The Gospel Coalition

I remember when I first heard Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” I was an angry, militant, wanna-be revolutionary studying psychology at a large predominantly-white university. Life was full of all the “racial” contradictions and angst that young, “conscious” ethnic people feel. We were planning another campus protest or perhaps just having one of our all night study sessions, listening to black revolutionaries before us (perhaps Malcolm X tapes or maybe something more recent from an aging Kwame Toure, a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael). Somebody asked if we’d heard this song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” I hadn’t, which of course meant I was in need of cultural education. That’s how we always made people feel when they didn’t know some fact or bit of trivia or culture that we knew. Soon, I’d be playing the track for my friends making them feel all kinds of inferiority in the presence of such a cultural and revolutionary titan (again, we weren’t so culturally aware as to recognize all the cultural genealogy of terms we might use; if I had, I surely would have denounced the Titans as a projection of white male superiority and imperial greed; but as it was, I became a black one ridiculing my culturally unaware friends).

It was probably about the third or fourth person I played it for, an older man who was a member of the Nation of Islam, who smiled in the most condescending “you young boys don’t know nuthin’” kinda way as he said, “Oh, you’ve heard some Gil Scott-Heron.” I hadn’t even paused to consider that the artist had a name! Young and dumb.

Thus was my introduction to Gil Scott-Heron, a man regarded as a pioneer of spoken word and of rap music. The song became something of an anthem. Among us college radicals it was a shorthand rebuke to those who seemed to be unaware of the revolution and the necessity of black consciousness.

However, the fire that had singed and burned participants in the 1960s revolutions was smoldering ash and gray smoke by the late 80s. It’s hard to fight a revolution when black men are running for president (not Obama, Jackson) and the number one sitcom is The Cosby Show, with its wonderful portrayal of Black middle class life. People look at you like, “What revolution? You better study, fool. I’m trying to get a job at IBM.”

And, like most campus “revolutions,” our un-televised version consisted of classes by day (mostly), a few campus protests for cultural centers and the like, a handful of juvenile op-eds in the campus newspaper, and trying to bounce while looking angry at the next Greek-lettered organization’s step show and after party. Then we graduated (most of us) and tried to get jobs at Apple (after all, IBM was still too much “the man’s” computer company). Some continue their revolutionary ways, still buying angry spoken word and hip hop cds, wearing red, black and green, perhaps going natural with dreads and braids, splashing on homemade oils, even getting a few theology degrees and making stuff up, and once in a while buying a bean pie or two. Man! I wish I had a bean pie right about now!

NPR has a short story on Scott-Heron here. Here’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Warning: The Lord’s name is used in vain in one line.