‘Television? Turn the motherfucker off.’

“You will not be able to stay at home, brother.

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip out for beer during commercials,

Because the revolution will not be televised.”

His career spans thirty years: thirty years as a socio-cultural watchdog, a pianist and novelist and poet and civil-rights activist; thirty years of crisply pointing out the failures and duplicities of government, the numbing, blinkered idiocy of modern society, and the false truths of the media. 52 now, grey and grizzled, Gil Scott-Heron may have an old man’s scarecrow frame, all elbows and skinny limbs and long pointy fingers, but he is still fighting the good fight, still able to be witty, incisive and sharply critical without descending into cynicism, and probably still as relevant and necessary now as he has ever been.

His newer songs about the dangers of globalisation and the puppet-mastery of the Bush administration notwithstanding (“The next idea George Junior has,” says Gil tartly, “will be his first”), his greatest legacy is probably 1971’s bass-and-flute-driven proto-rap diatribe ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’ Written partly in response to what he saw as the apathy and lassitude of black youth – demoralised in the wake of the triple assassination of Kennedy, King and Malcolm X – it still remains spookily contemporary, still has much to say to us about our lives, and remains perhaps music history’s ultimate piece of agit-pop.

“…The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen…”

An autodidact and compulsive polymath, Scott-Heron’s own revolution started at home. His mother was a magna cum laude college graduate, rare enough in that era for a black woman. He lived with her in New York following his parents’ divorce, a move precipitated by the abuse he

sustained as one of three black students at an ‘integrated’ school in the South. A respect for education, an understanding of where it can

take you, was thus fostered early, and he wrote his first book of poetry at 13 and his first novel

at 19.

Most significantly, he became inspired early on by the thinkers, activists and literary luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly poet and publisher Langston Hughes and baritone and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Their public, fearless social consciences, their proud eloquence and ability to speak their minds, and their integration of the oft-ignored folk history of black music into their own work – the deep full-body sorrow of southern spirituals, the dark cadences and colours of the blues as well as the syncopated new rhythms of jazz – all of these are plain in Scott-Heron’s own music and writing.

“…And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane on Search For Tomorrow, because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day…”

Does Scott-Heron think it’s more difficult these days to be socially conscious?

“I’ve never been able to be unconscious,” says Gil, “so I don’t know. I think that black Americans have to get beyond the ‘I’ syndrome. I am this, I ain’t that, I have this, I ain’t got that. Because there’s a whole lot of things happening in the world that we miss, because we’re so busy looking at what’s going on in our own little trip, [instead of] gettin’ to be a part of anything that’s gonna help change things for the better. “

After his thirty years of travelling, does he think other countries have their problems more in hand than the United States does?

“They ain’t got to wrestle with the same problems,” he reasons, and then says something that is quite eerily poignant to recount, several weeks later. “You find that geography oftentimes, and environment as well as history, has a lot of influence on the problems [in a country], and how they develop. Like, the Arabs, the Muslims and the Jews, they’ve had that going on for, like, the last two, three thousand years! They still haven’t got sorted with how they’re gonna get along with the man who lives across the street. Like, at least we have solved that problem. You know, like, [these days, in New York,] folks battling up and down the street? They’re just trying to get to the goddam subway.”

…There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news…

As you’d expect from the author of ‘The Revolution…’, Scott-Heron sees the domination of world culture by the medium of television as a decidedly mixed blessing.

“The benefit of television,’ says Gil, ‘is that now, all that shit that you’ve heard about vaguely somewhere, is in your living room. You can no longer avoid the fact that those people are being treated bad: live, here it is, have a look at the shit.

“But at the same time, how you come to look at it – the government is the one that has the press conference, so that’s what you read in the paper.”

At least, on the Internet, someone suggests, we have greater freedom to choose.

“The internet can also be doped,” Gil responds. “And anyway, you could always do that. Television: change the channel. Turn the motherfucker off. Before television, before radio, people still had to have opinions. People still had to do shit. These are not the things that make ideas possible. These are the things that shape ideas. You have to be careful not to let your idea be shaped by someone who might have ulterior motives.”

…The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell...

Scott-Heron is frequently referred to as ‘the daddy of rap:’ he was certainly among the first to mould sharp political comment into a kind of black-American beat poetry; to fuse the spoken word with, variously, jazz rhythms, African percussion and lush soul arrangements; to use ideas from the whole canon of black culture like the Harlem Renaissance poets did.

When you ask him whether his given title of ‘godfather of rap’ sits well, however, he grins and says, coyly: “Most folks just call me Gil.”

But what about now – when the most dominant form of black-origin music is polished MTV-friendly r’n’b, and rap’s most ‘inflammatory’ artist is Eminem? His track ‘Message To The Messengers’ of several years ago, gave a stern warning to rap’s younger generation, giving out about their language, their money-lust and their treatment of women, and reminding them of the responsibility that comes with claiming to ‘represent’ (“Tell all them gun-totin’ brothers/That the man is glad to see us out there killin’ each other”). These days, though, he’s surprisingly loath to condemn any misguided young guns outright. “As far as rap is concerned nowadays, my kids like it, and I like my kids,” he grins.

“The revolution will not go better with Coke/The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath/The revolution WILL put you in the driver’s seat.”

We talk about how Ireland has very recently and rapidly become a wealthy, multicultural society, and has already become internationally notorious for, ahem, perhaps not handling it so well. What lessons, if any, can Ireland learn from the past mistakes of the US?

“You can learn from the fact that [people] got to stand up for themselves,’ Gil says. “Because when people look at America, they look at a series of people who for the last hundred, 150 years, stood up when other folks were laying down. From David Walker and Martin Delaney, to Booker T. Washington, to W.E.B. du Bois, to Frederick Douglass, to Marcus Garvey, to Dr King, to Malcolm X, to Al Sharpton. We’ve had people who stood up for us. And that’s where the progress came: from the fact that some people were willing to do that – like Mandela – willing to pay the price to make sure they’re on the right side.

“You see, the revolution takes place in your mind. When you decide that this, what you’re seeing, ain’t the way you wanted your life to be, and go and join some people who are trying to do something different, people can be revolutionary. No matter whether you ever throw a bomb, throw a brick, throw anything at anybody, you’ve changed your mind. You no longer support the things that are not productive for your community. You are now revolutionary.”