Song of the Day 5/19: Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

For some reason, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame couldn’t simply place Gil Scott-Heron among the pantheon. He’s in this year, but as an “early influencer.” If they’re talking about his influence on rap, well, that’s undeniable, but that shortchanges an artist whose body of work towers above some of the acts already in.

At his earliest gigs, Gil Scott-Heron was advertised as a poet. He attended Lincoln University near Oxford, Pa., where he studied creative writing and met Brian Jackson, his first musical collaborator. (He left without graduating, but got an MA in creative writing in 1972). He’s been eligible for Hall election for more than 25 years — his first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” came out in 1970. This was the opening track. The beat poetry influence is obvious, but the pointed social commentary was pure Black Power. BTW, some of the names you don’t recognize were Black leaders at the time; Scott-Heron was calling them out for hypocrisy.

For all his influence on rap, especially political crews like Public Enemy, by the ’90s Scott-Heron was critical of the genre:

They need to study music. I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There’s a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music. There’s not a lot of humor. They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.

He struggled with substance abuse throughout his career, and twice served prison terms for possession. Yet he wrote several songs discouraging substance abuse. Probably most famous is “The Bottle,” but he also warned against PCP, which has a brief run of popularity as a recreational drug in the ’70s, on his 1978 LP “Secrets.”

Scott-Heron died in 2011, just 62 years old, a year after releasing a comeback album, “I’m New Here.” Musically it’s nothing like his earlier work, but it shows his creative juices were still flowing. Too bad the Hall didn’t see fit to recognize him while he could have appreciated it.