Inner city tantrums: what Kanye West learned (or didn’t learn) from Gil Scott-Heron

Like a lot of people, for the last few days I’ve been getting to grips with Kanye West’s megalomaniacal opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I’ve written on the Guardian website about the avalanche of praise that it has received thus far, why I think it reveals a hankering for a modern masterpiece which is not just a good record but a significant cultural event, and why I’m not convinced that this fits the bill, brilliant though it often is.

What I find interesting is that Kanye himself is so clearly reaching for that significance, and never more clearly than on the last song, Who Will Survive in America, where he turns to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 recording Comment #1 for some climactic gravitas.

As I wrote in a recent blog, circa 2005 I thought Kanye might be undergoing a potentially fruitful process of politicisation. I gave up on that notion pretty quickly — Kanye’s favourite subject, to the exclusion of almost everything else, is Kanye — and that’s fine. Lots of artists dabble in politics, realise it’s not their strong suit and then move on. Better to do that than to make bad music out of bad politics. He’s even backed down from his seminal attack on George W Bush, in a rant crass enough to draw parallels with his feud with Taylor Swift. It’s depressing but, if he’s sincere, then, well, OK. So be it.

But it feels like he can’t bring himself to let go of the extra cultural clout that a political dimension brings, or to give up on the idea that he might tangentially belong to the tradition of Gil and Marvin and Stevie. In Gorgeous, an early track on the record, he makes a pitch for his music as “inter century anthems based off inner city tantrums” and hip hop as “the soul music for the slaves that the youth is missing”. When he compares his situation to “when they tried to have Ali enlisted,” the yearning for persecuted-hero status is palpable. That’s a delusion I can live with, but the Gil sample bothers me more each time I hear it.

Scott-Heron, like Chuck D, possessess one of black music’s great voices of righteous authority — he could read out a Facebook status update and make it sound like the “I have a dream” speech. Kanye sampled his Home Is Where the Hatred Is to good effect under Common’s ghetto-conscious rap on 2005’s My Way Home, giving a respectful nod to black music’s tradition of protest. As Public Enemy demonstrated, a historically resonant sample can work like a web page hyperlink: you click on Rebel Without a Pause in 1988 and it takes you to Jesse Jackson at Wattstax in 1972, and maybe you decide to find out more. In his book on PE’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Christopher R Weingarten talks about the band “dropping clues that their music was bigger than hip hop”. It’s a history lesson in disguise, there for those who are interested.

But if you follow the clue in Who Will Survive in America to Comment #1 you realize how bizarrely ahistorical Kanye’s sample is, thrilling and moving though he makes it sound. Even the heavily edited portion he uses is puzzling in 2010. “The new word to have is revolution”? No it isn’t. “Build a new route to China if they’ll have you?” Why? And then you hear the bits Kanye left out.

In 1970, Scott-Heron was a hungry, cocky 21-year-old novelist and poet. The cover of his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox breathlessly announced, “Gil Scott-Heron takes you Inside Black… His is the voice of the new black man, rebellious and proud, demanding to be heard, announcing his destiny: ‘I AM COMING!’” (That’s the kind of pitch Kanye can endorse.) He had a flinty, darting intellect and little tolerance for voguish revolutionary rhetoric. While the Last Poets were talking about confrontation, Scott-Heron tracks like Brother and Whitey on the Moon emphasised brass tacks: food, shelter, education and medicine.

Comment #1 was his dig at the informal alliance between the Black Panthers and the white radicals of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (or rather ex-members: the SDS had split into feuding factions in 1969). Not a great fan of the Panthers, he had nothing but contempt for the “teenybopping, revolt-on-weekends young” who “vomit up slogans to stay out of Vietnam”. As the rant climaxes he tells a “paleface SDS motherfucker” to “find his own revolution”. When he suggests a “route to China” he’s talking about the SDS’s enthusiasm for Chairman Mao. The whole track only makes sense in the very specific political circumstances of 1970 and if Kanye is using it to draw an analogy with a period in which a black man is actually president (unthinkable when Scott-Heron recorded Comment #1) then I can’t for the life of me work out what it might be.

I don’t want to be pedantic — this is a pop record, not a school textbook — but Who Will Survive in America is fundamentally bogus. Scott-Heron always had immense curiosity about, and compassion for, the wider community. West used to, on songs like We Don’t Care and Jesus Walks, but he’s long since faded out we to concentrate on I. There are many people on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (42 performers on All of the Lights alone) but very few in it — it’s world begins and ends with Kanye West. After an hour of wall-to-wall narcissism, psychologically interesting though it may be, he fastens Scott-Heron’s words to his album like he’s slapping a Greenpeace bumper sticker onto a gas-guzzler. It’s not protest, it’s branding.

I wonder what Scott-Heron makes of the track. He must be accustomed to his carefully chosen, historically precise words being mangled and wrenched out of context (witness Snoop Dogg’s half-assed misquote on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach album) and he likes Kanye enough to sample him on his own I’m New Here album. So maybe he’ll shrug it off. Or maybe, with justification, he’ll tell Kanye to go and find his own revolution.

Bonus beats: at the risk of Kanye-esque narcissism, here’s my 2005 interview with him and a recent interview with Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets talking about the febrile politics of 1970. Also, an excellent Rob Fitzpatrick interview with Gil-Scott Heron.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people

Five years ago, Kanye West’s blurting denunciation of George Bush’s handling of the Katrina crisis seemed unimprovable. It was a spontaneous, emotional reaction to a wrenching disaster and an inadequate official response. It coincided with the first year of YouTube, which meant it could be watched around the world instead of just reported. And it did what no protest song was able to do during the Bush years, by condensing widespread frustration and ire into a single, pungent, viral phrase — a perfect two-years-on companion piece to the Dixie Chicks’ “we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” But now Bush himself has planted the cherry on the top by calling it “the worst moment of [my] presidency.”

First off, this makes Bush seem like a callous narcissist who is more hurt by a rapper’s outburst than, oh, 9/11, the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank crisis or indeed Katrina itself. It also does Kanye a huge favour by reminding people of a time before he mutated into a hybrid of Tracy Jordan and Patrick Bateman. This was during the same vaguely political period when he recorded Diamonds from Sierra Leone and spoke up for gay rights, and there he was accusing the president of failing in his duty of care to the poor of New Orleans. Four years later, he was accusing one pop singer of having an inferior music video to another pop singer, leading the new president, one Kanye actually liked, to call him a “jackass”. This might be considered a step down.

Whether Bush deliberately misread Kanye’s point or genuinely doesn’t get it, he now defends himself on the safe grounds that he is not “racist”. Look, he implies, some of my best cabinet members were black. Well yes, but given the demographics of New Orleans, it’s obvious that Kanye’s point was more about class than race. A few months after the incident I interviewed will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who summed it up nicely: “I’m sure George Bush has a lot of black friends. He loves black people with a fuck of a lot of money. He doesn’t care about people that don’t have money. It just so happens that those people are black.” The phrase owed its resonance to timing more than inaccuracy. This was the tipping point for anti-Bush sentiment. Another interviewee, Michael Franti, told me: “After Katrina happened, people in the South saw people starving to death because of ineptitude by the government. And Bush came down and made a bunch of bullshit speeches and everybody was like, What the fuck? And that really changed the attitude of the country overnight.”

Kanye, who seemed as startled as anybody by his outburst, never followed up his moment of accidental glory. This may be for the best — he’s much more articulate on the subject of Kanye West than of politics. But he did inadvertently spur the likes of Lil Wayne and Jay-Z into recording songs about Katrina, and directly inspired one of the decade’s more intriguing protest records, by the Legendary KO:

Protest songs have borrowed popular melodies since the days of topical ballads, because before recorded sound the quickest way to get your message across to the masses was to piggyback on an existing tune. This habit was revived during the civil rights movement, when everything from 19th century spirituals to brand-new soul hits were remade as freedom songs. The Legendary KO, two Houston rappers who worked at shelters housing evacuees from New Orleans, were so wowed by Kanye’s statement that they quickly wrote a song around his hit Gold Digger and sent it to a friend who ran a hip hop website. The borrowing is witty and brazen, and clarifies the class aspect (George Bush “ain’t messing with no broke niggas”), while the new lyrics are pithy and defiant. It was an overnight viral sensation. “Unfortunately a lot of people don’t take to serious songs too easily,” the Legendary KO’s Damien Randle told me. “You almost have to sugar coat it in order to trick people into listening to it.” (A nice chain of coincidence: Gold Digger samples Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman; Charles’s Georgia on My Mind formed the basis of Lil Wayne’s Georgia… Bush; and back in 1961, jailed Freedom Riders turned Charles’s Hit the Road Jack into Get Your Rights Jack.)

It was an exciting moment for political music. Greil Marcus wrily voted the Legendary KO his third favourite single of 2005 and “Kanye West featuring Mike Myers” his first. At the time I thought this could be a way forward for protest songs: the topical ballad reborn in the age of YouTube, social media and a cavalier approach to copyright. But it didn’t really happen, notwithstanding a glut of novelty pro-Obama clips during the 2008 election. This, I think, is the real disappointment of recent years. Never mind record label jitters or airplay bans — anyone can stick a memorable protest song on YouTube. I’d like to see more people take the opportunity.