Hello, you magnificent few who read this as a matter of course¹. Are you ready for more scintillating analysis of late night entertainment? Lately, I've been watching BBC FOUR a lot and I'll be telling you about a fantastic documentary I caught at 2.40 am on Saturday night. I'll also be telling you all what I listen to on the radio at three in the morning.

This week: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Up All Night

BBC Four, the classier of the BBC's flagship digital channels, is filling this month with a series of programmes celebrating the 1960s. They also broadcast, in the early hours of Sunday morning, a documentary about a 1970s icon, the godfather of rap, Gil Scott-Heron. The documentary was entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, after one of his songs.

Actually, 'songs' isn't a fair description of Scot-Heron's work - what he wrote were poems which he and his skilful backing band then put music to. His poems were about social trends and circumstances, about the problems with the US. He also wrote bleak predictions of the future; The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a prediction of anarchy in the US. Scott-Heron campaigned for racial togetherness and equality, and performed with Stevie Wonder at concerts promoting the concept of a public holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. One of the things I learned from this fantastic documentary was that Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday' was part of this movement and entirely about MLK².

One interesting quirk of this documentary was that this latest broadcast of it came less than 36 hours after the funeral of former US President Ronald Reagan. The newspapers have been absolutely packed recently with articles saying how wonderful and how great a President Reagan was, and it was refreshing to see in this documentary a reminder of how he was viewed in life, rather than in death. Scott-Heron's "B-Movie" tore into Reagan's America with a vicious attack including such words as:

'As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation.

And here's a look at the closing numbers –

Racism's up, human rights are down,

Peace is shaky, war items are hot -

The House claims all ties.

Jobs are down, money is scarce –

And common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading.

Movies were looking better than ever

And now no one is looking because

We're starring in a 'B' movie.'

Sadly, Scott-Heron suffered from heavy drug addiction in the 1980s and his new interviews and performances in the programme showed the effects of this - his stuttering voice which was once so commanding, and the involuntary twitches.

But what shone through, through Scott-Heron's performances as one of the earliest purveyors of 'Radical American Poetry' was how great an influence and how perfect a tool of social commentary Rap (the abbreviation of Radical American Poetry) can be. The programme reminded us that many other rappers have followed Scott-Heron's use of the artform as social commentary and as a means to exhort people to improve their lives - Grandmaster Flash with 'The Message' and 'White Lines', Run-DMC with 'It's Like That', the very recent 'Where Is The Love' by the Black Eyed Peas. All these are using their talents to reflect and to bemoan the state of American society. All of them are, indirectly, following in the footsteps of Gil Scott-Heron.

And a documentary doing justice, albeit only having an hour to do so, to Scott-Heron and broadcast on British television, was fantatsic. I know so much more about him now than I did before - for example, that his father was the first black footballer to play for Glasgow Celtic.

Shame it was on at 2.40am on digital (although it had been shown earlier in the week at a more reasonable time). It should be shown on Prime Time. And people who dismiss rap as violent, sexually explicit, and moronic, should be foreced to watch this one hour investigation of the Man who defines the positive aspects of the genre.

Entertainment for Insomniacs Archive

Egon

17.06.04 Front Page

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