The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
So, I just heard that Gil Scott-Heron is dead, which is a strange feeling, because while I knew who he was, I'm not sure I ever had consciousness he was alive. It's more like he lived in an alternate universe: maybe the 4th world with Sun Ra or P-Funk's Mothership. His best known piece is 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.' I include a link below, watching it invites a kind of cognitive dissonance, because one of the tropes of 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' is a negation of image. He tells you what the revolution will not be: bringing the image to mind and shutting it down. Here we have a reinsertion of the image.
Perhaps it is just me and my fixations, but hearing it for the first time in many years, this strikes me as a very Puritan piece, mistrustful of the image, couching itself almost completely in Word. What he seems to be attempting here is a kind of iconoclasm, breaking down both icons and the media structures that support them so people can realize that observation is different than participation: "the Revolution will be live."
[I also notice a troubling inability to articulate what the Revolution WILL be, though I have to admit these days, while I am still stirred by the rhetoric, I have lost my taste for blood.]
I keep telling people that more than ever we live in an age of image. I don't think this is necessarily bad, sometimes image can convey what words miss. The persuasive aspects reach beyond the boundaries of language, even as it can be troubling to disassemble the way one might analyze a text. To be ignorant of the image means to miss, not just a world of meaning, but what the images are actually *doing* to you: there is also the trouble about how to assemble images oneself. Images require a kind of literacy, too, or at least a thoughtfulness in understanding how they are constructed, the ways in which they work. I think of the complex and loaded symbolism of medieval icons and I suspect our images are no less packed: though the question is what's behind them?
Gil Scott-Heron is widely considered the 'godfather of rap' though disdained the title. Personally, I consider rap to be firmly rooted in the Word, perhaps it's most ingenious permutation of the century. But I also don't see it as being so fundamentally different from poetry or music. I think the trouble he saw with the form, was that it failed to bring forth the revolution he desired. Did it change anything or did it reinforce existing structures? I recall an interview in which he said that to be born black in America was to have to fight for the same rights other Americans took for granted. As much as I would like to disclaim this, to point to all the progress that has been made in the past 50 years, I suspect it may still be the case. It is certainly true of being born poor in this country. And while I still believe that the US is one of the greatest countries in the world (I do!) and that there are unprecedented opportunities for people of all backgrounds, I also know that the following is true: we may all have the same claims to equality, but we are not born equal, nor do we all start from the same place.
Click to viewPerhaps it is just me and my fixations, but hearing it for the first time in many years, this strikes me as a very Puritan piece, mistrustful of the image, couching itself almost completely in Word. What he seems to be attempting here is a kind of iconoclasm, breaking down both icons and the media structures that support them so people can realize that observation is different than participation: "the Revolution will be live."
[I also notice a troubling inability to articulate what the Revolution WILL be, though I have to admit these days, while I am still stirred by the rhetoric, I have lost my taste for blood.]
I keep telling people that more than ever we live in an age of image. I don't think this is necessarily bad, sometimes image can convey what words miss. The persuasive aspects reach beyond the boundaries of language, even as it can be troubling to disassemble the way one might analyze a text. To be ignorant of the image means to miss, not just a world of meaning, but what the images are actually *doing* to you: there is also the trouble about how to assemble images oneself. Images require a kind of literacy, too, or at least a thoughtfulness in understanding how they are constructed, the ways in which they work. I think of the complex and loaded symbolism of medieval icons and I suspect our images are no less packed: though the question is what's behind them?
Gil Scott-Heron is widely considered the 'godfather of rap' though disdained the title. Personally, I consider rap to be firmly rooted in the Word, perhaps it's most ingenious permutation of the century. But I also don't see it as being so fundamentally different from poetry or music. I think the trouble he saw with the form, was that it failed to bring forth the revolution he desired. Did it change anything or did it reinforce existing structures? I recall an interview in which he said that to be born black in America was to have to fight for the same rights other Americans took for granted. As much as I would like to disclaim this, to point to all the progress that has been made in the past 50 years, I suspect it may still be the case. It is certainly true of being born poor in this country. And while I still believe that the US is one of the greatest countries in the world (I do!) and that there are unprecedented opportunities for people of all backgrounds, I also know that the following is true: we may all have the same claims to equality, but we are not born equal, nor do we all start from the same place.