Gil Scott-Heron RIP

I think this is actually true. Shit.

http://twitter.com/#!/baddabyng/status/74261843341873152

Who is Jamie Byng?

Canongate guy, instrumental in getting last album off the ground.

I guess that lends at least a tiny bit of cred to the claim.

If true, R.I.P.G.S.H!

oh no

GSH was (??) godfather to one of Byng's kids.

NO WAY HE RULED!

HOLY SHIT :'( R.I.P.

but i guess not that surprising to a lot of people?

Oh fuck. Terrible. RIP.

all of a sudden i don't feel so bad about jeff conaway dying!

both 70's icons in their way...

though only one of them was a genius...

Oh shit.

FUCK FUCK FUCK (still haven't really recovered from Leonora Carrington passing this week)

fuck

RIP

RIP

but I'm New Here was a helluva way to go out.

saw his show in Central Park in the mid '90s. an original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHOq8i5Pyk&feature=related

will probably shock no one to discover this dude was huge for me as a teenager

as a birthday present when i turned 17 my friend stenciled 'the revolution will not be t-shirtized' on a shirt

it was my favorite shirt :/

<3333333

Got word from a friend who used to work at Beggars saying that it is confirmed. RIP....

:(

This news has completely knocked the stuffing out me...I know I shouldn't be shocked but damn...:((

this sucks, been playing that new one on the radio lately.

RIP dude, whitey's still on the moon.

the rawest of raw dogs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qya2FSTJLbM&feature=related

RIP one of the greatest of all time.

Will be greatly missed.

nooooo!!

NPR obit: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/05/27/136731274/gil-scott-heron-poet-and-musician-has-died

boo...oh man this sucks

This is heartbreaking.

I didn't listen to I'm New Here a lot but the few times I did it really affected me. "New York Is Killing Me" was a great bluesy, haunting. Also the "On Coming From A Broken Home" was great in its confirmation that even though a person isn't raised in the typical nuclear family they are still loved nonetheless. I was kinda hoping he would do more stuff in this vein sonic wise.

It really sucks. :(

Sad and so sudden!

Just awful. A great loss. His last interviews were so dispiriting. Rest in peace.

r.i.p.

genius dude

RIP

he wasn't sick, was he?

man, this has been a very bad week.

RIP

he wasn't sick, was he?

Chronic crack addiction probably qualifies.

OMG NO

RIP

fuck man

RIP :/

youtube playlist with 100 vids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OET8SVAGELA&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=AVGxdCwVVULXdjD4Jm0w8ZRMP7Rk3Ln7f6

no, this

http://www.youtube.com/artist?a=GxdCwVVULXdjD4Jm0w8ZRMP7Rk3Ln7f6&feature=bottomfeedr

he wasn't sick, was he?

Chronic crack addiction probably qualifies.

Wasn't it strongly implied that he was HIV positive as well? I've seen articles of the writer stating this but not by him so I didn't want to jump to conclusions about his status.

very sad

his seventies recs have some amazing musicians on them - ppl like ron carter and bernard purdie - purdie's drumming on this one is just out of this world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1dvUVTwnJk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58I77Ux2JI&feature=player_embedded

wow. this is really haunting and I'd never heard it before.

everyone should get that fucking record its so fucking good

first thing i heard when i got up today, so so sad

i genuinely feel sick in my stomach hearing this news. gil was a god. it was most probably going to happen sooner rather than later knowing his previous drug abuse and whatever but still, i wish this dude could have lived forever.

RIP. Sad, sad news.

RIP :(

terrible news to wake up to, such an amazing voice. RIP Gil

Dreadful news. I don't know where to start. RIP

Hope the tributes don't overlook how funny he was.

RIP

RIP. Love the dude enough that I chose this as my user name, obvs.

This is the one I can't get over lately, so beautiful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDC_ZM48S0Y

Didn't that new yorker piece from last year imply he was still using?

it came straight out + said it

yes and yes xp

Jeez, this is terrible. 'I'm New Here' is a masterpiece and it seemed like a new artistic dawn for him with much more in store. RIP.

i am shocked too, it's weird. i only really discovered his music one or two years ago. bought reflections and bridges. both absolutely stunning. his wonderful voice will be missed.

i wanted to post we almost lost detroit as well ;-)

So so sad. It always hits me most when the artist has just released something amazing. Often when a pop star dies you're remembering them and their work when much younger, with Gil (and Johnny Cash before him), being so familiar with their older voices, the voices of artists operating at or near their peak right at the end, really hits.

both Heron and Cash are good examples of "late style". RIP.

this is so sad

i'm trying to find some youtube from seeing him a couple of years ago, when he'd talk about black history month, and the unsuitability & unpronouncability, of february for BHM, and, further, the peculiarity of february as a month, considering the lexical roots of other month names and how they suggested that they should be differently arranged, w/february at the end of the year and september as the seventh month, october as the eighth, etc, the order brought forward accordingly. all of this just to provide evidence of how hilarious + lively his mind was and how enrapturing it was to see him, even just bullshitting between songs before leaning on his organ.

My Dad had a bunch of his records with Brian Jackson and when I got my first turntable at 13/14, I raided the loft and found them, alien to the collection mostly consisting of 'normal' Motown, Dylan&Billy Bragg, the Beatles&Stones etc. He also had a bunch of shit I didn't care about. And while Dylan, Gaye, Stevie, Lennon etc. all have a place in my heart, I remember spending one week we were off school just with my head close to the speaker going through all these boxes and finding Gil... being fascinated by the artwork and then HAVING MY MIND BLOWN when the music came. Everything else was insignificant compared to this guy. Ok maybe not Stevie. It took me a couple years to get his records on any other format and in my mind I still associate certain songs with pops and hisses. If you were to make a film of my life, you could knock out a huge of portion of my teenage years by just showing me with my headphone jack into a shitty stereo with Free Will or From South Africa... spinning on top of it.

And then he released I'm Not There and Kanye sampled the shit out of him and I stop disassociating him with some vague idea of something from the past like a person can do with anything from Shakespeare up to present day and someone living, breathing, the poet of my life no longer in an abstract sense but in reality.

I've never met this man or even seen him perform live but I feel like I knew him and I am incredibly sad of his passing.

Oh man.

playing gil all day in the store. stuff i haven't heard in years sounds so good.

a hoy hoy, that was awesome (and heartbreaking).

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his
Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's
Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

"We're all sort of shattered," she said.

from the AP obit

RIP

In order to get Pryor to host SNL, Lorne Michaels had to agree to let Gil-Scott Heron, Thalmus Rasulala and Pryor's ex-wife Shelley also perform on the show. Said Michaels later about these stipulations, "He better be funny."

1975- Gil performed "Johannesburg" on Saturday Night Live

terrible news. RIP to one of the greatest

I wonder if there's anyone now who could blackmail Lorne into letting a personal fave be the musical guest on the show he/she hosts. Timberlake, probably, but that's about it. Or Barack Obama.

fuck, i just heard. i'm certainly a fan and have been for almost two decades now. i was lucky enough to see him a few times over the last couple of years and meet him very briefly in passing; he was classy and friendly.

dude took it all, did it all, fucked with a lot of people and fashioned some very important folds in the fabric of music history. i'm pleased that he was being lionized and appreciated near the end in much the same way porter wagoner was. he did not do much of anything easy and, between his health and his habits, it's kind of amazing that he lived this long. it's to the world's benefit that he did. rest in peace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaiFd9YQzEc

RIP. An American original in every sense. But yeah, having read a few articles about his lifestyle, it is impressive he made it this far.

immortal for this turn of phrase

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28ijn_the-revolution-will-not-be-televise_music

rip. so sad. he was so many kinds of awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bujlRZNPh_E

Been checking some stuff out today and discovered this, which works better than the Jamie XX remixes imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adq_e_NSzQ8

That's amazing. I'm not a fan of the Jamie xx remixes so it's just in a totally different league for me.

immortal for this turn of phrase

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28ijn_the-revolution-will-not-be-televise_music

― moonship journey to baja, Saturday, May 28, 2011 5:59 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Ironic that if you click this link you watch an ad before the song comes on

RIP

One of the greatest. Last november he cancelled two shows in my city and there went my chances to see him live.

Peace Go With You Brother has been my favorite of his since first hearing it. Rest In Peace

OMG just saw this thread, heartbreaking.. love this dude. last album was tremendous, i'm still digging into his earlier records (i have a best-of comp that i adore), lots more to hear for sure. RIP great musician, artist, person

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgVZ4b9O34s

On the subway, he liked to sing just loud enough to be heard by the people around him, and he was very pleased one time when another passenger said, “Brother can sing.” He also liked it when people told him he looked like Gil Scott-Heron.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/gil-scott-herons-scornful-brilliance.html#ixzz1NpFJli1j

i am still absolutely gutted by this.

felt compelled to write something brief, yet reverent; here's what i came up with.. RIP

http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8802:gil-scott-heron-1949-2011&catid=85:in-memoriam&Itemid=95

In case you missed the link tucked into that New Yorker article linked two posts up, if you never saw the original profile of GSH from last year in the New Yorker, it's definitely a worthwhile (if somewhat depressing) read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_wilkinson

I guess they brought this one out from behind the paywall for now. Check it out.

hope xl release something posthumously just so the were new here album doesnt end up being his last album. trivial pettiness aside, glad he is finally at peace. one of the greatest musicians and writers ever.

^ echoing sean, the new yorker piece is excellent & well worth the time

yeah, I just read it & am pretty devastated about how prolonged & impossible-seeming his decline was.

tremendous piece by Nate Patrin over at pfork

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7978-appreciation-gil-scott-heron

Greg Tate on Gil Scott-Heron: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/05/gil_scott_heron_obituary_greg_tate.php

That was pretty marvelous.

In death and in repose I now see Gil, Arthur Lee of Love, and the somehow still-standing Sly Stone as a triumvirate—a wise man/wiseguy trio of ultra-cool ultra-hip ultra-caring prognosticators of late-20th-century America's bent towards self-destruction and renewal. Cats who'd figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild

Greg Tate's prose in that blog is wonderful. A case of the writer having some of the snap and swagger of his subject. And the Sly comparison hadn't occurred to me but it's bang on - it's just that he turned his unravelling into a masterpiece whereas Gil's produced only silence for the most part.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083657/

Anyone see the 1983 Robert Mugge doc on Gil Scott-Heron called "Black Wax"? I wonder if it's still available and how it is. Mugge music docs are usually very straightforward.

perhaps this is old news, but gil scott-heron's explanation of his most famous song was news to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZvWt29OG0s

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that the revolution would not be televised, we were saying that the thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something that you see, and then all of a sudden you realize “I’m on the wrong page.

Have not seen this--

Black Wax (coming to DVD and Blu-ray on November 13th) is Mugge's 1982 portrait of Gil Scott-Heron, the great poet-singer-songwriter and rap music forefather. It was the first American film to be fully funded by Britain's then-brand-new Channel 4 Television and also likely the first film to use Steadicam from first frame to last. Black Wax centers on the man Melody Maker called "the most dangerous musician alive" and many dubbed the forefather of rap music - and his 10-piece Midnight Band. It was filmed entirely on location in Washington, D.C., primarily at the Wax Museum Nightclub (now defunct). Songs performed by the band include such potent political numbers as "Winter in America," "Alien," "Johannesburg," "Storm Music," "Waiting for the Axe to Fall," "Gun," and "B-Movie" (a scathing analysis of how and why Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States). Between songs, Mr. Scott-Heron is shown reciting his equally powerful poems ("Paint it Black," "Black History," "Billy Green is Dead," The H2O-Gate Blues," and "Whitey on the Moon"), leading the camera on a unique tour of Washington, D.C. (from the monuments of official Washington through the minority neighborhoods that make up most of the rest), and finally confronting the "ghosts of America's past" (life-sized wax figures of John Wayne, Uncle Sam, Neil Armstrong, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, four U.S. Presidents, and black leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King). This is Mr. Scott-Heron at the absolute peak of his powers. The politics is always entertaining, and the entertainment is nothing if not political. Transferred to HD from the original 16mm film and lovingly restored.

It's good. Especially if you like the Amnesia Express era.

wow, yeah can't wait to see this. i really like GSH's early-80s LPs.