Whose Tube? Gil Scott Heron Is Not Dead

Yet we have no idea
Why we are struggling here
Faced with our every fear
Just to survive-Beginnings

The saints have all gone ahead. Langston, Malcolm, Miles, Martin, James. Bob Marley is somewhere liming. But bless us, Gil Scott  Heron is not dead.  Many of us in DC thought that was his ghost we saw in many of the wrong places at the wrong times.  It was.

Gil is back on stage now, last Fall at SOBs in New York,  and most recently at the 9:30 Club in DC.   Hopefully, more and more of us will see him, hear him. Gil is performing again, singing the blues in a jazzy way that makes us happy sad.  Singing jazz in a bluesy tone that connects yesterday and today musically, politically, culturally.

The cost of indulgence has been high, no pun intended, for Gil and many of us.  Anyone who has at once felt the exhilaration of newfound freedom, followed by the revelation of self-destruction associated with abuse, knows that we thought Gil was dead because some part of us had died.  Perhaps murdered by the awareness that even if we did descend from kings and queens, we had no claim as a birthright, but pain as a promise, and addiction as a traditional response.

Gil saw that.  He sang about the pressures and privileges of those first minutes of a new day.  Who would believe that freedom, freedom of choice would have some of us choose an expensive rock/powder persona instead of becoming a drunk? In what remained, we were left analyzing our victimhood as a first step towards beginning anew.

Personally challenged, Gil also saw his message muted. His lyrical politics gave way to…a lot of things. The politics of prosperity diverted our attention.   Johannesburg is no longer a symbol, just another city.  Our failed black protest drug experiment, dose upon dose of reminiscent speeches and marches left us cold and impotent. But Gil, me, and you survived.   Thankfully, they can stop production of “I Saw Him to Go to Pieces”: the Gil Scott story.  Gil is not dead.  And neither is his poetry, his music, his message.

His work, the art of agitation and provocation is not nostalgic, it is so next week.  His music inspires the agent provocateur today.  The visual elements illustrate his lyrical timelessness.

Gil is not stuck in the past, but here now, still representing our selves, to us and anyone else looking.  He comments from his perch, sending a message to the messengers.  And the visual artists support and interpret that for our eyes.

Today, as our connection to each other, the church and its ministers are questioned, we need inspiration, personal and political. Enjoy righteous voices, Gil and Brian Jackson singing to us as we slide through completely new beginnings. Any truth to the rumor Barack is rehearsing a duet with Gil for the convention?

VeTalle Fusilier is a producer and writer based in Washington, DC. It's pronounced VEE-tal few-suh-LEER.