The 13th in a series of posts from Carl Lee.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - but it may be live-streamed
Back in 1970 a 21-year-old Gil Scott Heron recorded his first album and named it after the address of the nightclub where the live recording was made, the ‘Small Talk at 125th and Lenox’. This was right in the heart of Harlem and in 1970 it was, and remains today, the heart of the social and political heart of African-American New York.
The first track on the album is a spoken word monologue called ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. It was a cri-de-coeur: an impassioned social critique and in time it became a part of the canon of Black American music.
I was reminded of this, and also the time in the early 1980s in Sheffield when I finally caught up with Gil Scott Heron and his sublime band lea by his musical partner in melody Brian Jackson.
There was also the time I stumbled into Brian Jackson’s re-imaginings of this heady classic courtesy of BBC Radio 6 DJ Craig Charles.
“You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.”
Gil Scott Heron died in his beloved New York in 2011; he had been in poor health for years after decades of drug use and being HIV positive.
Brian Jackson though is still with us, and how.
At the age of 73 he is still delivering some of the funkiest, sharpest drops around as he plunders his and Scott Heron’s artistic legacy and re-imagines it with a cast of new collaborators, most notably "Masters at Work’, the moniker of legendary re-mix team of ‘Little’ Louie Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez.
Readers: I bought the new Brian Jackson offering straight from the label the day after it was released and that is something I haven’t done in oh, well since last century at least.
This revival of Brian Jackson’s career has not been spawned by a hip New York label but by the longstanding British label Barely Breaking Even (BBE), who since 1996 have been a magnet for alternative talent orbiting around the outer reaches of funk, soul, jazz, house and whatever moves the dance floor in their East London world.
If you think what might rock DJ Gilles Peterson’s boat and you’ll get the idea: from Roy Ayers to Hugh Masakela.
The hard hitting social commentary of Gil Scott Heron somehow feels apposite today as Trump's government in the USA unleashes ICE on predominantly African-American and Hispanic urban neighbourhoods, and a deluge of racism, AI slop and outrage grifting being pumped out globally from US platforms owned by the USA’s richest elites.
Maybe Gil had a premonition, as back in 1992 he bizarrely accepted the paid gig as being a voice-over on Tango’s first ‘Orange Man’ advert.
“You know when you’ve been tangoed”.
I remember this spawning a craze in school for people to slap other students' faces. A fore-runner of loom bands, bottle flips, fidget spinners, dabs and the rest... and the current 6-7... (Alan)
I sort of feel the USA has been rather more than tangoed by the more contemporary orange man.
As the track ‘Winter in America’ that Jackson has revived sets out:
“ And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your soul, Lord knows
From winter in America”
Listen to it here:
Clearly Gil Scott Heron is the poet in his and Jackson’s relationship, but it is Jackson who brings the soul, the jazz flute and shimmering Fender Rhodes piano, and in this hot-off-the-press revival of their oeuvre it is the Latin New York groove from Masters At Work that drives the sound.
I think Craig Charles referred to it as ‘banging’, I’ll not demur and it sure has brightened up a grey and wet winter in Yorkshire.
Yet it is the biting political satire of ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ that Jackson and The Roots rapper ‘Black Thought’ up date with contemporary lyrics that demonstrates Gil Scott Heron’s enduring relevance 65 years after he read his poetry in a Harlem club on the junction of 125th and Lennox.
“You will not be able to block, unfollow, mute or swipe left to disengage with the revolution.”
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
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