THIS Is Black History Month

In 2015 something other than critical thinking has replaced the obvious trend of action we envisioned in the 1970's we felt deep in our bones was sure to materialize listening to Gil Scott-Heron telling the deep stories we felt, but could not tell ourselves. If we followed the path from his pointing finger we were supposed to be in a state of a kind of prosperity that began with a heightened understanding of personal power, and evolve into a respected place in society our great grandparents had sung about in church and field. But, complacency replaced the urgency of becoming a force of nature serpentine in nature capable enough to boost the economy of our rich heritage and brilliance into viable integrity that translates into cultural strengths one can bank on, and respect in American culture as a spiritual power lacking in the substance of American economy of soul.

That is a lot of jibber jabber on my part if you are young enough to have grown up watching the situation comedies that placed the revolutionary into a comical role, and the pimp into a cultural hero the larger world accepts as 'the way we are'!

Gil Scott-Heron, our poet and the nation's prophet is dead now the timbre of his voice reminds me. The finality of decisions is as finite as death is translucent and at one point the end of our life. That is how the work ethic of Death works with vision. Yesterday, we had visions today we don't see. The year 2015 has come, and the areas of concern many of us Blacks own are governed by outside forces, not by inner unctions. That's jibber jabber, our jibber jabber.



Gregory E. Woods
1.29.15

Black man by the pool by Ana Dias 

a LIFE LIVED DEEPLY

Spoken-word musician Gil Scott-Heron dies in NYC

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Cristian Salazar, Associated Press – Sat May 28, 7:29 am ET


NEW YORK – Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," died Friday at age 62.

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

"We're all sort of shattered," she said.

Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating `hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music."

"Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.

Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West.

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which critiqued mass media, for the album "125th and Lenox" in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was "I'm New Here," which he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.

Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time, including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped by the politics of the 1960s and the black literature, especially of the Harlem Renaissance.

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the publication of "The Vulture," a murder mystery.

He also was the author of "The Nigger Factory," a social satire.

This is the man whose attitude, poetry and "bluesology" influenced a whole generation of radical rap musicians. Renowned in the '70s and '80s as the "Minister of Information", Gil Scott Heron is the voice of humanity, whose prose dissects the ills of the world with scalpel-sharp precision. He is a writer/poet/musician and one of America's great originals. Performing work from his latest album 'Spirits', Scott Heron is a man with something to say and a message worth listening to. - anon.