What Made Gil Scott-Heron Gil Scott-Heron

The Believer Logger published an excerpt last week from the forthcoming Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man by Marcus Baram. "A Look at Gil Scott-Heron" details how "the rhythm of the blues shaped the way he wrote poems—'lotta hittin’ on the one down there,' he said, meaning that he would emphasize certain words on certain beats, anticipating by a decade the revolution of hip-hop, with its emphasis on rhythmic speech over music."

Baram also discusses the climate of social protest that made Scott-Heron who he was politically:

The creative ferment at Lincoln [University], and the young black students from around the country attracted to that energy, were responsible for the Gil Scott-Heron who moved millions with the messages in his music and helped influence generations of musicians.

In September 1969, the school was on the verge of revolt. As a rural school, too far away from urban unrest, Lincoln didn’t experience the explosive rage blowing up on other black campuses such as Howard University or Morgan State. But there was plenty of anger directed at the conservative school administration, which looked down on political demonstrations and some of the free-form creativity taking place on campus. The school had started admitting female students only the year before, and some of the older students and faculty were still resentful at the changes taking place on campus. But Gil and his friends kept pushing for even more change.

As for the poems and lyrics:

Gil also borrowed some of the styles used by Langston Hughes and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance to get the intended effect in his poems and lyrics, which was to convey his own observations to the man on the street, who wasn’t necessarily equipped with a master’s degree in English literature. He was heavily influenced by the way Langston Hughes used humor and wordplay to highlight contradictions such as the reality of life in America versus the way people thought things were. Some of Gil’s compositions also seemed to borrow some of Hughes’s style, adopting a preacherly cadence to mock old elitist traditions. In “Comment #1”—“And the new word to have is revolution / People don’t even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel / Because God’s whole card has been thoroughly piqued / And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey”—Gil takes aim at the black church, echoing Hughes’s attack on academia in “Letters to the Academy,” in which Hughes challenged “all you gentlemen with beards” to “come forward and speak upon / The subject of the revolution.”

Read on! At The Believer!