Gil Scott Heron

by Lauren Langston

Gil Scot Heron

Gil Scott Heron was born in 1946 In Chicago to a Jamaican pro soccer player father and a librarian mother. As a child, his parents divorced when he was young, and he was sent to live with his Grandmother in Tennessee, where he experienced firsthand prejudice and abuse as a result of being one of only 3 black children to attempt to integrate his Jackson elementary school. These trails and tribulations prompted Heron to begin writing poetry, and he would later go on to be a world famous beat poet. 

Around junior high, Heron was sent back to New York where he introduced fellow classmates to the poetry of Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones as well as his original work. Most of Heron’s poetry portrayed anger and aggression against major media and white America, based on the ignorance and lack of awareness that was being given to the terrible conditions of America’s inner cities. Heron took his experiences and put them into beat poetry. One of the most famous, and my absolute favorite, is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. This poem uses carefully chosen lyrics and a tone of honest anger to directed at the government and biased television stations, who sat in the suburbs blissfully unaware of the deteriorating inner-city conditions of the early 1970s. His verses are directed not only at corporate America, but blacks and whites as well. It was a call to action. 

People must first change their minds before they can change the world. I think Heron’s work is incredibly powerful and relevant to the Beatnik movement of the 1960’s. I have included a link to the video of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and below are the lyrics, which I think speak volumes about the powerful time at the end of the sixties when the struggle for equality took a turn from the fight for civil rights to the demand for action. 

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,

Skip out for beer during commercials,

Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox

In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.

The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon

blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John

Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat

hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the 

Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie

Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds

thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May

pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,

or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.

NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32

or report from 29 districts.

The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down

brothers in the instant replay.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down

brothers in the instant replay.

There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being

run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.

There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy

Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and

Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving

For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville

Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and

women will not care if Dick finally gets down with

Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people

will be in the street looking for a brighter day.

The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock

news and no pictures of hairy armed women

liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.

The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,

Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom

Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message

bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.

You will not have to worry about a dove in your

bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.

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.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,

will not be televised, will not be televised.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers;

The revolution will be live.

Works Cited

http://www.gilscottheron.com/lyrevol.html

http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/card/0,,490651,00.html?artist=Gil+Scott%2DHeron

tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.

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.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,

will not be televised, will not be televised.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers;

The revolution will be live.

The Beat Poets

by Tiffiny Costello


THE BEAT POETS

While the term "beat" originated from Herbert Hunke in the 1940s to describe his feeling of being "beaten by the world" (Watson 4), the word eventually evolved into "beatnik." Jack Kerouac, one of the famed Beat Poets, gave the word life by combining it with the "sputnik" that had just been launched by Russia. A lone satellite hurdling through space on its' own, as is the lone bohemian beat poet; or by then, Beatnik. 

The Beats were known for their black tights, adoration for saucy jazz, and for being somewhat nomadic and detached in their physical being, but also in their spiritual and mental being. The original leaders of the hipsters created not only an accepting world for other artistic-types, but also sought out their own escapades, even if they seemed float through the world. Allen Ginsberg, his most famous poem recently adorned in the film, "Howl," Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gregory Korso are some of the most in vogue and most remembered of the Beatniks because of their literary works and lofty "angel-headed hipster" lifestyles. 


One of the most famous poems to come out of the Beatnik Era was Ginsberg's "Howl." It went to trial because it was considered obscure, insulting, and pejorative. During the mid-20th Century, books were being banned and Ginsberg's "Howl" was on it's way to the banned list. However, Ginsberg won and the poem was not disheveled. It was a ground-breaking poem; calling out his friends and also a poetic cry for the homosexuals of the 40s and 50s. 


Below is an excerpt of the poem, "Howl." The first few lines are the most famous and most recognized in the poem. He dedicated the poem to Carl Solomon, who Ginsberg met while in a mental hospital. 

"Howl"

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
              looking for an angry fix, 
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
              ery of night, 
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
              contemplating jazz, 
       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 
              ment roofs illuminated, 
       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
              among the scholars of war, 
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 
              skull, 
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 
              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 
              to the Terror through the wall, 
       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of 
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between.

Works Cited

Watson, Steven The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944

          -1960, New York 1995.

Top Left Photo: http://www.dlackey.org/weblog/2006/07/

Photo: http://sonidodelatumba.blogspot.com/2008/12/los-beatniks-rebelde.html