“All the dreams you show up in are not your own”: The Legacy of Gil Scott-Heron

Even as I was mesmerized by it, I was aware of the incongruity, if not the ridiculousness of it. I was keenly aware that I wasn’t who this man was talking to. I knew that he was talking about a whole different planet from NorthPark Mall in Davenport, Iowa — one that I’d never seen anything like and couldn’t even imagine. I didn’t have the tools to analyze the subjects, but the groove grabbed me.

Gil Scott-Heron’s art, like his life, was often about spanning two different worlds. Born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, his mother, Bobbie, was an opera singer who sang with the New York Oratorio Society, while his father, Gil, was a Jamaican star soccer player known as the Black Arrow who played for Scottish Celtic.

His parents split when he was a child, and he was sent to live with his mother’s mother, Lillie Scott, next door to a funeral home in Jackson, TN while his mother went to Puerto Rico to teach English. It was Lillie who gave Gil his start in music, when she rescued the funeral home’s piano from the junkyard for six dollars so that he could play hymns for her ladies’ sewing circle. Eight-year-old Gil had started listening to the blues on WDIA in Memphis and figured out that he could play John Lee Hooker tunes if he mixed them in with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Four years later, Lillie died in her sleep, leaving Gil to find her, an event that understandably traumatized him. Back he went to urban life, this time in the Bronx with his mother and her brother. His uncle soon moved out, forcing Gil and his mother to move into a housing project in Manhattan. Gil later told Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker, “Black people didn’t want to live in Chelsea, but we just wanted to go somewhere. We started in ’65. It was eighty-five percent Puerto Rican, 15 percent white, and me.”

His English teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School was a graduate of the Fieldston School, a private institution in the affluent Riverdale section of the Bronx. One day a bored Gil challenged her to let him leave class, saying he could write better than the authors she was assigning the class to read and giving her a piece from his notebook. She sent it to the head of the English department at Fieldston, who on reading it invited Gil to a meeting.

In his second meeting with school officials, he showed an early instance of his DGAF attitude. When asked how he’d feel if passed by a classmate in a limo as he walked to the school from the subway, he replied, “Same way as you. Y’all can’t afford no limousine. How do you feel?” He received a full scholarship.

He quickly found out that this acceptance only went so far. In his second year, he ran afoul of school officials for playing the Temptations on the choir’s Steinway, something he maintains wasn’t proscribed until he did it. It may have been his attitude or his status as one of five Black students in a class of 100, but the incident prompted a meeting with his mother and the threat of expulsion (he got off with having to stay after school three Wednesdays in a row to clean erasers). Whichever it was, it was one of the more benign things he endured while there.

From Fieldston, Gil headed to Pennsylvania and Lincoln University, alma mater of his idol, Langston Hughes. Here, two things happened that changed his life: He saw the Last Poets, a Black spoken-word group, and he met Brian Jackson, a flautist and keyboardist from Bed-Stuy with whom he formed the group Black and Blues and who would be his collaborator for years, playing on his seminal records.

His calling card.

After two years at Lincoln, Gil left to write poetry and two novels, “The Vulture” and “The N***** Factory,” with the former published to good reviews in 1970. That same year, his debut album, the live “Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox” was released, featuring a spare early arrangement of “Revolution.”  The follow-up was his first studio work, the more melodic “Pieces of a Man.” He headed back to Chelsea for a time before getting his MA in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars program in 1972, despite never having finished his undergrad degree. Starting that year, he taught lit and creative writing full-time at D.C.’s Federal City College as he and Jackson continued to make music.

 In 1974, his track “The Bottle” had gotten airplay in NYC and caught the ear of Clive Davis, who went with Stevie Wonder to check out Gil and his band at the Beacon Theater. Davis later compared the experience to the times he saw Whitney Houston and Patti Smith for the first time: “I remember it vividly and I remember being floored…He was such a charismatic, compelling, striking young artist, very much of his moment in time. I was very taken with him…This was someone whose impact would be profound.”

Davis signed Gil to his new Arista label, for which Scott-Heron would record four albums over the next 10 years. But as the 80s went on, his drug addiction took hold, and the label dropped him. During the 90s and early 2000s he recorded and performed sporadically between stints in jail as his health and relationships eroded.

While serving time at Riker’s in 2009, Scott-Heron was visited by Richard Russell, owner of XL Records, at various times the home of Adele, the White Stripes, Radiohead, and MIA. Upon his release, at Russell’s urging, Scott-Heron recorded his last album, 2010’s introspective, electronic-oriented “I’m New Here.” Russell then asked The xx’s Jamie xx, a longtime fan, to remix the album. Done with Scott-Heron’s help, “We’re New Here,” spent time in the UK albums chart. This past February, a 10^th-anniversary edition of the album and another remixed version by Makaya McCraven were released. Drugs had ravaged his voice, but at the same time, it was as strong as ever.

For an all-too-brief period, it looked like the critically acclaimed “I’m New Here” and the 2011 European tour would be Scott-Heron’s comeback, but it wasn’t to be. His health was already broken, and on getting back from Europe he went into St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, where he died on May 27, 2011 of undisclosed causes. The poet had said all he ever would about this world.

Scott-Heron’s link to the world of hip hop came about in his lifetime, but it wasn’t something he sought out, nor was it something he was even proud of. “I don’t want to tell you how embarrassing that can be,” he told The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson in a seminal piece entitled “New York is Killing Me,” published shortly before his death. “Long as it don’t talk about ‘yo mama’ and stuff, I usually let it go. It’s not all bad when you get sampled—hell, you make money. They give you some money to shut you up. I guess to shut you up they should have left you alone.” He hated what he saw as posturing without substance, and in 1994’s “A Message to the Messengers,” he warned that art would inform life:

“Tell all them gun totin’ young brothers/That the man is glad to see us out there killin’ one another.”

By the end of the year he recorded it, both Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac were both gone. 

But along with that of his own influence, the Last Poets, hip hop artists through the years have embraced the ethos of his work. Public Enemy’s Chuck D. first heard Scott-Heron in the 70s as a teenager and says of him, “(Scott-Heron and the Last Poets) are “not only important; they’re necessary, because they are the roots of rap—taking a word and juxtaposing it into some sort of music. You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word. He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else. In combining music with the word, from the voice on down, you follow the template he laid out. His rapping is rhythmic, some of it’s songs, it’s punchy, and all those qualities are still used today.”

When asked about all this, Scott-Heron just said, “I think they made a mistake.”

But as he said when Russell came to him to propose a new album, “All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

Upon his death, in addition to tributes from the likes of Nile Rodgers and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, homage came from Ghostface Killah, Snoop Dogg, who called him “1 of tha greats,” and Eminem, who said that Scott-Heron “…influenced all of hip hop.” Tupac’s own “Dear Mama” was described by as his “attempt at a Gil Scott-Heron record.” Talib Kweli said, “Kanye West, Jay-Z, Ice Cube… mention Gil Scott-Heron and go oan about how he’s influenced them. Put it this way: without Gil Scott-Heron there would be no Kanye talking about ‘New Slaves’.” Scott-Heron’s music even made it to Hollywood: a Leon Bridges cover of “Whitey on the Moon” was included in the 2018 soundtrack to “First Man.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is woefully behind on recognizing hip hop. It’s yet to honor LL Cool J, and women haven’t been part of the conversation at all (I know, you’re shocked). If Scott-Heron were still with us, he likely wouldn’t have much use for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But he belongs. Alongside influences like Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Lady Day and John Coltrane, he belongs.

Pages: 1 2