Friday, July 27, 2012

ProjectHBW: Prof. Jerry Ward--Lectures in China

ProjectHBW: Prof. Jerry Ward--Lectures in China: [By Jerry Ward] To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at HuaZhong Normal University (Wuhan) and...
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012


CHINA IV








“Most of the people of China live on low land near the sea and near great rivers….Tea plants grow in the hilly parts of China.”

Alexis Everett Frye, First Course in Geography (1907)



Each trip to China is a teachable moment, an illumination of puzzles, a sojourn in a land where ancient and contemporary poetry is treasured.



Q:  Is East Lake more beautiful than West Lake?

A:  Both are quite beautiful.  Neither is as beautiful as the lake of the Jade Emperor (Yu Di).



                As an overseas professor at Huazhong Normal University (Central China Normal University) in Wuhan, I have deep interest in exchanges between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America, in promoting the mutual destruction of stereotypes. For remarkably different reasons, both nations manufacture disinformation to protect their roles in world affairs and to protect their citizens against the destructive power of TRUTH.  As both nations move unequally toward becoming models for the future of humanity, the idea of a future exposes the despair we ought to avoid.

                My job is to share knowledge about African American literature and cultures with my Chinese colleagues and the students who take courses in the School of Foreign Languages.  I try to clarify for them (and for myself) the historical contradictions of capitalist desire.  In return, the Chinese provide diverse examples of dangers associated with rapid modernization and insufficient attention to sustainability and the ecological and psychological dimensions of growth.  Yes, the Chinese are far ahead of most of the world in the use of wind power as an alternative to fossil fuels; on the other hand,  their efforts to make Wuhan a world-class industrial center may eventually make the city unfit for human habitation.  Excessive pollution may decimate people as overpopulation drives them to urban madness, the bane of Western cities.

                My fourth trip to China deepened my sense of political and ethical differences; of how an uncritical embrace of the myth-dripping West might oil a path to a state of being post-human; of the power and relentless determination of “antizens;” of how the inhumane neo-colonial imperatives of both the East and the West poison dreams of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” on the continent of Africa; of Richard Wright’s foresight in suggesting in White Man, Listen! “that the West is ethically dubious when it urges upon Asians and Africans concepts or principles that the West discovered only accidentally and under conditions far different from those that obtain in Asia and Africa;” of why both the Chinese and the Americans need to absorb the dialectics of Frantz Fanon.

Lectures in China

                To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at Chinese universities, I have given lectures since 2009.   Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the West.  Often they do not understand the cultural dynamics of academic trends.  Why do Western critics so dread the absolute, the essential, and the certain?  The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and political.  One must exercise care in explaining that the universal is not universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a weapon of massive destruction. 

                During May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for critical growth.  The listing includes a post-delivery comment for each of them.

1)      Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?--- In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and culture and its probable consequences of such misreading  in a future of African American literary study.  I am indebted to Maryemma Graham for drawing my attention, after I returned to America, to an important example of a consequence:  Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (2012):335-341.



2)      The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey ---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry







3)      The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.





4)      On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions among theory, methodology, and method.



5)      The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri: Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention  to how Nadhiri  uses oral/aural memory , grammatical innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of time and being dealt with in theoretical physics  in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.





6)      Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism –A  discussion of Reed’s sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it means to be an American.



7)      Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone ---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21st century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.





8)      Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection) can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his novella The Man Who Lived Underground.



9)       American Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature.

I have little interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among diverse citizens of the United States or Europe.  To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for making conclusions about truth.

 I do want them to grasp what the following blog on Toni Morrison’s most recent novel does not say. I want them to understand why Morrison rather than Jesmyn Ward or Tina McElroy Ansa or Tayari Jones is the target of commentary:











Morrison, Toni.  Home.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.



                The Nobel Prize in Literature is the most prestigious award the West offers to writers, but one might ponder whether it is a curse or a blessing for those who earn it.  Does a writer’s creative powers decline or hibernate after she or he receives the award? No.  The prize is not meant to cripple the human spirit.  Reasons for strong difference in quality must be sought elsewhere.

                Judgment is so privatized and relative in the twenty-first century that it matters very little if a reader says “Yes” or “No.”  Value is a pragmatic commodity.  It has the stability of a theorized subatomic particle.  Only a statistically insignificant portion of the world’s population gives more than a few seconds of thought to the growth or stasis or decline of the writer’s imagination.  No writer can maintain stellar performances over several decades of doing things with words.

But prizes create unreasonable expectations.  Writers who possess them are often more harshly judged than their peers who create excellent works in oblivion.

                Such is the case with Toni Morrison since she won the ultimate literary prize in 1993.  Not even the protective circle of the Toni Morrison Society can deflect barbs of disappointment, the weird neutrality one feels after reading Home (2012).  When you compare it with earlier novels ---The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, or Jazz, you think the early works have the signature richness and depth of songs by Etta James, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughn. Paradise, Love, A Mercy, and Home are good. They are attractive explorations of what is cruel. They are not, however, overwhelmingly exciting novels. They are like the singer who scored number one on last week’s pop chart. You are disappointed that these later works do not light your fire.

                Bernard Bell aptly claimed in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition that Morrison’s fiction was marked by poetic realism.  In Home, realism has been displaced by some ironies of postmodern poetry.  Its plot is recognizable but thin. Morrison indulges her entitlement to grieve in an opaque fashion.  The narrator’s language floats above the story’s engagement with obscene racism, because Morrison contemplates her cleverness in the use of language more than she uses language to provoke consciousness of America’s social and cultural filth –systemic brutalization of black sensibility, medical experimentation on black bodies worthy of a Nazi doctor.  Its examination of manhood in post-Korean War America focuses on the fragility of male subjectivity, while its portrayal of boyhood displays remarkable strengths.  Superb imbalance.  The protagonist Frank Money nurtures too much grief and self-pity.  “In Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered” (84). He is truly not “some enthusiastic hero” (84).  When the language of the novel is not laughing at the reader, it is sweating the reader.  It invites hostility and displeasure.  In other words, reading Home requires admitting the validity of a remark made by Joan Zhang, a Chinese graduate student, about Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “…it is only through removing the mask of ‘the feminine mystique’ that female blacks can achieve their growth; it is only after female blacks’ growth that male black’s growth becomes possible; it is only with the growth on both sides that males and females can live harmoniously, which is the essence of Walker’s ‘womanism’ .“

                We should have respect for Morrison’s achievements.  Scholars are obligated by literary history to read her writings –all of them.  But scholars, like casual readers, do not have to like all of her work. They are free not to tarry in the new “home” she has constructed.







Learning and Teaching: The Core of Cultural Exchanges



                It is relatively easy to present lectures in China, especially if one maximizes the conversational mode.  Speak plainly.  Explain fully.  Avoid jargon and convoluted sentences. For a foreigner, teaching in China can be a remarkable challenge.

                During the eight weeks of teaching twentieth-century American literature to graduate students, I had to modify my style of teaching.  In America, many graduate students delight in being vocal, in displaying their opinions, and in provoking their teachers.  Engagement with the instructor is commonplace.  In China, most graduate students are disarmingly respectful and silent.  Yes, they will ask questions after a class session, but they are very content to listen carefully and take notes.  The professor’s authority is beyond challenge.  Such behavior is ideal if the professor thinks a lecture is the best way to impart knowledge.  My teaching style is discussion-driven, because I do not want to be the only voice in the room.  I need to know if students are confused by some of my statements.  I need evidence that my students are thinking critically about the subject matter.  Are they resisting propositions about various pieces of literature? I found the absence of rich conversational exchange to be annoying.  I was forced to lecture.

                I discovered the traditional method of Chinese teaching can have good results.  My students were required to submit a 4-5 page essay on Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” on June 29.  To increase the probability that students would make the best use of the work they do in their concentrations –--literature, linguistics, or translation, I gave them three options.

Option A: Translation students will write an essay on the difficulties of translating selected passages from the story.

Option B: Linguistics students will write an essay on the function of grammar, syntax, and diction in the narration of the story.

Option C: Literature students will write an essay on how the use of symbolism in the story creates a selective vision of American society in the 1960s.

The translation and linguistics students produced the best papers, because they used the theories from their sub-disciplines to focus their thinking.  On the other hand, many of the literature students found it difficult to focus on how symbols might function.  I got the impression they had inadequate training in how to write about literature according to Western criteria.  I chose not to penalize them for what they had not been taught about avoiding plagiarism by carefully documenting all sources they used.

In the future, I will make use of what my friend John Zheng, an alumnus of CCNU and a professor at Mississippi Valley State University, advises: 



“Students at CCNU need to be told before class what they are supposed to do and they will have to speak or participate in exchanging ideas. Or next time you tell them that discussion takes a big percentage of their grade. They like to listen, but you may not know what they think. They may be shy or afraid to be laughed at by peers. When I was there I forced them to talk, to participate and to make oral presentations. And I also found two heavily plagiarized the Internet essays. Maybe assign a piece to each and come to talk about it in class. I also said each reading will be tested so everyone had to read.” (Email from Zheng, July 11, 2012)



In the future, I will concentrate of creating an atmosphere for discussion-rich class sessions and on teaching critical thinking about literature.  In the future I will draw upon the very pleasant experiences I had in my seminar for Ph.D. candidates as we discussed how to conceptualize and do research for their dissertations. We talked about James Fenimore Cooper’s sea fictions, the novels of Ernest J. Gaines, Gish Jen, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright’s quest for a conversational path beyond races and cultures, and the dramas created by Suzan-Lori Parks.  It is a blessing (a slice of blissful meat) to talk with Chinese Ph.D. candidates who force me to remember virtually everything I have ever learned.

              Much of my future work will be dedicated to helping Professor Luo Lianggong to develop a distinguished program for the study of African American literature and culture within the School of Foreign Languages at CCNU.   He and I have already begun discussing how to lay the groundwork for such a program, one that must give a great deal of attention to pedagogy ----teaching post-graduate (master's level) and Ph.D. candidates how to acquire the necessary historical background information for making astute interpretations of African American literature and how to grasp the nuances (linguistic aspects and implications of speech act theory) that secure the distinctive difference of African American literature. Having had direct experience with teaching students in a foreign language (English), I am convinced that pedagogy is crucial. It is pedagogy that will be central in what I do at CCNU in the spring of 2013.

                Lectures, small conferences and workshops for Chinese teachers, exhibits and musical performances will eventually be incorporated, but having African American texts (books, videos, and so forth) available for teachers and students in Wuhan is more important. My informal assessment of CCNU library holdings suggests that we must try to acquire more African American primary and secondary texts. Three examples: 1) One student is determined to write her dissertation on Sonia Sanchez, but she has no way of accessing Sonia's earliest publications; 2) I want to teach a special seminar on Richard Wright, but the library does not have copies of the Library of America early and later works; 3) if someone gave a lecture on the Harlem Renaissance and the novels of Wallace Thurman, it would require a major effort to make it possible for students to do a follow-up reading of Thurman's Infants of the Spring against Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven. I stress these practical issues to illuminate the importance of balancing the acquisition of materials with the teaching of African American literature and culture.

               My work as a Famous Overseas Professor is unofficially an outreach effort of the Project on the History of Black Writing, and I shall be asking many of my American colleagues for assistance with acquiring books. My very wise and energetic friend Maryemma Graham, of course, provides the much needed support to keep me focused on my commitments.

                My very satisfying experiences with my Chinese colleagues will help to shape my future as an independent scholar, now that I have retired from Dillard University.  The future has begun with almost daily correspondence with these colleagues and fulfilling their requests for information or advice about their projects or for letters of recommendation.  The future involves my c circulating emails to build new bridges between Chinese and American scholars and students.  The following is an example of what I shall broadcast in the future.





July 22



Dear Friends,

My colleague Zuyou Wang, editor of the bimonthly Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal, requested that I ask you to consider sending articles to his journal. He also suggested that my article on Wright, which appeared in a recent issue, be used as a model of submissions. I have pasted it below.

When I wrote the article, I struggled (1) to make the ideas rather uncomplicated for the Chinese readers who are interested in teaching American and African American materials and (2) to provide ideas that can be translated into research projects or used in the classroom.

As some of you already know, I am devoting time to promoting greater interest in African American literature and culture in China. I am grateful to Professor Wang for helping me with that undertaking. It is a good move for more of us to participate in critical exchange with Chinese teachers and scholars. Thus, if you have a relatively brief article that you deem appropriate, please send it to Professor Wang at


wiziyi@gmail.com


With all best wishes,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Famous Overseas Professor
Central China Normal University















For Shandong Journal of Foreign Language Teaching





“Directions in the Study of Richard Wright”





Contemporary studies in languages and literatures are marked by varying degrees of anxiety. The impact of new technologies on the uses of language can be noted in the alacrity with which many people engage one another in social networks. Users, particularly in the United States, instant message, tweet, text-message, or post items on Facebook in forms that contrast dramatically with traditional uses of standard American English. People who have been trained to attend carefully to spelling, grammar, syntax, coherence, and unity of ideas may find themselves either amused or dismayed or confused by the new forms of communicating. On the other hand, people who have little regard for accuracy or nuances in communication willingly embrace what might be called“rhetoric of carelessness.” They seem to be convinced that playful inventiveness is the future, that linguistic conventions are arbitrary, and that minimal representation of thought is the ideal. Thus, it is to be expected that some scholars and teachers fear that new habits of writing and reading will undermine the desire or ability of younger generations to make critical judgments about literature. These new habits eschew the discipline and patience necessary for analysis and interpretation of literature. They cannot be dismissed as trivial, because they are fundamental in changing what counts as knowledge.



Anxiety about literature and language is intensified by ambivalence regarding the changes that accompany the progress of globalization. Those changes influence how we speak of a large range of topics: emerging world orders, ecology, biocultural transformations (including shifts in the cognitive functions of the brain), and the cultural studies that have displaced or subsumed what was once called literary theory and criticism. Even if we try to be empirical and scientific in our approaches to the study of literature, we still have the onus of being uncertain in efforts to generate appropriate questions for our investigations of twentieth-century American writers. We are overwhelmed by our options; we choke on our wealth of information. We are frustrated by global theories that dismiss the importance of nations and national boundaries (which are also cultural boundaries) that have been so critical in the growth of American, or to be more accurate, United States literature. Much depends on how one conceptualizes globalization in the study of literature, or answers the question: what is globalization?[i]



Is globalization primarily a way of thinking about historical processes, or is it a conviction that post-modernity has succeeded in compromising our ability to locate ourselves and our cultural expressions in a history that can be verified? These questions do not have simple answers. Theory notwithstanding, we can be sure that twentieth-century literature is indelibly marked by national origins. It is unethical to pretend that older works can or should be read as if they were written under the conditions of electronic revolutions. Globalization may make us sensitive to the metaphor of the uncertainty principle, but it neither can nor should erase historical consciousness in literary and cultural studies. Historical consciousness existed to prior any newfangled global consciousness. Cautionary hypotheses ought to govern directions in the study of the literature of the United States or of any nation-state. Awareness of the limits of knowledge is crucial, for example, in the study of Richard Wright (1908-1960).



It is remarkable that many contemporary studies of Wright’s works tend to recycle old ideas about “universal” themes, naturalism, modernism, the writer’s ideology and political intentions, and the much overworked notion of “double consciousness” as an innate feature of African American thought. The more progressive or future-oriented studies, however, attempt to be interdisciplinary. They may adapt some version of intersectionality research, which “is defined principally by its focus on the simultaneous and interactive effects of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference in the United States and beyond”(185).[ii] Studies that borrow from intersectionality theory have the potential of making us more discriminating in our investigations of Wright’s works. They can assist us in distinguishing between which of his works have immediate productive relevance (the potential to provoke synchronic thinking about contemporary human issues) and those which have reflective relevance (the potential to invite diachronic thinking about change). For example, Wright’s novella “Down by the Riverside” provokes thought about human behavior in the aftermath of natural or man-made disasters; in contrast, Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices may invite thought about the historical consequences of migration and urbanization, whereas Black Power may urge us to ponder the vexed outcomes of twentieth-century liberation struggles in the post-colonial African nation of Ghana. It is reasonable to argue that future studies of Richard Wright and other American writers of his generation should examine both the writer’s and the reader’s assumptions about the function of literature in his or her own time. It is illuminating to know whether harmony or discord is more prominent. Otherwise, we shall only compound anxiety and confusion about what makes literature relevant in the contexts of globalization.



Directions in the study of Wright are most valuable when they are aligned with questions about what his works reveal or seem to predict about human beings and change. For what revolutions in human thought do Wright’s works continue to be germane? Does the impact Wright wanted his fiction and nonfiction to have still affect us? Will continuing study keep interest alive?



Explorations associated with the 2008 Richard Wright Centennial allow us to sketch how Wright scholars have begun to reposition their engagements with his published and unpublished works and how those works may assume new significance for readers and thinkers. The celebration of Richard Wright as an internationally honored citizen of the republic of American letters and culture did not officially conclude, at least for those who respected the wishes of the Richard Wright Estate, until November 28, 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of his death. This conclusion, however, was a resumption of efforts to secure memory of Wright’s significance beyond his writing the classic texts Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), staples of American cultural literacy in schools where censorship is not tolerated. New directions point to Wright’s presence or absence in the reorientations of the Barack Obama Era, which is especially marked by post-racial claims that paradoxically co-exist with an increasing significance of race.



It is noteworthy, for example, that Mark Bracher’s “How to Teach for Social Justice: Lessons from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cognitive Science”[iii]provides a remarkable footnote on the philosophical and psychological qualities of Native Son which can provoke “a recognition that entails, for all white readers, the further recognition that we are ultimately responsible for all the Biggers (white and black) and their horrific and brutal actions” (384). Perhaps Bracher unintentionally reifies a black/white binary formation, forgetting that some of the Biggers among us in the second decade of the 21stcentury are Hispanic or Asian-Americans or as mixed-race as a Tiger Woods. In the context of the Centennial, Bracher’s idea is a red flag. If Bigger Thomas and other characters from Wright’s fictions are used as sociological icons without rigorous qualifications, we risk intellectual impoverishment; we miss or dismiss the importance of the salient points Wright made in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” regarding the origins of fictions and the No Man’s Land “which the common people of America never talk of but take for granted.”[iv] One of the more valuable lessons of Centennial activities was how lack of skepticism about limits promotes blindness rather than insight. For just such a reason, new directions entail remembering.



David A. Taylor’s Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression American (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley& Sons, 2009) and Brian Dolinar’s “The Illinois Writers’ Project Essays: Introduction,” Southern Quarterly46.2 (2009): 84-90 bid us to examine Wright’s use of ethnography more closely than did Carla Cappetti’s book Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Rereading of Wright’s 1930s proletarian poems (only “Between the World and Me” seems to get notice for its lynching theme) and stories (Uncle Tom’s Children) will beget re-examination of Lawd Today! and the topic of spousal abuse and fresh examination of domestic workers and organized labor in the unpublished novel Black Hope (based in part on Wright’s extensive interviewing of domestic workers in New York). James A. Miller’s excellent chapter “Richard Wright’s Scottsboro of the Imagination” in Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) creates a fine opportunity to investigate Wright’s perspectives on the American criminal legal system in Native Son, Rite of Passage(1994), The Long Dream (1958), and A Father’s Law (2008). Indeed, Wright’s importance in critical discussions of race, law, and legal ethics has yet to be tapped. David Taylor’s article “Literary Cubs, Canceling Out Each Other’s Reticence,” The American Scholar (Summer 2009):136-141 provides new information regarding Wright’s correspondence with Nelson Algren, and we should go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University) to discover more about Wright’s correspondence with Joe C. Brown and others. Despite the biographical attention that has been given to Wright by Constance Webb, Michel Fabre, John A. Williams, Margaret Walker, Addison Gayle, and Hazel Rowley, much about the full extent of Wright’s intelligence and analytic imagination has not been engaged.



We should want to learn from the applications of cutting-edge theory in W. Lawrence Hogue’s “Can the Subaltern Speak? A Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son,” The Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 9-39 and Mikko Tuhkanen’s “Queer Guerillas: On Richard Wright’s and Frantz Fanon’s Dissembling Revolutionaries, MississippiQuarterly 61.4 (2008): 615-642. Both articles put Native Son and Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957) in the present space of terrorism, suggesting which kinds of international theory might enable contemporary readers to absorb and digest Wright’s 20thcentury perspectives. Likewise, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (2011), edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow, contains fresh essays that bid us to consider how the transnational qualities of Wright’s works might necessitate some use of transcultural theory.



Wright’s uncanny intelligence and imagination, we should remember, enabled him to warn us in The Color Curtain that



It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons, to make the world safe for their mystical notions… (218)[v]



Ongoing re-examination of Wright’s works may yet reveal other warnings that have been ignored.





“On ‘Third Consciousness’ in the Fiction of Richard Wright,” The Black Scholar39.1-2 (2009): 40-45 is a welcomed Eastern challenge from Professor Chen Xu (Hangzhou Dianzi University) to the adequacy of W. E. B. DuBois’s thoroughly Western idea of double-consciousness. If we embrace the probable effectiveness of “third consciousness” in marking a certain uniqueness in African American literary traditions, we may better understand the historical silence of double-consciousness (or playing in the dark) in scholarly considerations of American literatures as multicultural. We are enlightened by Howard Rambsy’s pioneering investigations of the visual “packaging,” [“Re-presenting BlackBoy: The Evolving Packaging History of Richard Wright’s Autobiography,” The Southern Quarterly 64.2 (2009): 71-83] for these investigations open vistas on the dynamics of motive and power in marketplace politics used to manage African American literature as well as on the dominance of visual popular culture. Our interest in Wright’s use of the photograph is deepened by John Lowe’s sustained critique of Pagan Spain,[vi][“The Transnational Vision of Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain,” The Southern Quarterly 46.3 (2009)] just as Nancy Dixon’s questioning of what Wright got wrong or right about Spanish culture in “Did Richard Wright Get It Wrong?: A Spanish Look at Pagan Spain,” Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 581-591 reopens speculation about Wright’s readings of African and Asian cultures. The examinations of Wright’s haiku by Toru Kiuchi, Jianqing Zheng, Meta Schettler, Lee Gurga, and Richard Iadonisi in Valley Voices: A Literary Review 8.2 (2008) and The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by Jianqin Zheng, create yearning for fresh commentaries on Wright’s early poetry and the poetry of his prose. We now have stronger reasons, by virtue of the testimonials provided by Howard Rambsy, Tara Green, and Candice Love Jackson in Papers on Language & Literature 44.4 (2008) and Mark Madigan and Toru Kiuchi in The Black Scholar 39.1-2 (2009), for asking why and how we read or teach Wright’s works, for testing the outcomes of using those works in efforts to increase literacy (functional, visual, cultural, political, and rhetorical) in postmodern, technology-dependent societies. literary study. My own anxiety begins to be replaced by optimism when I wager that new directions in the study of Richard Wright shall arm us for our battles with a future of globalization, that they will help us balance the “rhetoric of carelessness” with a “rhetoric of genuine concern.”



The scholarship, criticism, and theorizing that is emerging call for remembering Wright’s optimism of the brilliant one-sentence paragraph that ends the 1945 edition of Black Boy.



With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of other should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.













[i] A good starting point for answering the question is the January 2001 issue of PMLA, which dealt with the special topic: Globalizing Literary Studies.

[ii] Evelyn M. Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock, “Mini-Symposium: Intersectionality Research.” Political Research Quarterly 64.1 (2011): 185.

[iii]College English 71.4 (2009): 363-388.

[iv]Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Richard Wright: Early Works (New York: Library of America, 1991), 871.

[v] Richard Wright. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1956).

[vi] It is unfortunate that difficulties in obtaining permission to reproduce Wright’s photographs for Pagan Spain precluded their use to enhance Lowe’s remarkable commentary.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

1928 Gentilly Blvd.

New Orleans, LA 70119-2002



July 24, 2012
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Saturday, July 21, 2012

CHINA IV is coming.

Yukuo and I
have great respect
for things ancient and spiritual.
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July 6, 2012

The cranes and I love the Yellow Tower.
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Reading Notes


Morrison, Toni.  Home.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.



                The Nobel Prize in Literature is the most prestigious award the West offers to writers, but one might ponder whether it is a curse or a blessing for those who earn it.  Does a writer’s creative powers decline or hibernate after she or he receives the award?

                Judgment is so privatized and relative in the twenty-first century that it matters very little if a reader says “Yes” or “No.”  Value is a pragmatic commodity.  It has the stability of a theorized subatomic particle.  Only a statistically insignificant portion of the world’s population gives more than a few seconds of thought to the growth or stasis or decline of the writer’s imagination.  No writer can maintain stellar performances over several decades of doing things with words. But prizes create unreasonable expectations.  Writers who possess them are often more harshly judged than their peers who create excellent works in oblivion.

                Such is the case with Toni Morrison since she won the ultimate literary prize in 1993.  Not even the protective circle of the Toni Morrison Society can deflect barbs of disappointment, the neutrality one feels after reading Home (2012).  When you compare it with earlier novels ---The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, or Jazz, you think the early works have the signature richness and depth of songs by Etta James, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughn. Paradise, Love, A Mercy, and Home are good but not overwhelmingly exciting. They are like the singer who scored number one on last week’s pop chart. You are disappointed that these later works do not light your fire.

                Bernard Bell aptly claimed in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition that Morrison’s fiction was marked by poetic realism.  In Home, realism has been displaced by cruel ironies of postmodern poetry.  Its plot is recognizable but thin. Morrison indulges her privileges.  The narrator’s language floats above the story’s engagement with obscene racism, because Morrison contemplates her cleverness in the use of language more than she uses language to provoke consciousness of America’s social and cultural filth –systemic brutalization of black sensibility, medical experimentation on black bodies worthy of a Nazi doctor.  Its examination of manhood in post-Korean War America focuses on the fragility of male subjectivity, while its portrayal of boyhood displays remarkable strengths.  Superb imbalance.  The protagonist Frank Money nurtures too much grief and self-pity.  “In Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered” (84). He is truly not “some enthusiastic hero” (84).  When the language of the novel is not laughing at the reader, it is sweating the reader.  It invites hostility and displeasure.

                We should have respect for Morrison’s achievements.  Scholars are obligated by literary history to read her writings –all of them.  But scholars like casual readers do not have to like all of her work, and they are free not to tarry in the new “home” she has constructed.

J. W. Ward, Jr. ---July 20, 2012 Reading Notes
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012


PHBW blog –July 16, 2012







Lectures in China

                To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at HuaZhong Normal University (Wuhan) and other institutions in China, I have given lectures there since 2009.   Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the West.  Often they do not understand the cultural dynamics of academic trends.  Why do Western critics so dread the absolute, the essential, and the certain?  The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and political.  One must exercise care in explaining that the universal is not universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a weapon of massive destruction. 

                During May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for critical growth.  The listing includes a post-delivery comment for each of them.

1)      Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?--- In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and culture and its probable consequences of such misreading  in a future of African American literary study.  I am indebted to Maryemma Graham for drawing my attention to an important example of a consequence:  Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (2012):335-341.



2)      The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey ---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry







3)      The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.





4)      On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions among theory, methodology, and method.



5)      The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri: Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention  to how Nadhiri  uses oral/aural memory , grammatical innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of time and being dealt with in theoretical physics  in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.





6)      Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism –A  discussion of Reed’s sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it means to be an American.



7)      Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone ---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21st century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.





8)      Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection) can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his novella The Man Who Lived Underground.



9)       American Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature.

I have little interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among diverse citizens of the United States or Europe.  To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for making conclusions about truth.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.


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Friday, January 20, 2012

On Gil Scott-Heron

Those who possess genius must pay a great price.

 

NEO•GRIOT

Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

CULTURE: Gil Scott-Heron: More Than a Revolution > Pitchfork

Gil Scott-Heron:

More Than a Revolution

A full picture of the late poet, novelist, singer, satirist, and father of four.

By Andrew Nosnitsky, January 18, 2012
Download full size (77 KB)
When Gil Scott-Heron passed away last May, the flurry of obits, essays, and think pieces that followed principally presented him in two specific lights-- as the man behind the much-quoted (and misquoted) catchphrase "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a presage of hip-hop. He was 62 years old when he died and had recorded 15 studio albums and written two novels; his postumous memoir, The Last Holiday, was released this week. Gil was a poet, a novelist, a singer, a songwriter, a pianist, a satirist, a father of four. In revisiting his catalog and talking to the people closest to him, it doesn't take long to see past the catchphrase and recognize him as a much more complex artist and human.
Well before his journey as an entertainer began, Gil's biography was a fascinating one. He was born in Chicago; his mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sung with the New York Oratorio Society and his father was a Jamaica-born professional soccer player. His parents separated when Gil was two and moved him to Tenneesse, where he was raised by his grandmother. There, he was one of the first black children to be integrated into the state's school system.
By 12 he moved north to live with his mother in New York, where he would befriend classmate and budding hoop legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a teen. (They remained friends for the decades that followed, with Kareem serving as best man in Gil's wedding to actress Brenda Sykes. When Gil passed, Kareem penned a brief but heartfelt eulogy on his blog entitled "Goodbye Gil Scott-Heron".) After graduating high school, Gil attended the HBCU Lincoln-- alma mater to luminaries such as Langston Hughes-- but dropped out to finish his first novel, The Vulture, which established him as a talent with both politically charged impulses and a knack for writing in the then-hip voice of the streets.
Larry McDonald, percussionist: There are two Americans I could listen to talk forever: Gil and Richard Pryor. The way they used "black English"-- they could curse and swear and say the most outrageous things, and it didn't seem obscene because it was totally in context.
Lurma Rackley, girlfriend and mother of Gil's son Rumel: Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, everybody was open to the realities that each person had to do something and be involved. All across the country and the world people were paying attention to the huge shifts that were going on-- the end of segregation, the efforts to end Apartheid, the focus on nuclear energy, the whole Nixon debacle. There were powerful political happenings and he was so brilliant about tapping into them in a way that people could understand. He was tapped into the energy of the time and he made extraordinary commentary on the major issues of his time. The commentary is still valid today.
For all the power in his message, Gil frequently struggled with the reductionist assumption that he was just a political firebrand.
"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.
A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."
McDonald: One day he said to me, "Man, I don't like how they have me as this black spokesman. When they do that, they're setting you up so they can shoot you down. I've got too many skeletons in my closet. I don't even want to be bothered by that." So I said, "Why do you go down this road?" He said, "I saw some shit that needed to be spoken on and nobody was speaking on it. So I just said it."
Gary Price, housemate: Everybody talks about "The Bottle" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Angel Dust", but some of the more emotional pieces like "Song for Bobby Smith" were my favorites. That song has no social or political things going on at all-- it's just a beautiful song.
Rackley: He had a soft side, too, and a lot of people were attracted to him. He talked about his grandmother a lot and her connection to the earth and to doing what's right. I think that infected his approach to the world in a positive way. He also had a pretty deep belief in the spirit world, he even named one of his albums Spirits. He felt that his ancestors who had gone on before him were still available emotionally and spiritually.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I don't know if I was as angry as I was misunderstood. I think that a lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads. We were clearly coming from a small southern town in Tennessee and we didn't estimate what effect we'd have on national and international governments. We were trying to represent our community and speak about the things there. If people don't understand the humor then it's angry, but if people see the juxtaposition of the ideas then they understand where we're coming from. Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and people of that nature always felt that humor was the best way to see a point of view.
Much of Gil's catalog is dripping with sarcasm and subtly deadpanned double speak, even in his most harrowing moments. He also had an obvious love for slapstick verbal puns and could bend language in all different directions almost as a natural tic. (This sort of wordplay might be one of his more blatant predictions of hip-hop.)
Rackley: People who saw his shows would get a taste of that because he would start off with a monologue and it was always so funny. Like when he goes into the "H20gate Blues" and he talks about the different shades of the blues-- the "I ain't go no money blues," the "I ain't got me no money blues," and the "I ain't go no woman and I ain't got me no money blues, which is the double blues." He was able to find humor in almost everything.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I think everybody has six senses, and the sixth one is your sense of humor. And that's my most valuable one. I can imagine myself without the other five, but I can't imagine myself without my sense of humor.
These popular misconceptions might have to do with his biggest hit. For all of its impact, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" had the side effect of narrowing the memory of Gil's work. That tiny string of words wasn't a mission statement, just one small fragment of his message. And a tongue-in-cheek one, as well. The poem was heavy with bluster but weighted with wordplay. In it, Gil critiqued crass sloganeering, mocking everything from Agnew to Ajax campaigns. The bitter irony, of course, is that it became a slogan itself. "He was commercialized by the [current] generation," says Leon Collins, who lived with Gil in D.C. throughout the 60s and 70s. "That's been co-opted and exploited a billion different ways." As time passed Gil himself seemed mostly indifferent to these developments, though quick to clarify his original intent.
"[The revolution] is not all about fighting and going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem."
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I was saying the revolution takes place in your mind. Once you change your mind and decide that there's something wrong that you want to affect, that's when the revolution takes place. First you have to look at things and decide what you can do. That's when you become revolutionary-- when you see that something's wrong and [you] have to do something about it. It's not all about fighting, it's not all about going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem.
"Revolution" was first recorded as the opening cut on Gil's 1970 debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. But before that it appeared in the pages of his self-released book of the same name. This was the collection that Gil slipped legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele when he and Brian Jackson were looking for songwriting opportunities. Thiele passed at the time, though, telling Gil, "If you make any money [with poetry], maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music."
Small Talk was recorded live on stage with two percussionists. Gil sung and played piano on the record's three fully formed songs and the rest of record was made up of straightforward and mostly intense spoken word in the vein of contemporaries like the Last Poets. (A 1971 Billboard review half-dismissed "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as "a solid soundalike" of the Harlem collective.) Much of the album orbits a similar tone, but in the same space Gil tends to pull back from anything resembling rage to instead offer a panoramic view of the urban landscape. The songs that follow are all sung in Gil's now-trademark fragile intonation and mostly lean personal rather than political. It's a starkly honest affair with Gil both digging deep inside his own story and drawing out the stories of those around him. His eye for detail is unmatched, as on the title track, where he plays silent observer to conversations at the titular intersection, from dope deals to complaints: "I don't know if the riots is wrong/ But whitey been kicking my ass for too long." There's an underlying hum of concern for the larger societal issues of the day, but Gil tends to focus more specifically on how humans internalize and overcome these struggles.
"A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts."
Gil, Jet, 1979: There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art from their lives. They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstances.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: All of those poems don't just represent me, they represent the people I know and see. Some of them were angry, some of them were upset, some of them were parents, some of them were in love with their children, some of them were trying to get jobs, some of them were working with their jobs, some of them had problems with their women. "Pieces of a Man" is about a son seeing his father who just lost his job. I never saw that [personally], but I saw a friend of mine whose father went a little berserk when he lost his job. "Your Daddy Loves You" is not about anger and hellraising, it's about the fact that sometimes men have so many things on their mind they forget to say, "I love you." You have to show the normalcy of your community to show the humanity of your community. A good poet feels what his community feels. Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.
Small Talk made enough money to satisfy Thiele, and for its follow-up Gil returned to the studio to cut Pieces of a Man with a stacked lineup that included heavyweight jazz sessioners Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Bernard Purdie as well famed arranger Johnny Pate.
It also served as a full-scale coming-out party for Gil the Singer. While his spoken voice was a powerful vehicle for both the language and political bluster of his time, there's a stark fragility to Gil's singing. Echoing near-contemporaneous Chicagoan influences like Lou Rawls, Oscar Brown Jr., and Terry Callier, Gil delivered his lyrics in a carefully tempered and often melismatic baritone. This is most apparent on 1974's Winter in America, his sparsest collection. Most tracks are backed by little more than hauntingly tinkled solo piano, either acoustic or electric; the record makes a strong case for Gil's voice as the single greatest accompaniment to the Fender Rhodes. As he aged, his instrument turned raspier and even more frail in a way that only magnified his intensity.
Pieces once again opens with "The Revolution", but this time blown out to funk proportions. This would become a common approach for Gil-- his catalog covers a striking amount of ground musically, with songs and styles that would expand and contract over time.
McDonald: He had two main bands. I was part of the Amnesia Express, which he put together when the Midnight Band broke up. We were playing the same songs that the Midnight Band played, but we had a different kind of energy. It was amazing to see how instead of shutting us down, he'd let us play and adopt [our ideas]. When we performed "Angel Dust", it could take up to 40 minutes. It became a performance piece. "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" became "The Other Side", which is a three-part thing on the Spirits album. I was playing "The Other Side" for a couple of years and then one day I went up to my brother and he had a 45 of "The Bottle" and he flipped it over and halfway through the song I said, "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar." It was "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." I had never heard [the studio version of] that song before we started playing it! And we was killing it! He gave us freedom to play.
Price: Everybody talks about Gil, and Gil was half of it. But Brian [Jackson, Gil's principle collaborator in the first decade of his career] was also the music. Gil was very limited in terms of his musical ability; he could play three chords on the piano. Brian always gets put in the shadows. Had it not been for a lot of Brian's music, I don't know if Gil's work would've been as far reaching-- he reached the jazz community, the R&B community, and then in later years he was a hip-hop influence.
While the hip-hop world, particularly those artists residing on its "conscious rap" shores, embraced Gil Scott-Heron that relationship was not without certain misconceptions, either. It's difficult to find any press from the past 20 years that doesn't explicitly frame Gil as a progenitor to hip-hop. It's equally difficult to find many conversations where he then doesn't explicitly rebuke those comparisons, though usually in good humor.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I generally try to put credit where credit is due. For those viewers that go around boom-box bashing-- I am not the one that's responsible. [laughs] For others, I think we came along at a time where there was a transition going on in terms of poetry and music and we were one of the first groups to combine the two... and for that reason I think a lot of people picked up and decided we were the ones who had originated it.
There were parallels to be sure, but to exaggerate them to influence is to overlook the differences of influence. Hip-hop's roots stemmed more directly from radio jocks and reggae toasters, while Gil drew his primary influence from the pages of Harlem Renaissance literature. Gil self-identified as a poet first and foremost (or pianist or "bluesologist"); rapping was simply one of his vehicles. He was a godfather of a bastard child by circumstance. Of course, the parallels helped sustain Gil's later career as many of young listeners (this writer included) came to his music through hip-hop sample sources and incessant name drops, but it's strange and maybe a little disrespectful that someone who was so powerful in his own time is now defined primarily by what came after. Presumably, this is the curse of being ahead of the curve, but this was just one of the many curves he rode along in his career.
Some were more tumultuous than others. 1971's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", a tale of a struggling heroin addict who describes withdrawal as "turn[ing] your sick soul inside out so that the world can watch you die." The track eerily predicted his own problems with cocaine later in life. Esther Phillips, a recovering heroin addict herself, would later cover the song. In a 1997 interview with Vibe, Gil recalled the songstress' initial response to the record: "She said I knew too much about junkies not to be one." At the time she was wrong, but in the last three decades of his life he would succumb to those very demons. His struggles with substance abuse during this time are well documented, maybe even over-documented-- notably, he smoked crack in front of a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
He didn't record much in this time, effectively retiring after Moving Target in 1982, producing only 1994's inconsistent Spirits and 2010's considerably more consistent Richard Russell-assisted second comeback I'm New Here in the years since. He toured with some regularity during his studio lapses, usually to mixed reviews.
Photo by Mischa Richter
McDonald: In the later years when he wasn't showing up [to shows], I think he thought that by [then] somebody should've come along to pick up [where he left off]. He had carried it all through the 70s and 80s. I guess he just wanted to hang out and do what he wanted to do, but he couldn't get away with it. He was too major. When I joined him he had like 20 albums out! You couldn't really expect someone to operate at that level of excellence for the next 20 or 30 years. He'd burn out. Whatever happened to him or whatever he became, he gave up the office. He didn't want to be bothered talking about all the stuff that was happening today. I figured people needed to leave him alone more than they did. But that was hard because he was so charismatic. It's not that I didn't see his faults; it was just worth it more for me to hang with him and not harass him about that stuff because I was always learning from him.
Leon Collins, housemate: When I look at entertainers in general, most of them are vulnerable, sensitive, compassionate. When trauma impacts them they're emotionally damaged and a lot of them have broken hearts. They self-medicate. That's the history of all music, black music in particular. Michael Jackson's another sensitive soul who was traumatized. I look at Gil as a cultural activist warrior who spoke truth to power and paid a price for it. The demons that chased Gil, he earned them. They were real but I don't think he asked for them.
via pitchfork.com

NEO•GRIOT

Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

CULTURE: Gil Scott-Heron: More Than a Revolution > Pitchfork

Gil Scott-Heron:

More Than a Revolution

A full picture of the late poet, novelist, singer, satirist, and father of four.

By Andrew Nosnitsky, January 18, 2012
Download full size (77 KB)
When Gil Scott-Heron passed away last May, the flurry of obits, essays, and think pieces that followed principally presented him in two specific lights-- as the man behind the much-quoted (and misquoted) catchphrase "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a presage of hip-hop. He was 62 years old when he died and had recorded 15 studio albums and written two novels; his postumous memoir, The Last Holiday, was released this week. Gil was a poet, a novelist, a singer, a songwriter, a pianist, a satirist, a father of four. In revisiting his catalog and talking to the people closest to him, it doesn't take long to see past the catchphrase and recognize him as a much more complex artist and human.
Well before his journey as an entertainer began, Gil's biography was a fascinating one. He was born in Chicago; his mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sung with the New York Oratorio Society and his father was a Jamaica-born professional soccer player. His parents separated when Gil was two and moved him to Tenneesse, where he was raised by his grandmother. There, he was one of the first black children to be integrated into the state's school system.
By 12 he moved north to live with his mother in New York, where he would befriend classmate and budding hoop legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a teen. (They remained friends for the decades that followed, with Kareem serving as best man in Gil's wedding to actress Brenda Sykes. When Gil passed, Kareem penned a brief but heartfelt eulogy on his blog entitled "Goodbye Gil Scott-Heron".) After graduating high school, Gil attended the HBCU Lincoln-- alma mater to luminaries such as Langston Hughes-- but dropped out to finish his first novel, The Vulture, which established him as a talent with both politically charged impulses and a knack for writing in the then-hip voice of the streets.
Larry McDonald, percussionist: There are two Americans I could listen to talk forever: Gil and Richard Pryor. The way they used "black English"-- they could curse and swear and say the most outrageous things, and it didn't seem obscene because it was totally in context.
Lurma Rackley, girlfriend and mother of Gil's son Rumel: Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, everybody was open to the realities that each person had to do something and be involved. All across the country and the world people were paying attention to the huge shifts that were going on-- the end of segregation, the efforts to end Apartheid, the focus on nuclear energy, the whole Nixon debacle. There were powerful political happenings and he was so brilliant about tapping into them in a way that people could understand. He was tapped into the energy of the time and he made extraordinary commentary on the major issues of his time. The commentary is still valid today.
For all the power in his message, Gil frequently struggled with the reductionist assumption that he was just a political firebrand.
"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.
A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."
McDonald: One day he said to me, "Man, I don't like how they have me as this black spokesman. When they do that, they're setting you up so they can shoot you down. I've got too many skeletons in my closet. I don't even want to be bothered by that." So I said, "Why do you go down this road?" He said, "I saw some shit that needed to be spoken on and nobody was speaking on it. So I just said it."
Gary Price, housemate: Everybody talks about "The Bottle" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Angel Dust", but some of the more emotional pieces like "Song for Bobby Smith" were my favorites. That song has no social or political things going on at all-- it's just a beautiful song.
Rackley: He had a soft side, too, and a lot of people were attracted to him. He talked about his grandmother a lot and her connection to the earth and to doing what's right. I think that infected his approach to the world in a positive way. He also had a pretty deep belief in the spirit world, he even named one of his albums Spirits. He felt that his ancestors who had gone on before him were still available emotionally and spiritually.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I don't know if I was as angry as I was misunderstood. I think that a lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads. We were clearly coming from a small southern town in Tennessee and we didn't estimate what effect we'd have on national and international governments. We were trying to represent our community and speak about the things there. If people don't understand the humor then it's angry, but if people see the juxtaposition of the ideas then they understand where we're coming from. Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and people of that nature always felt that humor was the best way to see a point of view.
Much of Gil's catalog is dripping with sarcasm and subtly deadpanned double speak, even in his most harrowing moments. He also had an obvious love for slapstick verbal puns and could bend language in all different directions almost as a natural tic. (This sort of wordplay might be one of his more blatant predictions of hip-hop.)
Rackley: People who saw his shows would get a taste of that because he would start off with a monologue and it was always so funny. Like when he goes into the "H20gate Blues" and he talks about the different shades of the blues-- the "I ain't go no money blues," the "I ain't got me no money blues," and the "I ain't go no woman and I ain't got me no money blues, which is the double blues." He was able to find humor in almost everything.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I think everybody has six senses, and the sixth one is your sense of humor. And that's my most valuable one. I can imagine myself without the other five, but I can't imagine myself without my sense of humor.
These popular misconceptions might have to do with his biggest hit. For all of its impact, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" had the side effect of narrowing the memory of Gil's work. That tiny string of words wasn't a mission statement, just one small fragment of his message. And a tongue-in-cheek one, as well. The poem was heavy with bluster but weighted with wordplay. In it, Gil critiqued crass sloganeering, mocking everything from Agnew to Ajax campaigns. The bitter irony, of course, is that it became a slogan itself. "He was commercialized by the [current] generation," says Leon Collins, who lived with Gil in D.C. throughout the 60s and 70s. "That's been co-opted and exploited a billion different ways." As time passed Gil himself seemed mostly indifferent to these developments, though quick to clarify his original intent.
"[The revolution] is not all about fighting and going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem."
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I was saying the revolution takes place in your mind. Once you change your mind and decide that there's something wrong that you want to affect, that's when the revolution takes place. First you have to look at things and decide what you can do. That's when you become revolutionary-- when you see that something's wrong and [you] have to do something about it. It's not all about fighting, it's not all about going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem.
"Revolution" was first recorded as the opening cut on Gil's 1970 debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. But before that it appeared in the pages of his self-released book of the same name. This was the collection that Gil slipped legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele when he and Brian Jackson were looking for songwriting opportunities. Thiele passed at the time, though, telling Gil, "If you make any money [with poetry], maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music."
Small Talk was recorded live on stage with two percussionists. Gil sung and played piano on the record's three fully formed songs and the rest of record was made up of straightforward and mostly intense spoken word in the vein of contemporaries like the Last Poets. (A 1971 Billboard review half-dismissed "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as "a solid soundalike" of the Harlem collective.) Much of the album orbits a similar tone, but in the same space Gil tends to pull back from anything resembling rage to instead offer a panoramic view of the urban landscape. The songs that follow are all sung in Gil's now-trademark fragile intonation and mostly lean personal rather than political. It's a starkly honest affair with Gil both digging deep inside his own story and drawing out the stories of those around him. His eye for detail is unmatched, as on the title track, where he plays silent observer to conversations at the titular intersection, from dope deals to complaints: "I don't know if the riots is wrong/ But whitey been kicking my ass for too long." There's an underlying hum of concern for the larger societal issues of the day, but Gil tends to focus more specifically on how humans internalize and overcome these struggles.
"A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts."
Gil, Jet, 1979: There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art from their lives. They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstances.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: All of those poems don't just represent me, they represent the people I know and see. Some of them were angry, some of them were upset, some of them were parents, some of them were in love with their children, some of them were trying to get jobs, some of them were working with their jobs, some of them had problems with their women. "Pieces of a Man" is about a son seeing his father who just lost his job. I never saw that [personally], but I saw a friend of mine whose father went a little berserk when he lost his job. "Your Daddy Loves You" is not about anger and hellraising, it's about the fact that sometimes men have so many things on their mind they forget to say, "I love you." You have to show the normalcy of your community to show the humanity of your community. A good poet feels what his community feels. Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.
Small Talk made enough money to satisfy Thiele, and for its follow-up Gil returned to the studio to cut Pieces of a Man with a stacked lineup that included heavyweight jazz sessioners Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Bernard Purdie as well famed arranger Johnny Pate.
It also served as a full-scale coming-out party for Gil the Singer. While his spoken voice was a powerful vehicle for both the language and political bluster of his time, there's a stark fragility to Gil's singing. Echoing near-contemporaneous Chicagoan influences like Lou Rawls, Oscar Brown Jr., and Terry Callier, Gil delivered his lyrics in a carefully tempered and often melismatic baritone. This is most apparent on 1974's Winter in America, his sparsest collection. Most tracks are backed by little more than hauntingly tinkled solo piano, either acoustic or electric; the record makes a strong case for Gil's voice as the single greatest accompaniment to the Fender Rhodes. As he aged, his instrument turned raspier and even more frail in a way that only magnified his intensity.
Pieces once again opens with "The Revolution", but this time blown out to funk proportions. This would become a common approach for Gil-- his catalog covers a striking amount of ground musically, with songs and styles that would expand and contract over time.
McDonald: He had two main bands. I was part of the Amnesia Express, which he put together when the Midnight Band broke up. We were playing the same songs that the Midnight Band played, but we had a different kind of energy. It was amazing to see how instead of shutting us down, he'd let us play and adopt [our ideas]. When we performed "Angel Dust", it could take up to 40 minutes. It became a performance piece. "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" became "The Other Side", which is a three-part thing on the Spirits album. I was playing "The Other Side" for a couple of years and then one day I went up to my brother and he had a 45 of "The Bottle" and he flipped it over and halfway through the song I said, "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar." It was "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." I had never heard [the studio version of] that song before we started playing it! And we was killing it! He gave us freedom to play.
Price: Everybody talks about Gil, and Gil was half of it. But Brian [Jackson, Gil's principle collaborator in the first decade of his career] was also the music. Gil was very limited in terms of his musical ability; he could play three chords on the piano. Brian always gets put in the shadows. Had it not been for a lot of Brian's music, I don't know if Gil's work would've been as far reaching-- he reached the jazz community, the R&B community, and then in later years he was a hip-hop influence.
While the hip-hop world, particularly those artists residing on its "conscious rap" shores, embraced Gil Scott-Heron that relationship was not without certain misconceptions, either. It's difficult to find any press from the past 20 years that doesn't explicitly frame Gil as a progenitor to hip-hop. It's equally difficult to find many conversations where he then doesn't explicitly rebuke those comparisons, though usually in good humor.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I generally try to put credit where credit is due. For those viewers that go around boom-box bashing-- I am not the one that's responsible. [laughs] For others, I think we came along at a time where there was a transition going on in terms of poetry and music and we were one of the first groups to combine the two... and for that reason I think a lot of people picked up and decided we were the ones who had originated it.
There were parallels to be sure, but to exaggerate them to influence is to overlook the differences of influence. Hip-hop's roots stemmed more directly from radio jocks and reggae toasters, while Gil drew his primary influence from the pages of Harlem Renaissance literature. Gil self-identified as a poet first and foremost (or pianist or "bluesologist"); rapping was simply one of his vehicles. He was a godfather of a bastard child by circumstance. Of course, the parallels helped sustain Gil's later career as many of young listeners (this writer included) came to his music through hip-hop sample sources and incessant name drops, but it's strange and maybe a little disrespectful that someone who was so powerful in his own time is now defined primarily by what came after. Presumably, this is the curse of being ahead of the curve, but this was just one of the many curves he rode along in his career.
Some were more tumultuous than others. 1971's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", a tale of a struggling heroin addict who describes withdrawal as "turn[ing] your sick soul inside out so that the world can watch you die." The track eerily predicted his own problems with cocaine later in life. Esther Phillips, a recovering heroin addict herself, would later cover the song. In a 1997 interview with Vibe, Gil recalled the songstress' initial response to the record: "She said I knew too much about junkies not to be one." At the time she was wrong, but in the last three decades of his life he would succumb to those very demons. His struggles with substance abuse during this time are well documented, maybe even over-documented-- notably, he smoked crack in front of a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
He didn't record much in this time, effectively retiring after Moving Target in 1982, producing only 1994's inconsistent Spirits and 2010's considerably more consistent Richard Russell-assisted second comeback I'm New Here in the years since. He toured with some regularity during his studio lapses, usually to mixed reviews.
Photo by Mischa Richter
McDonald: In the later years when he wasn't showing up [to shows], I think he thought that by [then] somebody should've come along to pick up [where he left off]. He had carried it all through the 70s and 80s. I guess he just wanted to hang out and do what he wanted to do, but he couldn't get away with it. He was too major. When I joined him he had like 20 albums out! You couldn't really expect someone to operate at that level of excellence for the next 20 or 30 years. He'd burn out. Whatever happened to him or whatever he became, he gave up the office. He didn't want to be bothered talking about all the stuff that was happening today. I figured people needed to leave him alone more than they did. But that was hard because he was so charismatic. It's not that I didn't see his faults; it was just worth it more for me to hang with him and not harass him about that stuff because I was always learning from him.
Leon Collins, housemate: When I look at entertainers in general, most of them are vulnerable, sensitive, compassionate. When trauma impacts them they're emotionally damaged and a lot of them have broken hearts. They self-medicate. That's the history of all music, black music in particular. Michael Jackson's another sensitive soul who was traumatized. I look at Gil as a cultural activist warrior who spoke truth to power and paid a price for it. The demons that chased Gil, he earned them. They were real but I don't think he asked for them.
via pitchfork.com

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CULTURE: Gil Scott-Heron: More Than a Revolution > Pitchfork

Gil Scott-Heron:

More Than a Revolution

A full picture of the late poet, novelist, singer, satirist, and father of four.

By Andrew Nosnitsky, January 18, 2012
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When Gil Scott-Heron passed away last May, the flurry of obits, essays, and think pieces that followed principally presented him in two specific lights-- as the man behind the much-quoted (and misquoted) catchphrase "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a presage of hip-hop. He was 62 years old when he died and had recorded 15 studio albums and written two novels; his postumous memoir, The Last Holiday, was released this week. Gil was a poet, a novelist, a singer, a songwriter, a pianist, a satirist, a father of four. In revisiting his catalog and talking to the people closest to him, it doesn't take long to see past the catchphrase and recognize him as a much more complex artist and human.
Well before his journey as an entertainer began, Gil's biography was a fascinating one. He was born in Chicago; his mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sung with the New York Oratorio Society and his father was a Jamaica-born professional soccer player. His parents separated when Gil was two and moved him to Tenneesse, where he was raised by his grandmother. There, he was one of the first black children to be integrated into the state's school system.
By 12 he moved north to live with his mother in New York, where he would befriend classmate and budding hoop legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a teen. (They remained friends for the decades that followed, with Kareem serving as best man in Gil's wedding to actress Brenda Sykes. When Gil passed, Kareem penned a brief but heartfelt eulogy on his blog entitled "Goodbye Gil Scott-Heron".) After graduating high school, Gil attended the HBCU Lincoln-- alma mater to luminaries such as Langston Hughes-- but dropped out to finish his first novel, The Vulture, which established him as a talent with both politically charged impulses and a knack for writing in the then-hip voice of the streets.
Larry McDonald, percussionist: There are two Americans I could listen to talk forever: Gil and Richard Pryor. The way they used "black English"-- they could curse and swear and say the most outrageous things, and it didn't seem obscene because it was totally in context.
Lurma Rackley, girlfriend and mother of Gil's son Rumel: Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, everybody was open to the realities that each person had to do something and be involved. All across the country and the world people were paying attention to the huge shifts that were going on-- the end of segregation, the efforts to end Apartheid, the focus on nuclear energy, the whole Nixon debacle. There were powerful political happenings and he was so brilliant about tapping into them in a way that people could understand. He was tapped into the energy of the time and he made extraordinary commentary on the major issues of his time. The commentary is still valid today.
For all the power in his message, Gil frequently struggled with the reductionist assumption that he was just a political firebrand.
"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.
A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."
McDonald: One day he said to me, "Man, I don't like how they have me as this black spokesman. When they do that, they're setting you up so they can shoot you down. I've got too many skeletons in my closet. I don't even want to be bothered by that." So I said, "Why do you go down this road?" He said, "I saw some shit that needed to be spoken on and nobody was speaking on it. So I just said it."
Gary Price, housemate: Everybody talks about "The Bottle" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Angel Dust", but some of the more emotional pieces like "Song for Bobby Smith" were my favorites. That song has no social or political things going on at all-- it's just a beautiful song.
Rackley: He had a soft side, too, and a lot of people were attracted to him. He talked about his grandmother a lot and her connection to the earth and to doing what's right. I think that infected his approach to the world in a positive way. He also had a pretty deep belief in the spirit world, he even named one of his albums Spirits. He felt that his ancestors who had gone on before him were still available emotionally and spiritually.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I don't know if I was as angry as I was misunderstood. I think that a lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads. We were clearly coming from a small southern town in Tennessee and we didn't estimate what effect we'd have on national and international governments. We were trying to represent our community and speak about the things there. If people don't understand the humor then it's angry, but if people see the juxtaposition of the ideas then they understand where we're coming from. Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and people of that nature always felt that humor was the best way to see a point of view.
Much of Gil's catalog is dripping with sarcasm and subtly deadpanned double speak, even in his most harrowing moments. He also had an obvious love for slapstick verbal puns and could bend language in all different directions almost as a natural tic. (This sort of wordplay might be one of his more blatant predictions of hip-hop.)
Rackley: People who saw his shows would get a taste of that because he would start off with a monologue and it was always so funny. Like when he goes into the "H20gate Blues" and he talks about the different shades of the blues-- the "I ain't go no money blues," the "I ain't got me no money blues," and the "I ain't go no woman and I ain't got me no money blues, which is the double blues." He was able to find humor in almost everything.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I think everybody has six senses, and the sixth one is your sense of humor. And that's my most valuable one. I can imagine myself without the other five, but I can't imagine myself without my sense of humor.
These popular misconceptions might have to do with his biggest hit. For all of its impact, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" had the side effect of narrowing the memory of Gil's work. That tiny string of words wasn't a mission statement, just one small fragment of his message. And a tongue-in-cheek one, as well. The poem was heavy with bluster but weighted with wordplay. In it, Gil critiqued crass sloganeering, mocking everything from Agnew to Ajax campaigns. The bitter irony, of course, is that it became a slogan itself. "He was commercialized by the [current] generation," says Leon Collins, who lived with Gil in D.C. throughout the 60s and 70s. "That's been co-opted and exploited a billion different ways." As time passed Gil himself seemed mostly indifferent to these developments, though quick to clarify his original intent.
"[The revolution] is not all about fighting and going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem."
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I was saying the revolution takes place in your mind. Once you change your mind and decide that there's something wrong that you want to affect, that's when the revolution takes place. First you have to look at things and decide what you can do. That's when you become revolutionary-- when you see that something's wrong and [you] have to do something about it. It's not all about fighting, it's not all about going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem.
"Revolution" was first recorded as the opening cut on Gil's 1970 debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. But before that it appeared in the pages of his self-released book of the same name. This was the collection that Gil slipped legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele when he and Brian Jackson were looking for songwriting opportunities. Thiele passed at the time, though, telling Gil, "If you make any money [with poetry], maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music."
Small Talk was recorded live on stage with two percussionists. Gil sung and played piano on the record's three fully formed songs and the rest of record was made up of straightforward and mostly intense spoken word in the vein of contemporaries like the Last Poets. (A 1971 Billboard review half-dismissed "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as "a solid soundalike" of the Harlem collective.) Much of the album orbits a similar tone, but in the same space Gil tends to pull back from anything resembling rage to instead offer a panoramic view of the urban landscape. The songs that follow are all sung in Gil's now-trademark fragile intonation and mostly lean personal rather than political. It's a starkly honest affair with Gil both digging deep inside his own story and drawing out the stories of those around him. His eye for detail is unmatched, as on the title track, where he plays silent observer to conversations at the titular intersection, from dope deals to complaints: "I don't know if the riots is wrong/ But whitey been kicking my ass for too long." There's an underlying hum of concern for the larger societal issues of the day, but Gil tends to focus more specifically on how humans internalize and overcome these struggles.
"A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts."
Gil, Jet, 1979: There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art from their lives. They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstances.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: All of those poems don't just represent me, they represent the people I know and see. Some of them were angry, some of them were upset, some of them were parents, some of them were in love with their children, some of them were trying to get jobs, some of them were working with their jobs, some of them had problems with their women. "Pieces of a Man" is about a son seeing his father who just lost his job. I never saw that [personally], but I saw a friend of mine whose father went a little berserk when he lost his job. "Your Daddy Loves You" is not about anger and hellraising, it's about the fact that sometimes men have so many things on their mind they forget to say, "I love you." You have to show the normalcy of your community to show the humanity of your community. A good poet feels what his community feels. Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.
Small Talk made enough money to satisfy Thiele, and for its follow-up Gil returned to the studio to cut Pieces of a Man with a stacked lineup that included heavyweight jazz sessioners Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Bernard Purdie as well famed arranger Johnny Pate.
It also served as a full-scale coming-out party for Gil the Singer. While his spoken voice was a powerful vehicle for both the language and political bluster of his time, there's a stark fragility to Gil's singing. Echoing near-contemporaneous Chicagoan influences like Lou Rawls, Oscar Brown Jr., and Terry Callier, Gil delivered his lyrics in a carefully tempered and often melismatic baritone. This is most apparent on 1974's Winter in America, his sparsest collection. Most tracks are backed by little more than hauntingly tinkled solo piano, either acoustic or electric; the record makes a strong case for Gil's voice as the single greatest accompaniment to the Fender Rhodes. As he aged, his instrument turned raspier and even more frail in a way that only magnified his intensity.
Pieces once again opens with "The Revolution", but this time blown out to funk proportions. This would become a common approach for Gil-- his catalog covers a striking amount of ground musically, with songs and styles that would expand and contract over time.
McDonald: He had two main bands. I was part of the Amnesia Express, which he put together when the Midnight Band broke up. We were playing the same songs that the Midnight Band played, but we had a different kind of energy. It was amazing to see how instead of shutting us down, he'd let us play and adopt [our ideas]. When we performed "Angel Dust", it could take up to 40 minutes. It became a performance piece. "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" became "The Other Side", which is a three-part thing on the Spirits album. I was playing "The Other Side" for a couple of years and then one day I went up to my brother and he had a 45 of "The Bottle" and he flipped it over and halfway through the song I said, "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar." It was "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." I had never heard [the studio version of] that song before we started playing it! And we was killing it! He gave us freedom to play.
Price: Everybody talks about Gil, and Gil was half of it. But Brian [Jackson, Gil's principle collaborator in the first decade of his career] was also the music. Gil was very limited in terms of his musical ability; he could play three chords on the piano. Brian always gets put in the shadows. Had it not been for a lot of Brian's music, I don't know if Gil's work would've been as far reaching-- he reached the jazz community, the R&B community, and then in later years he was a hip-hop influence.
While the hip-hop world, particularly those artists residing on its "conscious rap" shores, embraced Gil Scott-Heron that relationship was not without certain misconceptions, either. It's difficult to find any press from the past 20 years that doesn't explicitly frame Gil as a progenitor to hip-hop. It's equally difficult to find many conversations where he then doesn't explicitly rebuke those comparisons, though usually in good humor.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I generally try to put credit where credit is due. For those viewers that go around boom-box bashing-- I am not the one that's responsible. [laughs] For others, I think we came along at a time where there was a transition going on in terms of poetry and music and we were one of the first groups to combine the two... and for that reason I think a lot of people picked up and decided we were the ones who had originated it.
There were parallels to be sure, but to exaggerate them to influence is to overlook the differences of influence. Hip-hop's roots stemmed more directly from radio jocks and reggae toasters, while Gil drew his primary influence from the pages of Harlem Renaissance literature. Gil self-identified as a poet first and foremost (or pianist or "bluesologist"); rapping was simply one of his vehicles. He was a godfather of a bastard child by circumstance. Of course, the parallels helped sustain Gil's later career as many of young listeners (this writer included) came to his music through hip-hop sample sources and incessant name drops, but it's strange and maybe a little disrespectful that someone who was so powerful in his own time is now defined primarily by what came after. Presumably, this is the curse of being ahead of the curve, but this was just one of the many curves he rode along in his career.
Some were more tumultuous than others. 1971's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", a tale of a struggling heroin addict who describes withdrawal as "turn[ing] your sick soul inside out so that the world can watch you die." The track eerily predicted his own problems with cocaine later in life. Esther Phillips, a recovering heroin addict herself, would later cover the song. In a 1997 interview with Vibe, Gil recalled the songstress' initial response to the record: "She said I knew too much about junkies not to be one." At the time she was wrong, but in the last three decades of his life he would succumb to those very demons. His struggles with substance abuse during this time are well documented, maybe even over-documented-- notably, he smoked crack in front of a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
He didn't record much in this time, effectively retiring after Moving Target in 1982, producing only 1994's inconsistent Spirits and 2010's considerably more consistent Richard Russell-assisted second comeback I'm New Here in the years since. He toured with some regularity during his studio lapses, usually to mixed reviews.
Photo by Mischa Richter
McDonald: In the later years when he wasn't showing up [to shows], I think he thought that by [then] somebody should've come along to pick up [where he left off]. He had carried it all through the 70s and 80s. I guess he just wanted to hang out and do what he wanted to do, but he couldn't get away with it. He was too major. When I joined him he had like 20 albums out! You couldn't really expect someone to operate at that level of excellence for the next 20 or 30 years. He'd burn out. Whatever happened to him or whatever he became, he gave up the office. He didn't want to be bothered talking about all the stuff that was happening today. I figured people needed to leave him alone more than they did. But that was hard because he was so charismatic. It's not that I didn't see his faults; it was just worth it more for me to hang with him and not harass him about that stuff because I was always learning from him.
Leon Collins, housemate: When I look at entertainers in general, most of them are vulnerable, sensitive, compassionate. When trauma impacts them they're emotionally damaged and a lot of them have broken hearts. They self-medicate. That's the history of all music, black music in particular. Michael Jackson's another sensitive soul who was traumatized. I look at Gil as a cultural activist warrior who spoke truth to power and paid a price for it. The demons that chased Gil, he earned them. They were real but I don't think he asked for them.
via pitchfork.com
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