Soul of a man

No matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around.
—performed by Gil Scott-Heron on I'm New Here, written by Bill Callahan

It's all about redemption. Gil Scott-Heron, the philosopher, poet, musician, author and rapper prototype, turned his incisive, uncompromising vision to himself for his last album, last year's I'm New Here. For all the bigness of theme and scope that seemed to encompass much of the work he is known for — "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," "Whitey on the Moon," "From South Africa to South Carolina" — INH reads like a 12-step confessional. It's brutal in its personal honesty, particularly the ominous reading of bluesman Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" that rides on an electronic dirge as he recites: Me and the devil, walking side by side. The video is just as ominous, shot in black and white and reminiscent of the great film Black Orpheus, with its deathly figures roaming the urban landscape.

Gil Scott-Heron died May 27 at age 62 in a New York City hospital after a flight from England. No cause of death has been officially released, but his body was ravaged from decades of alcohol and drug abuse, and in 2008 Scott-Heron said that he had been HIV positive for years. He was born in Chicago in 1949 and raised from age 2 by his grandmother in Tennessee after his parents separated. He seemed to predict his own death on INH, saying: Yeah the doctors don't know, but New York was killing me/ Bunch of doctors coming 'round, they don't know/ That New York is killing me/ Yeah, I need to go home and take it slow in Jackson, Tennessee.

He should have taken his own advice as he indeed met his end in New York. And INH seemed a preparation for that end. On the recording he says with a laugh: If you've got to pay for things that you've done wrong, I've got a big bill coming.

Everything about him seemed big when he burst onto the scene in 1970 with "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a screed railing against the intersection of mass media and the black power movement, voicing mistrust of the motives of any establishment figure and turning away from the American establishment. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; the revolution will be live, he concludes. It rode on a bed of African drumbeats and was delivered with an accusative, proselytizing voice.

The piece was on the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox and branded Scott-Heron as a "new black poet." I was entranced by his work. It was far different from anything I'd heard before, and soon I was crouched in college dorm rooms listening to it with my friends, including future MT editor W. Kim Heron, a cousin of Scott-Heron's. The next few albums, Pieces of a Man, Free Will and Winter in America were onour playlist as Scott-Heron's work became more and more musically inclined, and although he was working with top jazz musicians such as bassist Ron Carter and drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, he never lost that three-chords-and-the-truth sensibility. Singles such as "The Bottle" and "Angel Dust" rose up the R&B charts, and singer Esther Phillips covered his "Home is Where the Hatred Is." He played Saturday Night Live with Richard Pryor, and the über divas of Labelle covered "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." It seemed that Scott-Heron could have been a rock star with his intense lyrics, deep bluesy voice and an ability to create hooks inside songs that went to uneasy places in our psyches.

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