Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011

And I was hurt and scared and shocked when Lillie Scott left suddenly one night, and they sent a limousine from heaven, to take her to God, if there is one. So I knew she had gone.
- Gil Scott-Heron, On Coming From a Broken Home

You can measure the complexity of a life by the inadequacy of the thumbnail obit. When Gil Scott-Heron died on Friday afternoon, the news reports invariably called him “Godfather of Rap”. It’s not entirely untrue but it does him a huge disservice, making him the prologue to someone else’s story instead of the hero of his own. When the New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson asked him what he thought when people told him he had pioneered hip hop he shrugged, “I just think they made a mistake.”

The figure he most resembled wasn’t an MC but Bob Dylan. A tough, scrawny prodigy, wiser than his years. A poet, storyteller and comedian as well as a musician. Restless, slippery, always two steps ahead. As a protest singer, he usually got to a topic before anyone else (Watergate, apartheid, nuclear power), and his treatment was cleverer and funnier than anyone else’s. Unlike Dylan he knew his stuff and stuck with it. He wrote personal songs too, but his greatest achievement was to turn politics into art with more consistent skill and commitment than pretty much anyone else.

He disliked slogans and platitudes. People sometimes forget that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was meant to be satire, not prophecy. While the Last Poets were rapping about impending revolution, Scott-Heron stood to one side with a sardonic smile, trusting nobody. High ideals struck him as promises just waiting to be broken, whether it was Whitey on the moon or a Black Power preacher on a street corner. He cared about the individuals he sang about, cooped up in their tenements, drowning in booze, walking through the twilight. Few songwriters excel at both satire and empathy, but Scott-Heron did because he made a distinction between politics as national theatre — absurd, comic, ripe for ridicule — and the way politics permeates the warp and weft of everyday life, which is as serious as it gets.

He had a rich, charismatic singing voice but he was above all a great talker. It was when he was addressing an audience, speaking so fluidly and confidently that you couldn’t tell where the between-song banter ended and the song itself began, that he seemed most in command of his art: what he called “throwing words at things and having them stick to the sense of it”. Topical raps like B Movie, H2O Gate Blues or Pardon Our Analysis (We Beg Your Pardon) should by rights be as dead as the presidents they skewered, but they’re kept alive by the agility of the language, the precision of the jokes, the sly authority of his voice. Furthermore, he was invariably right without being self-righteous. “There’s a difference between being a piano player from Tennessee and an international crusader,” he said in an interview last year.

He was promoting I’m New Here, his first album in 16 years and his first great one in 29. The record is a memoir in fragments. The cackling, earthy spoken interludes are as integral as the songs, and more candid. While the title track, a Smog cover, seemed to promise a document of catharsis and redemption after fruitless years in and out of jail and addicted to crack (“No matter how far wrong you’ve gone/You can always turn it around”), Scott-Heron’s tarry, guttural voice said it was more complicated than that. I will not be your reformed character. I will not be your elder statesman. I will not be your ghetto conscience. I retain the right to fuck up. In the New Yorker profile, he was still using drugs and still estranged from Brian Jackson, his musical partner throughout the 70s.

I tried and failed to speak to him for the book and again, a few months ago, for a magazine, but at least I saw him live last year. Not what he used to be but so much better than he might have been. He had been silent for so long and now I could hear his voice again: defiant, erratic and rattling with history. And then they sent a limousine for him.

If I hadn’t been as eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as introspective, as selfish, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be who I am.
- Gil Scott-Heron, I’ve Been Me

RECOMMENDED READING: A tribute from his friend and publisher Jamie Byng, Alec Wilkinson’s New Yorker profile and Sean O’Hagan’s Observer interview. ALSO: Alec Wilkinson’s thoughts on the New Yorker blog and Nate Patrin’s Pitchfork tribute, with links to dozens of songs that GSH recorded and inspired.

Dylan in China

“No matter what Bob Dylan has done… or what he will do for the rest of his life, his obituary has already been written: ‘Bob Dylan, best known as a protest singer from the 1960s, died yesterday…’” That line, from Greil Marcus’s excellent essay on Masters of War, is one of my favourite observations about Dylan, and it came to mind again this week when the 70-year-old singer toured China for the first time. On Radio 4’s Today programme, they played Blowin’ in the Wind and spoke to a Chinese fan who said he loved Dylan because he sang songs of peace. It was as if the last four-and-a-half decades had never happened, and Dylan was still the skinny guy with the harmonica on stage telling the world that the times they were a-changin’.

Well, the times went and a-changed for Dylan, several times, but it was the singer’s misfortune to arrive in China the same week the authorities arrested dissident artist Ai Weiwei. To human rights advocates, Dylan was suddenly meant to turn back into the protest singer he used to be and take a stand. “It’s shocking to see him collude in this kind of censorship,” said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch. “Back in the day, if he had been in Ai’s shoes, he would have expected someone to speak up for him. What does he have to lose?” Newspapers noted, disapprovingly, that he had had his setlist vetted by the Chinese authorities. (Given Dylan’s famously unpredictable live form, I wonder if they also ordered him to play the songs properly: “Just like on the albums please, Mr Dylan.”)

So even though he played some songs that are often considered broadly (albeit sometimes cryptically) political, like Ballad of a Thin Man (beloved of the Black Panthers back in ’66), A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Desolation Row, Like a Rolling Stone and All Along the Watchtower, reporters bemoaned two omissions: Blowin’ in the Wind (which he last played in Taiwan on Tuesday) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (California, August 2009). After Beijing and Shanghai last week, he plays Hong Kong on Tuesday and Wednesday but don’t hold your breath. Critics also complained that he didn’t say anything between songs, but then he never does.

If it were U2 playing China, having agreed not to perform Pride, Sunday Bloody Sunday or Walk On, then the critics would have a point. They still align themselves with resistance movements and political prisoners and therefore probably wouldn’t accept the booking in the first place. But Dylan made things perfectly clear back in 1964 when he told the New Yorker: “Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know – be a spokesman.” The only time I can remember him saying about China was a surreal 1966 Playboy interview in which he jokingly challenged Chairman Mao to a fistfight.

By then, he had rejected explicit protest songs. His only relapses for leftist causes were 1971’s George Jackson and 1975’s Hurricane, while 1983’s Neighbourhood Bully, a stout defence of Israeli foreign policy released during his born-again Christian phase, was political in a direction that few of his old 60s fans expected or enjoyed. This is a man who couldn’t even be persuaded to publicly criticise the war in Vietnam, for God’s sake. In the summer of 1968, when the anti-war movement was gearing up for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he defended a friend who supported the war by telling a surprised interviewer, “People have their views. Anyway, how do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

But just as Joan Baez is still asked by some grey-haired protesters whether “Bobby” will be joining at her at the latest demonstration, his past won’t let him go. Do I wish he’d said something about Ai Weiwei, simply out of support for a fellow artist? Of course. Am I surprised he didn’t? Hell no. As David Aaronovitch put it in a smart Times (£) comment piece, “As Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have commented, the silence from the West over the latest crackdown has been deafening. Why would Dylan be prepared to do stuff that we aren’t? But he’s 70 and doesn’t need the money and his words conceivably might make a difference.”

One song in his Beijing setlist contains a neat, if unintended historical lesson. At the 1965 Newport folk festival, where he famously enacted his divorce from the veteran left-wing folkies who had fallen for him so hard, he played a reluctant encore featuring the tartly titled It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. The idea that Dylan is the man to speak out on righteous causes — the rock star as noble activist — should be all over now. It should have been for 46 years. But still it endures. Bob Dylan, best known as a protest singer from the 1960s, has no say in the matter.

Note: For more on Ai Weiwei’s life and career, this New Yorker article from May 2010 is unbeatable.

Bashment and Bob

Interesting piece by Dan Hancox, who knows more than most about the different kinds of political messages appearing across the musical spectrum in response to government cuts. I think he’s unjustly sniffy about protest songs, making a distinction simply between records he likes and ones he doesn’t — the lyrics in the bashment mix are no more sophisticated than the Agitator’s, albeit usually funnier. But he’s right to challenge Steve Goodman (Kode9)’s absurd claim that overtly political music is just “boring”. Of course it can be boring, it can be bad, and there’s space for all kinds of more subtle, coded alternatives, but I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who dismisses with one sweep of the hand. I’m not even going to start to list all the non-boring political songs — I have a book full of them.

I’ve also been reading Greil Marcus’s new book of essays about Bob Dylan, which celebrates perhaps the longest and most fruitful musician/critic relationship in rock. When he writes about the aesthetic failings of a certain kind of protest song, I tend to pay attention. In a review of a 1998 tribute album to Pete Seeger he writes:

Not all of them are bad, any more than all protest songs are bad.… But the purity of heart, the certainty of righteousness, the inexplicability of doubt, and the smooth, genteel, utterly harmless surfaces of the music, whatever the style, is like a disease. As one wades across this double CD — which has a lot less to say about the indomitability of the human soul than the recently released four-CD set Bird Call! The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen, a band known only of its single hit, the 1962 “Surfin’ Bird’” — one realizes that Pete Seeger’s songs… really are about one world: his.”

Now that’s how to phrase a critique. “Boring”? Try harder.

Suze Rotolo 1943-2011

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s former girlfriend and muse, died last Thursday after a long illness. I came to admire her a great deal while researching my book. As a so-called “red diaper” baby and member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), she had the radical upbringing that Dylan lacked and she prodded his political conscience into life. Without her input, it’s by no means certain that Dylan would have ever have written Blowin’ in the Wind or Masters of War. She even illustrated several of Dylan’s protest songs when they first appeared in Broadside magazine. After the couple split, and Dylan began to divest himself of what he saw as political baggage, she continued to work as an activist and artist. Here’s the relevant section from my book, the scene being Greenwich Village, 1961:

In some ways, the most important person Dylan met during those first few months in the Village was not an industry figure, but a smart, beautiful seventeen-year-old named Suze Rotolo. They were introduced in July and fell in love almost immediately. At the apartment they shared on West 4th Street, Rotolo fed her boyfriend’s gargantuan appetite for new stimuli with the likes of Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Graves and Bertolt Brecht: he devotes five pages in Chronicles to the ‘outrageous power’ of Brecht and Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ and its terrifying black freighter. Crucially, Rotolo also awoke his political conscience. She was working as a secretary for CORE and came home each night with stories about the civil rights struggle. One day towards the end of January 1962, with a CORE benefit show looming, Dylan composed ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till’, about a black fourteen-year-old who had been beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Bob Dylan the protest singer was born.

Dylan denies he was ever a protest singer, but then he didn’t think Woody Guthrie wrote protest songs either. He argued instead in terms of ‘topical songs’, like those written by his Village contem- poraries Tom Paxton and Len Chandler. ‘He didn’t read or clip the papers and refer to it later,’ Rotolo told Dylan’s biographer, Anthony Scaduto. ‘With Dylan it was not that conscious journalistic approach. It was more poetical. It was all intuitive, on an emotional level.’

A scary John Birchers soundtrack playing in the background

A month ago, my gut feeling was that the Republican hierarchy and conservative punditocracy would pander to Tea Party sentiment until the midterms and then steer a more moderate path. This excellent piece by Ron Rosenbaum suggests otherwise. We know there’s going to be a Republican takeover today but exactly what kind of Republicans will be taking over? And where are the level-headed conservatives who will point out that rage is an emotion, not a political strategy?

Here’s Rachel Maddow on how William F Buckley and the Republican leadership sensibly rejected the John Birch Society in 1965 versus current conservatives’ willingness to embrace the lunatic fringe.

And here’s the Dylan song it’s named after, complete with strange picture of penguins:

They say sing while you slave and I just get bored

This isn’t by any means the most famous Solomon Burke single but it was the one I played when I heard that he had died a week ago because it’s one of the highlights of an excellent new compilation called How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan. I thought of Dylan’s song again on Wednesday, when Margaret Thatcher’s 85th birthday was, rather wonderfully, overshadowed in the news by rejoicing miners, because the Specials and U2 both covered it, with fresh intent, in the early 80s (the Specials changed “National Guard” to “National Front”). Dylan wrote it in 1965 while he was in the process of disowning protest songs and the scene that came with them — buzzing with electricity, this was the song which outraged folk’s old guard at Newport that year — but it sounds like one nonetheless.