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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html?_r=1&hpw
Unique, and one of music's pioneers. I saw him live a couple of times in the 70's.
Unique, and one of music's pioneers. I saw him live a couple of times in the 70's.
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
Videos
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (YouTube)
Whitey on the Moon (YouTube)
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he was admitted to St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital Center after becoming ill upon his return from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. I dont know if I can take the blame for it, he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a bluesologist, drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.
Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early 70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions and has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.
You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word, Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.