RIP Gil Scott-Heron

I've listened to him for years. I will miss him and his music. As an Anglo-Saxon human, I never felt offended by his words. Spend some time and look at our country differently.

A great, but flawed artist. He's to rap what Robert Johnson is to the blues -- a touchstone. But he was wrong about the revolution. As events in the middle east demonstrate, the revolution might not be televised, but it is being streamed.

After reading a profile of him in a New Yorker, I was moved and intrigued. I got his latest CD and have to say it is unlike any other--part music, part commentary. His was a sad case really.

I saw Gil Scott-Heron a bit more than 30 years ago. This was in a little club in a little farm town next to my then-university town. The audience was 99.9 percent white. He introduced one song, "Whitey on the Moon," by saying something like this: "I started thinkin' that if they could send one white guy to the moon, why not send 'em all?"
There was a brief pause before most of us clapped, tentatively at first, then more solidly. Each of us was doubtless thinking that he couldn't be talking about us. We, after all, were cool enough to have come to the show. But we knew at the same time that he was really and absolutely talking about each and every one of us.
It was a great show, by a truly impressive guy. I'm glad I got to see him, and I was sad to learn of his passing.
-- Howard