and error directly from my old man/ But I'm committed to the consequences" ("Give Her a Call" on Spirits.) This means that, ultimately, you should accept that you're not going to be anyone else than yourself. That is the message of "No Exit": "But the cards that they deal you/ Are the ones you gotta play"; "The only one who matters/ Is stuck inside with you" (on Moving Target). But, being oneself does not mean you cannot work on your own self. We should not think of ourselves as mere links in a chain. The limit that our genes set us depends on how willing we are to free ourselves from this idea of a chain. This chain is a pretext for inaction: "We are the ones who tie our fathers to our sons," he sings in "Willing" (1980). Adding: "What my life really means is that the songs that I sing/ Are just pieces of a dream that I've been building." "It's your world!" "Life was made for us to be what we wanna be" (It's Your World). On the autobiographical Spirits, the poet concludes the opus by urging each and everyone (himself included) not to resign themselves to status quo. He has got an example in mind: "Ain't no way overnight to turn your life around/ […]If you're looking for a loser who found strength and success/ Remember the spirit of Brother Malcolm X/ And know you can leave all your mistakes behind/ The day that you "really make up your mind". (Spirits). His third album was entitled Free Will. V as in "The Vulture." Same thing with the vulture. It seems there is no getting rid of the vulture, the bird Gil Scott-Heron makes his symbol of absolute evil. Proof of this is we find it at both ends of Gil's poetic career. ("The Vulture" is given a new title and becomes "Your Soul and Mine" on I'm New Here!). When it first comes, it seems reasonable to assume that the vulture stood for the nation's golden eagle gone wrong, a raptor feeding on the carrion of black ghettos' dead. Despite the amount of fatalism on the poet's part, he insisted that there is sense in fighting it to the death: "Only promise me a battle/ A battle for your soul and mine." (Small Talk At 125 th and Lenox). The song's new title did not lead to any change in the lyrics. "E" as in "environment." Gil Scott-Heron deserves recognition for being an early whistleblower on the subject, the first major African-American recording artist that drew his audience's attention to environmental matters. Side by side with Red (for a revolutionary morning) and Black (for Blacks' real emancipation this time and all it would mean) "Green stands for liberation," he sings in "Liberation Song" (The First Minute of a New Day.) The damage done to the earth is part of his "Winter in America": "the forest buried beneath the highway" that "never had a chance to grow" and "the robins/ Perched in Barren treetops" and longing for "the buffalo who once ruled the plains." His three anti-Nukes songs -"We Almost Lost Detroit," "South Carolina" and the gospel-like "Shut' Um Down" stand out as powerful warnings against the hazard of a nuclear winter, a peril he was quick to identify. PLAY VIDEO K as in "The Klan" ("He who rides with the Klan/ Is a devil and not a man") as opposed to MLK, "Martin King": "A toast to all the leaders/ who had a golden dream" ("A Toast to the People" on From South Africa to South Carolina.) X as in "Malcolm X." Malcolm is a frequent reference on the early albums, the first one especially. The murdered leader is always invoked in a didactic way but the perspective is always changing; it never becomes reflex : it can be to mock a "Blacker-than-thou" attitude among fellow blackmen/ brothers: "I think it was a little too easy for you to forget that you were a negro before Malcolm." The brothers should be honest about their former compromises with Whites. Smugness will not do the trick. Or, when addressing white student & would-be revolutionaries, telling them to "Leave brother Cleaver and Brother Malcolm alone please," the concern is rather not to see black people's revolution hijacked/ harnessed/diverted by white middle-class youngsters who should never forget they are the offspring of slave-owners. And then invoking Malcolm should not be a substitute for action. He took the black community very far indeed, but only so far: "With Malcolm as our leader/ We learned/ and thought/ And thought we had learned/ Things were better/ Things were changing/But things were not together// And now it's your turn." ("Evolution (and Flashback)") on Small Talk on 125 th and Lenox. Like "J" as in "Johannesburg," Z as in "Zimbabwe," mentioned in "Morning Thoughts" is proof of Gil Scott-Heron's internationalist concern about any part of the world where the sun of liberation may finally come to shine. A transatlantic breeze blew and he heard the message on the wind. But Mr. Scott-Heron was never one to favor readymade answers: "Now sometimes distance brings misunderstanding," he writes in "Johannesburg," still assuring "We're on their side." "Don't you want to be free?"

C. Literary Matters (And you can't draw the line between politics and poetics.)

A as in "Alphabet" A one-letter variation can make all the difference. As when fake "freedom" is denounced as "free-doom." Or when Gil Scott-Heron speaks of his artist's response to John Coltrane as both a "complement" and a "compliment." I can't help thinking that the arrest of Gil Scott-Heron's attention on single letters bespeaks the true poet's attention to their basic material. In what may be his most polysemous text, "The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash," Gil Scott-Heron broaches the topic of the alphabet as part of a general reminder of the arbitrariness of what Western cultures may wrongly regard as eternal realities (the calendar being another one.) He doesn't run through the whole alphabet, as I'm doing. Gil finds so much to say about the letter "C" as in "C.I.A," "Chile," "Congo," "Cuba," "Che Guevara" that no other letter is dealt with in any detail. Yet his treatment of "C" was enough to spell out an aspiration of the times: listen! "R-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n"! ("Omen," in Small Talk at 125 th and Lenox). PLAY POEM R as in "rhyme." Gil makes skillful uses of it. Among the most brilliant displays of this talent is his use of the monorhyme in "Work for Peace," which perfectly conveys the stifling character through recent history of the alliance between the Military and the Monetary. PLAY SONG H for "heroin" since it was one of the poisons "pin[ning Gil Scott-Heron] inside a drug infested cell" ("Don't Give Up") . Raises the question, which Claudine Raynaud (co-organizer of the conference this keynote was given at) has explored, of autobiography in Scott-Heron's writing. A guess, with the benefit of hindsight, is that his early songs, poems, or fiction on addiction may have been a way for him to keep harm at arm's length. That he eventually re-read those songs as an anticipation of his own addiction in writing is likely, if not obvious. 4 What was a dramatic monologue in the early "Home is Where the Hatred Is," (Pieces of a Man) with the singer's persona being urged/ or urging himself to "kick it, quit it" becomes clearly autobiographical in the second and third parts of "The Other Side" on the 1994 Spirits. PLAY BOTH EXTRACTS A passage in Gil's youthful novel The Vulture reads like a dreaded future version of himself: "The mainline train to hell was collecting passengers at a rapid clip. The older cornerboys had gone the way of the needle, and all I could do was shake my head and swear that it wouldn't happen to me. Sometimes in the middle of the night I saw myself in a dream world of rubber walls and straitjackets, crying and trying to free myself from insects that crawled all over me and nibbled at my privates. My hands would be so covered with ants and spiders that I couldn't determine the fingers. My hair was infested with lice and leeches. I would wake up screaming and run to the liquor cabinet, where I sat up for the remainder of the night with a drink in my hand, trembling" (31). Late live performances of "Pieces of a Man" suggest that when he sang the last stanza, he was conscious of singing about himself. I as in "influences" → Sticking to obvious ones: Langston Hughes (Jesse B. Semple's stories). Scott-Heron's "Rivers of My Fathers" cannot but call to mind Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Hughes's poem conjures up a grand vision of huge tributaries across the world finally meeting in the speaker's mouth. The word whispered at the end of Gil's song suggests a darker assessment. By whispering "Africa," he seems to have given up on America's ability to come out of the present confusion. Gil's poems and songs more than occasionally include short lists of names, which are so many nods to music heroes of his. Like Baker, one of his characters in The Nigger Factory: "All through the act of love, he [may have] heard the words from The Last Poets' album banging into his mind […]" (88). Of course, John Coltrane (see "Plastic Pattern People" + "And then he wrote Meditations") and Billie Holiday stand out as role models. On the prose front, the campus-novel aspects of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man definitely seem to have been an inspiration for The Nigger Factory. Q as in "I.Q.," a character in The Vulture, who quotes from Pliny the Younger: "Please remember that poets have a license to lie" (186). Did Q-Tip sample Gil Scott-Heron? "C" as in Jean Toomer's Cane. I found sentences therein which I can imagine blowing Gil's mind when he read them. This one first: Kabnis [saying] "[…] Been shaping words t fit my soul" (151). Two lines in Gil's "Plastic Pattern People" sound like a complement and a compliment to Toomer's words: "Up and down a silly ladder run the notes, without the words./ Words are important for the mind, but the notes are for the soul." (in Small Talk at 125 th and Lenox). Then, the most striking sentence: "The flute is a cat that ripples its fur against the deeppurring saxophone" (Cane 104). Gil never played the flute himself but the long meandering flute soli or the instrument's gaily chattering in the background are unmistakable and unforgettable signature features of his sound. (Solo on "Beginnings" + "Winter in America") PLAY FLUTE SOLI Echoes of Toomer's sentence rippled to the infinite on finding out that Mr. Waberi chose to make the narrator of The Divine Song (The Africa List) a cat, the embodiment of enigma which Gil himself chose as an album cover for Secrets. Unless he meant "cats" as Ricky does, addressing Junior, in The Vulture: "I told on you to get cats, Junior. Seedy gave me cats for nothing. They have to be the most beautiful high in the world." (p.236) S, as in "Spirits," the title of the short poem set to music on his 1994/penultimate album, entitled precisely Spirits. Established religion doesn't seem to have been part of Gil Scott-Heron's progressive mindset. ("Class," social class, was a more conscious concern of his, than God.) There are a few mentions of "God" here and there in his songs. But to him, "G-o-d" seems to have meant nothing or no-one specific beyond the vague notion of a beneficent placeholder. When asked on his final tour during an interview at a Barcelona radio station if he believed in anything, he confirmed this belief in spirits. What he meant by "spirits" was the spirits of all those that came before us and that run in our blood, inspiring and guiding us. He only saw them as positive influences, not as forces dragging us down, slowing us down. Spirits were a dynamic force coming from the past. John Coltrane's "Equinox" was one such force. "Spirits" was meant to complement it. G as in "Godfather" (of rap). That is how Gil Scott-Heron has come to be regarded, possibly erroneously. But the question seems of little interest. What matters more, if he is/ was, is what a demanding Godfather he made. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five brought "rap" to millions of ears with "The Message." It was a very serious message, of the kind Gil Scott-Heron must have approved of. Messengers have a responsibility. They should convey the right message. That is why the group of radicals in The Nigger Factory choose to call themselves Members of Justice United in Meaningful Black Education, a name the acronym of which is Mjumbe, "Mjumbe is the Swahili word meaning messenger." (6) When it turned out that the messengers were not delivering the right message, the older poet stepped in and sent them his "Message to the Messengers" and rapped their knuckles. P for "Presidentiad." Homer wrote the Iliad; Pierre de Ronsard wrote La Franciade; Philip Freneau wrote The Columbiad; I propose to gather into an epic entitled The Presidentiad Gil Scott-Heron's poems about a string of American presidents that were in office between the 1950s and the early years of the new century. If, as Pound contended, an epic is a poem containing history, Gil Scott-Heron's lyrics frequently match the criterion.

The Presidentiad would include 7 cantos: After a proem on George Washington and lying. See The Vulture,: "We are raised in America under many contradictions and hypocrisies. America has always been known as the land of the free whites and the home of the slave. One of the greatest perpetuators of this type of hypocrisy was the Father of the country, George Washington. How many of our children are aware of the fact that George Washington was a slaveowner and a criminal being sought by the English authorities? Not very many. And it is important that they know, because a lot of our children grow up idolizing George Washingtonwanting to be like him, because he never told a lie! Never told a lie!' I repeated. 'He was living a lie! All George Washington represents in my mind is another Virginia racist who thought black people were ignorant savages. We must be careful not to let our children foster these false examples. All of this is part of the white "brainwashing" that has taken place in this country for so long." … Following the proem, Canto 1 would be "Bicentennial Blues." It would serve as an introduction as the song's focus is quite broad: it spans the whole history of the United States, from its first president and slave-owner, George Washington, down to Ronald Reagan, with scathing portraits in passing of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Canto 2 would be "H2Ogate Blues" with Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal in full focus; Gerald Ford would be the anti-hero of Canto 3, a follow-up to Canto 2, entitled "We Beg Your Pardon (Pardon Our Analysis)"in which Scott-Heron challenges the non-elected President's decision to pardon President Nixon. "B-Movie," the first instalment of Scott-Heron's treatment of President Reagan, would make up Canto 4. Also a follow-up, "Re-Ron," a plea against Ronald Reagan's re-running for President would be Canto 5. The sixth Canto of this unfinished epic would be "Work for Peace," a poem about the Military Industrial Complex. It starts with a dismissive/ scathing portrayal of Eisenhower as a noxious nonentity and includes a quick kick in the teeth for George W. Bush as the mere shadow of a commander-in-chief. To conclude this historical and very personal series, "Black History/ The World" could be a possible seventh canto since it consists in an alternative view of world history as seen by a Black Man claiming loud and clear his right to tell "His-story." Thus The Presidentiad would end. The presence of this epic dimension could be what Waberi was aware of with this nod to Dante in his novel's French title La Divine Chanson, which calls to mind The Divine Comedy. U as in "U.S.A.": Closer to Bruce Springsteen than to Bob Dylan to which he has sometimes been compared, Gil Scott-Heron never stopped critically scrutinizing his country. An alternative to The Presidentiad as a title to his collected more political poems about America could be An American Jeremiad since up until Spirits, Scott-Heron kept assessing how America was measuring up to the values it championed at inception. He did not like what he found … Remember: "Halfway justice/ Halfway liberty/ Halfway equality/ It's a half-ass year". L as in "lyrical pauses". "Just like music/ Just like music that we make/ Fills the spirit/ And helps to see a clearer day" ("Must Be Something" in The First Minute of a New Day). Like the occasional long flute soli appearing here and there through G S-H's long recording career, most of his musical opuses include restorative lyrical breaks. Those are grounded in the natural world and refer to his experience of family life. Pieces of a Man has "I Think I'll Call It Morning," Free Will has "The Middle of Your Day," Bridges has "Song of the Wind." Winter in America has "Rivers of My Fathers," From South Africa to South Carolina has "A Lovely Day," Reflections has "Grandma's Hands," Moving Target has "Explanations," Real Eyes has "Combinations" and "Your Daddy Loves You," I'm New Here has "On Coming from a Broken Home," The First Minute of a New Day has "Western Sunrise." Only Small Talk At 125 th and Lenox is relentlessly angry; yet the title poem provides some kind of a breather with its modernistic transcript of mundane/ everyday conversations at a Harlem street corner. M for "Modernism": there is Harlem Renaissance-type Modernism in "Small Talk at 125 th and Lenox," a succession of bittersweet snapshots in the form of assembled scraps of conversation recording the district's atmosphere. Nostalgia for Southern food, the week-end routine of sin and redemption, sexual bantering, dismissal of Washington politics, slogan-like exchanges, the grudge borne to Whites, anecdotes of economic hardship and injustice, complaints about junkies and gentle mocking of the procrastinating type who loves it too much there to ever move from the neighborhood: it's all in there. Rather than a criticism of passiveness in those revolutionary days, I take the poet's self-effacement between Harlemites' words as a sign of deep empathy. W as in "words." Which of the words and the music came first to Mr. Scott-Heron? We gain precious little information on this. "Late Last Night" (on 1980) is the rare occasion when he pictures himself in the throes of composition. He had had "Music runnin' up and down and sideways in [his] head," a "poem [..] stereoed inside [his] mind" when following some incident, "quick as the words occurred to [him], disappeared again"/ due to "all the confusion and everything, [he] forgot the words to [his] tune." Y as in "you." Gil's final word on his final CD is "You," part of a final "Thank you" to his Mama. Gil Scott-Heron's lyrics have several concentric circles of addressees: they range from "I and I," in a dialogue with himself, to a community of two whose other member can variously be his mother, America itself, a fictional character ("Karintha" and "Becky" from Cane), a man who decided to be what he is (just a man since "there ain't no such thing as a superman"), the wind "You alone have been to Africa" ("Song of the Wind"), a casualty of violence to whom he pays homage, or any listener representative of the human kind. The favored community of the brothers, most present in the early years is equally likely to be admonished and empathized/sympathized with/and urged on by the poet: "Must be somethin'/ Must be somethin' we can do!" PLAY "Morning Thoughts" ***