Once asked how he felt about people calling him the Godfather of Rap, Gil Scott-Heron said he thought they’d made a mistake. Yeah, there were similarities: the sing-speaking; the mix of soul, poetry, and jazz; the concept of music as a reportorial force—what Public Enemy’s Chuck D later called “Black America’s CNN.”
Beyond that, though, he didn’t get it. Hip-hop was—especially at its onset— loud, braggadocious, more concerned with personal mythmaking than societal reflection. And whereas rap’s origin story was all about economy (two turntables and a microphone, the big personality with the bare-bones rig), Scott-Heron and his writing partner Brian Jackson had always sought to make their music subtler and more refined—less radio DJ than verse set to sound.
Pieces of a Man is best known for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and with good reason: Few pieces of music capture as much humor, bitterness, grief, and insight in such a short space. But it’s the whole of the album—its tonal shifts, its musical variety—that makes Scott-Heron legendary: the pessimism of “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” next to the uplift of “Save the Children,” springy jazz funk (“Lady Day and John Coltrane”) next to heavy soul ballads (“Pieces of a Man”).
As bracing as his observations can be, he has a way of making them feel casual, almost offhand—the chatter of someone on the corner rather than the Sermon on the Mount. He once said the place he came from was more Langston Hughes than Huey Newton—in other words, he wasn’t there to change what he saw, only to describe it with as much empathy as he could. Whereas artists like Bob Marley and Fela Kuti—both radical Black voices of the ’70s—inspire action, Scott-Heron inspires careful, unflinching observation. Asked whether “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was an effort to turn his anger into humor, Scott-Heron shook his head and said he didn’t turn anything into anything. And if the condition of being Black in America looked unjust and absurd, well, maybe that’s because it is.