Gil Scott-Heron dies

MUSICIAN Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, died on Friday at age 62.

Scott-Heron’s influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected. ‘If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating ‘hooks’, which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion,’ he wrote in the intro to his 1990 collection of poems, ‘Now and Then’.He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply ‘black music or black American music’.Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West.Throughout his career, he took on the issues of his time, shaped by the politics of the 1960s and the black literature, especially of the Harlem Renaissance.He also was the author of ‘The Nigger Factory’, a social satire. – Nampa-AP

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