I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed.
Go to 69: Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand
“The first thing I want to say is: mandate my ass.”
The opening line of ‘B’ Movie is an absolute belter. But then, Gil Scott-Heron was a master of kickstarting a song.
“You will not be able to stay home brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.”
This is how he starts the song for which he most famous: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
A man speaking rhythmically over conga drums is now a cliché of spoken word poetry, so it’s a testament to the power and quality of the piece that opens Heron’s debut album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, that it still sounds so damn relevant.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was a response to a song by The Last Poets called When the Revolution Comes. By the beginning of the 1970s, black Americans had successfully fought for increased civil rights but at a traumatic cost: the assassination of the movement’s leader and chief proponent of nonviolent protest, Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King’s murder moved many towards more militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, whose goals were more complete overthrow of the system than gradual accumulation of rights. The Last Poets had formed in 1968 on the birthday of Malcolm X and two years later released an incendiary spoken word record that urged black Americans to wake up and be part of the coming change.
When the Revolution Comes laments that “some of us will probably catch it on TV”, as a way of urging people to action. Gil Scott-Heron – who was inspired to make music after seeing The Last Poets live – took this idea a step further. His revolution would be so sudden and transformative, it wouldn’t make it to our screens.
He sets the stage for this idea in those brilliant opening lines that reference a couple of contemporary (what we now call) memes. The first is Joan Baez’s famous “stay home for peace” t-shirt that urged US soldiers back home on leave from Vietnam not to return to the warzone. For Scott-Heron, both peaceful change and sitting on the sidelines were not options for the black community.
The second is Timothy Leary’s infamous acid maxim, “tune in, turn on and drop out”. But Scott-Heron twists Leary’s optimism about the mind-expanding potential of psychedelics to be about the much more stupefying experience of plugging in a television. For all his talk about “revolution” – a word mentioned 20 times in this song – Scott-Heron is more interested in critiquing American culture, which had gradually coalesced around the content on the television sets that had become the prominent feature of most homes in the country during the 1960s.
He takes on the relentless commercialism of broadcasting with its ad breaks and sponsored programming (“The revolution will not go better with Coke”), the sentimental images that help sedate a nation (“no pictures…of Jackie Onassis blowing her nose”) and, most critically, the biased, sensationalist news reports that steer the narrative while reaping the rewards that come with turning live events into lurid entertainment: “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay” – a line that itself is rerun immediately on the version of the song he'll re-record for his second album.
If Scott-Heron’s interest is more in the velvet realm of cultural academia than being out on the tarmac “trying to slide that colour television into a stolen ambulance”, it's because that was his world at this time. He was a student at Lincoln University though had put his studies on hold to write a couple of novels.
Before that he had attended the prestigious Fieldston School in New York City, but Scott-Heron wasn’t a child of privilege. His teenage writings had earned him a full scholarship to the private Ivy League prep school. In the admissions interview, he was asked how he’d feel about seeing his wealthier classmates arrive by limo. Heron’s response to his wage-earning future teachers: “Same way as you. Y’all can’t afford no limousine. How do you feel?”
Even from an early age – he was one of the three black children who broke the school segregation barrier in Jackson, Tennessee – Gil Scott-Heron was upping the ante, unafraid to speak his mind with characteristic wit to those in power, as well as his contemporaries.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was an extraordinary introduction to his talent with words, but it was by no means the peak of his creativity or commitment to social causes.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell. But whitey’s on the moon.”
The realisation in 1969 of JFK’s moon-land dream was widely greeted with astonishment, pride and admiration, not just in America, but around the world. Even the Soviets were begrudgingly impressed. Voicing any form of criticism about such a lauded achievement was not the done thing.
The narrator can’t pay his medical bills, his rent is raised, food prices are going up and he must run a gauntlet of junkies whenever he leaves his house. The shiny televisual success of the moon landing is literally a world away from the hard scrabble of daily life in places like The Bronx in the 1960s, where Scott-Heron spent his teenage years.
Prior to New York, Scott-Heron had passed a more idyllic childhood living with his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee. After his parents separated when he was two, Scott-Heron rarely had contact with his father, Gilbert Heron – a professional footballer who became the first black man to play for Glasgow Celtic. His mother, Bobbie Scott, went to work in Puerto Rico, leaving her young son in the care of her own mother.
After his deeply religious grandmother salvaged a piano bound for the junkyard, young Gil learned how to play hymns for her sewing circle meeting. When she was out of earshot, he would switch to the blues music he heard coming out of a Memphis radio station.
One morning, the 12-year-old Scott-Heron discovered that his grandmother had died in her sleep, so his mother returned and moved the pair of them to New York.
“Junkie walking through the twilight. I’m on my way home.”
Revolution and Whitey both feature on Gil Scott-Heron’s debut album. Recorded in front of a live audience, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox was largely a poetry and percussion affair. For his follow-up, 1971’s Pieces of a Man, Scott-Heron collaborated with his college friend Brian Jackson and the result was a more musically expansive record.
A piano and flute player, Jackson brought sweet soul and freewheeling jazz elements to the songs. Meanwhile Scott-Heron reined in the proto-rap cavalcade of words in favour of more restrained and poetic song lyrics that were less about dissecting the system and more about the real people who suffered because of it.
On Home is Where the Hatred Is, his empathy for the plight of those who struggle with addiction is so acute, it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t writing from first-hand experience. By the end of the decade, Scott-Heron would become more like the character in his song.
“You see that black boy / over there running scared / his old man in a bottle”
Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson continued to collaborate throughout the 1970s, cutting nine albums together, including 1974’s essential Winter in America. During this time, the pair lived together just outside Washington DC, where Scott-Heron was teaching at Federal City College and working on a Master’s.
Living and working close to the centre of American power gave the singer fresh insights into the politics of his time, many of which he channelled into Winter in America’s epic critique of Vietnam, Watergate and the Cold War, H2Ogate Blues.
Though the track had become the opener of Scott-Heron’s live sets, he didn’t plan on including it on Winter in America because “nobody outside of Washington seemed to know what the hell I was talking about.” But drummer Bob Adams insisted it be added because it was “funny as hell”. Scott-Heron would soon surpass his witty Washington-focused political analysis on ‘B’ Movie.
Scott-Heron was inspired to write Winter in America’s hit single, The Bottle, after seeing a line of men queuing outside a liquor store holding their empties from the day before. The song manages to combine insights into serious social issues with a seriously danceable groove, all topped off by Jackson’s phenomenal flute playing.
By the turn of the decade, the partnership was close to breaking point. Scott-Heron was increasingly taking command of the songwriting as well as duo’s backing group, The Midnight Band, making Jackson feel like he was just another band member.
When Davis insisted they work with Malcolm Cecil – a producer known for his use of electronic sounds – for their 1978 album, Secrets, the differences between the poet and the musician became even more pronounced. While Jackson was excited by the musical possibilities of new technology, Scott-Heron just wanted to be a blues singer.
After years of no hits, Arista wanted Secrets to have more commercial songs and less politics. Instead, Scott-Heron gave them funky explorations of the US penitentiary system, worker safety and on the lead single, Angel Dust, drug addiction, a song that according to Davis was “nearly” a hit.
Addiction eventually became something that Scott-Heron didn’t just observe. Having married Brenda Sykes in 1978, he turned to drugs and alcohol whenever his touring obligations took him away from her. His growing dependencies eventually led to a split with Jackson. 1980’s Real Eyes was Scott-Heron’s first record without his musical partner since his debut.
“Come with us back to those inglorious days”
In January 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States, having defeated the incumbent Jimmy Carter. Under America’s electoral college system, Reagan won 489 versus Carter’s 49 votes so, though the popular vote was much closer (50.8% vs 41%), the media declared a landslide victory.
In politics, such a margin is typically seen as giving the winning candidate a mandate from the people to fulfil the promises they made during the campaign. But Gil Scott-Heron questioned that interpretation (“mandate my ass”) by looking beyond the headline numbers.
Voter turnout for the 1980 US presidential election was 54.2%, the lowest in more than three decades. Scott-Heron reasoned that meant only 26% of the registered voters had cast in favour of Reagan and that, ultimately, the majority of voters had chosen to back nobody. Hardly a mandate.
He lays out this argument behind the slap of a funky bassline and a steady beat during the opening section of ‘B’ Movie. An analysis of turnout rates and popular vote margins is unlikely musical material, but in Scott-Heron’s hands it’s compelling stuff, especially when he ties it in to the theme of his thesis.
Ronald Reagan had been a second-rate Hollywood actor, who became head of the Screen Actors Guild union, before shifting his politics to the right, first as Governer of California then as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. Scott-Heron posits that each of these roles saw Reagan act the part in pursuit of power, not out of any genuine desire to improve society.
“And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate. We’re all actors in this I suppose.”
To explain why the country is so susceptible to self-deception, Scott-Heron outline how “America has changed from a producer to a consumer”, dancing to the tune of the new controllers of the planet’s “natural resources and minerals”. Unable to accept this reduced position, the American people are suffering from nostalgia. Instead of facing the problems of today and tomorrow “they want to go back as far as they can – even if it’s only as far as last week.”
“But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan.”
In truth, only a handful of the dozens of films that Reagan appeared over four decades from 1937 to 1964 were Westerns. He was probably best known for playing opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo or his “win one for the Gipper” deathbed scene in the 1940 sports drama Knute Rockne, All American. But as the narrator of several wartime propaganda newsreels, Reagan was associated with a patriotic flavour of film that made him an acceptable stand-in for John Wayne.
“A Madison Avenue masterpiece”
At this point, ‘B’ Movie ups a gear. On Reflections, the 1981 album that this song closes, the title is listed with an explanatory parenthesis: ‘B’ Movie (Intro, Poem, Song). Having introduced its idea, it’s time to expand on it with poetry. A short, compulsive guitar riff enters, soon to be followed by footnotes from the horn section.
Meanwhile, Scott-Heron is introducing the supporting cast and crew of Reagan's administration in cinematic terms, including a screenplay “adapted from the book called ‘Voodoo Economics’ by George ‘Papa Doc’ Bush". George Bush was Reagan’s Vice-President but had previously challenged him during the Republican primary where he questioned his opponent’s idea of using big tax cuts to stimulate economic growth.
Bush called this supply-side or trickle-down theory, “voodoo economics” – suggesting that, like half-dead zombies, it would only provide the appearance of economic life. The “Papa Doc” reference is to the former leader of Haiti, home of the Vodou religion, François Duvalier, whose repressive leadership style included claiming to be a Vodou priest. (And in a neat bit of unplanned synchronicity, Duvalier was succeeded as president by his son, Jean-Claude, or ‘Baby Doc’, just as Bush’s own son would become US president like his father before him.)
Scott-Heron’s point is that the American people were now supposed to forgot Bush’s prior opposition to what became known as Reaganomics. Instead, the man will cynically sit at the right hand of power, while Reagan’s administration cuts taxes for the rich and welfare programmes for the poor, while loading up on debt to boost military budgets.
“Quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes - cause all of a sudden we have fallen prey to selective amnesia.”
Unlike many of the electorate, Scott-Heron hasn’t forgotten that, when faced with a student takeover of the square at Berkley’s University of California, the-then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan quipped: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”. Though no one died in the shootings that followed, a few years later, four students were killed by Ohio’s National Guard during protests at Kent State University.
Scott-Heron first started talking about Reagan during a live show at Kent State on the night that Reagan was elected. Over the coming months, he continued to developed the lyrics of ‘B’ Movie, but the legacy of the bloodbath that took place on that campus remained in his thoughts.
He concluded that Reagan was ultimately about reversing the liberal gains of the late 60s and 70s. The conservative faction in America has been disturbed by the progress of civil, women’s and gay rights. So, it chose to “call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild” and go back to the good old days:
“When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it.
To a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else.”
(Let’s stop for a minute to marvel at this pair of lines: clever, funny, loaded with meaning and rolled off with conviction and rhythm in just under five seconds.)
Reagan had been moulded by the right to be their puppet in power. Scott-Heron talks about the make-up and special effects (“Grecian formula 16 and Crazy Glue”) used to piece together the perfect “cotton candy politician”. And Reagan is indeed right for the role.
After his acting career began to falter, Reagan was hired by General Electric to tour their factories and be the face of the company. Meeting working people and delivering speeches of homespun jokes and wisdom was great training for the campaign trail. He charmed people, so much that when he ran for president he didn’t feel the need to temper his policies or personality.
The nation knew that Reagan was very right wing so could hardly be surprised when in office he:
- Scaled back the welfare systems that had kept the working classes afloat during the recession of the 70s
- Introduced draconic drug laws that deliberately targeted black people
- Attempted to ban abortion and introduce prayer times in schools
- Ignored the AIDS epidemic that was prominently affecting the gay community, but then according to Reagan that was a lifestyle “I do not believe society can condone, nor can I.”
- Eventually left office having racked up unprecedented national debt
“My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
Most of these events were yet to happen when Gil Scott-Heron wrote ‘B’ Movie. But even when he concludes his poem with a summary of Reagan's first year in office, the results aren’t good:
“Racism's up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot…Jobs are down, money is scarce.”
How can you deal with all this bad news? In Lady Day and John Coltrane, his stirring tribute to two of music’s finest voices, Scott-Heron sings of a hero who “rides in on his saxophone.” It’s his own moment of nostalgia, being soothed by the sounds of the past. But instead of a white man on white horse, Scott-Heron’s heroes are a pair of black musicians.
His advice for coping with the Reagan era will involve more self-deception. But as the final section of ‘B’ Movie – Song – suggests, music can still be our saviour.
“None of this is real”
I first heard ‘B’ Movie as the opening track on Underworld’s Back to Mine mix album. Unusually for a DJ mix, they didn’t edit the track or mix into something else halfway through – the CD really opened with all 12+ minutes of Scott-Heron’s epic essay. While it may seem remarkable that a lengthy tome on 20-year-old American politics should resonate with a 20-something-year-old from another continent in the early 2000s, this was the era of George W. Bush.
Not only was there the direct connection through his father, Reagan’s vice-president, there was also a similar sense about this Bush era that he was the plaything of his backers. GW was the figurehead, but it was old hands like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who really ran the show, all the way to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Even today, ‘B’ Movie continues to speak very specifically about its own context while saying something about contemporary issues and characters. Donald Trump – another star of our screens – traded on nostalgia with his Make America Great Again campaign. If America was in danger of losing its position as the world’s premier trading power to China, why not elect someone who played a businessman on TV?
While these historical echoes ensure ‘B’ Movie’s thesis remains relevant, it’s the final Song that elevates it from the interesting to the extraordinary. After reminding us that we’re starring in a B movie and would rather have had John Wayne, Scott-Heron begins to sing his advice: “remember that none of this is real”.
If we’re in a movie then at some point the director will yell cut and the scene will stop. Eventually the reel will run out leaving an empty screen and we can all go home. You just have to believe. And the mantra strikes up:
“This ain’t really your life, ain’t really your life, ain’t really nothing but a movie.”
Scott-Heron repeats this line over and over as the music builds. New vocal tracks are added so it soon sounds like a crowd of voices commanding you to bury your head in the sand. It’s like hypnosis or advertising. He’s convincing both you and himself that despite everything you’ve just heard, it will somehow all be ok. We end ‘B’ Movie dancing off into the sunset to the funkiest of hooks.
But still…that mantra is difficult to shift. Days later, you’ll find it cycling around in your mind. And maybe you’ll remember what came before. Recall the irony, revisit the grim truths. And maybe you’ll get angry enough to stop being a dupe and do something about it.
“I did not become someone different that I did not want to be.”
Like many of his fellow black Americans, Gil Scott-Heron became a victim of the Ronald Reagan era.
The singer was also diagnosed as HIV-positive – the virus that Reagan’s administration had attempted to ignore during the 80s – and had become a crack addict. He spent much of the first decade of the 21st century, in and out of prison and rehab and didn’t record or play live until 2007.
The final years of the 2000s and his life represented a renaissance of sorts for Scott-Heron, after Richard Russell, owner of XL Records, convinced the singer to record an album with him. The resulting record, I’m New Here, is short but satisfying, as Scott-Heron explores his past and pays tribute to the women who raised him.
Throughout it all there’s little hint of regret about his addiction, troubles with the law or the breakup of his marriage. As the above opening line of the album’s title track suggests, Scott-Heron appeared to be happy with who he was and what he had achieved. Yet, he also distanced himself from the record, describing him as a mere participant in Russell’s vision, or as he so beautifully put it: “All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
“Jagged jigsaw pieces tossed around the room”
I saw Gil Scott-Heron live in 2010 in San Francisco. He was warm, funny, intelligent and still possessing a honey-toned voice of astonishing emotional power. The highlight was a stunning rendition of the title track of his second album, Pieces of a Man.
It’s a searing portrayal of the impact of job loss, where even the mailman delivering the news tries to soften its blows:
But he can’t prevent the “burden of shame” and first the letter then the man himself are torn up and soon the police are only arresting “the pieces of a man”.
When he died on May 27th, 2011, it was hard not to wonder if the ravages of crack addiction and the health issues compounded by HIV hadn’t left Gil Scott-Heron in pieces himself.
But in his wonderful memoir, The Last Holiday, published posthumously, he doesn’t dwell on any of this. Instead of seeking someone to blame for his situation, he looks back with fondness on the people he encountered throughout in his life, telling their stories as much as his own.
This is how to remember Gil Scott-Heron: as a poet, voice and person who could generate empathy and understanding for real life people and the issues they faced. Then turn that soft compassion into razor-sharp fury against the self-interested politicians who continue to fail the people they are supposed to serve.
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If you like this, try:
This brilliant live version
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Whitey on the Moon
Lady Day and John Coltrane
Pieces of a Man
Home is Where the Hatred Is
The Bottle
H2OGate Blues
I'm New Here
Go to 69: Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand
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