May 29, 2011

Singer-songwriter-musician Gil Scott-Heron has passed on. Most peers of my advanced age know him from his seminal 1970s song critiquing consumer culture, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised":

You will not be able to plug in turn on and cop out...
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox...
There revolution will not be televised, will not be televised.

But a younger generation reacted enthusiastically to his newly released album, "I'm New Here"--his first in 16 years--even as they understood his physical frailty and his battles with substance abuse. In a recent and widely heralded New Yorker profile by Alec Wilkinson, Scott-Heron openly smoked crack and was depicted as living the life of a hermit, sequestered in his New York apartment. The title of the story (which is also one of the best songs on the DVD) seems painfully appropriate today: "New York Is Killing Me."

(For those interested, please read pages 244-45 of Watching the World Change for a discussion of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as it relates to our era of 24/7 news.)