Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Pieces of a Man’: the album that defined 1970s New York
When Richard Hell fled Kentucky in a Greyhound bus and headed towards New York City, he couldn’t be sure of what awaited him. He had grown up in Lexington, under the shadow of a brick block narcotics treatment facility known on the streets as Narco, where beats like William S. Burroughs resided. When he arrived, he found a fractured world where it looked like the residents of Narco had joined him on day release. This was shocking and exciting in equal measure, and he learnt that “things always change, and New York teaches you that”.
In the 1970s, things were changing at a bewildering pace, and largely for the worse. Between 1969 and 1974, the city lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Subsequently, a million homes depended on welfare, rapes and burglaries tripled, drugs ran rampant, and murders hit a high of 1,690 a year. However, a lot of art comes from chaos and defiance — New York was a creative cocktail of both.
As Fran Lebowitz wrote: “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” A great deal of artists relished in the glut of grime, and it resulted in a weird cultural zenith. From the mire, art embodied both a call for change and the defiance of creativity. This is epitomised by one album that encapsulates those two central tenets perfectly; it changed with the times and heralded both punk and rap in the process: Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 masterpiece Pieces of a Man.
Any record that invented rap and seemed to impart a political punchiness that punk would uphold, a whole decade before the fact when it comes to rap and a handful of years for punk, is worthy of praise for its avant-garde advancement alone. However, the beauty of Pieces of a Man is that it batters boundaries of genre, style and intent into next week without ever breaking its perfect summery stride.
By turns, Scott-Heron sings of ignoring the dystopia and taking dominion of your own mental state by skipping down to the record store and listening to ‘Lady Day and John Coltrane’, escaping the trappings of trash culture and commercialism to focus on spiritual awakening with ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, and asking folks to clean the goddamn place up to ‘Save the Children’.
As Charlie Steen, the frontman for post-punk outfit Shame, opined when we recently spoke with him: “The words, rhythm and subject matters that Scott-Heron tackles and masters are what causes him to be an unstoppable force, an undoubted poet and a genius… His inspiration and influence can be seen in lyricists and artists to this day and his work will forever live on. The bravery involved in honesty and truth should never be overlooked or under-valued, its rarity is what makes it so special and so important.”
Beyond that daring brilliance that captured the fractured street corners of Manhattan and rendered them illuminating in pitch-perfect prose, there is something totemic about his work. As his old friend from Johns Hopkins University, Dr Ron said: “If David slung a rock and hit Goliath in the centre of the head, which is how the Bible described it, and down he went. And then [David] went over and took up a sword that was bigger than he was and cut his head off. If you saw somebody do that, almost no matter what happens later you’d [be applauding]. [Gil Scott-Heron] was David to me!”
And even beyond that, he was something that critics never give enough credit to—he was ineffably cool. It isn’t flippant or juvenile, coolness requires an eye for evolving culture and an unerring sense of sincere individualism. Scott-Heron had that in spades, and it soars throughout his humbly swaggering sound—a sound that typified New York on the brink of dystopia, with artists scurrying towards a more enlightened path to drag it back up from the mire. Scott-Heron scurried to a place well ahead of its time.
