Gil Scott-Heron

b. 1 April 1949, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Raised in Jackson, Tennessee, by his grandmother, Scott-Heron moved to New York at the age of 13 and had published two novels (The Vulture and The Nigger Factory plus a book of poems by the time he was 12. He met musician Brian Jackson when both were students at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, and in 1972 they formed the Midnight Band to play their original blend of jazz, soul and prototype rap music. SMALL TALK AT 125TH AND LENOX was mostly an album of poems (from his book of the same name), but later albums showed Scott-Heron developing into a skilled songwriter whose work was soon covered by other artists: for example, Labelle recorded his The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Esther Phillips made a gripping version of Home Is Where The Hatred Is. In 1973 he had a minor hit with The Bottle. WINTER IN AMERICA and THE FIRST MINUTE OF A NEW DAY, for new label Arista, were both heavily jazz-influenced, but later sets saw Scott-Heron exploring more pop-oriented formats, and in 1976 he scored a hit with the disco-based protest single, Johannesburg. One of his best records of the '80s, REFLECTIONS, featured a fine version of Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues; but his strongest songs were generally his own barbed political diatribes, in which he confronted issues such as nuclear power, apartheid and poverty and made a series of scathing attacks on American politicians. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Barry Goldwater and Jimmy Carter were all targets of his trenchant satire and his anti-Reagan rap, B-Movie, gave him another small hit in 1982. An important precursor of today's rap artists, Scott-Heron once described Jackson (who left the band in 1980) and himself as ‘interpreters of the black experience’. However, by the '90s his view of the development of rap had become more jaundiced: ‘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 humour. 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’. In 1994 he released his first album in ten years, SPIRITS, which began with Message To The Messenger, an addess to today's rap artists: ‘…Young rappers, one more suggestion before I get out of your way, But I appreciate the respect you give me and what you got to say, I'm sayin' protect your community and spread that respect around, Tell brothers and sisters they got to calm that bullshit down, 'Cause we're terrorizin' our old folks and we brought fear into our homes’.