Feb 16, 2010 Gil Scott-Heron - 'I'm New Here'. Gil Scott-Heron - New York Is Killing Me. Gil Scott Heron 'Winter In America'.

Gil Scott-Heron grew up surrounded by heroism. He distrusted empty promises and easy solutions. He also had a very hard time with himself.

Whether you expect a memoir to explain how the third sentence relates to the first two will determine how you feel about this posthumous book. “The Last Holiday,” published eight months after Scott-Heron’s death at 62, provides sharp oratorical examinations of the American social contract as well as a pop star’s bathetic memories and celebrity encounters.

At some point in the second half of his life, he became a crack addict; his career and ambitions and relationships suffered for it. This is all public knowledge, though it forms no part of his memoir except in very cloudy hints ­toward the end. Scott-Heron tells us he respected “books and teachers and laws.” He calls Thurgood Marshall “my candidate for Man of the Century.” He was a Samaritan, a political activist who learned that symbolic gestures went only so far and a moralist who knew that nobody could be forced to believe anything. Precocious in youth — at 20 a published novelist and poet, a teacher of literature at Federal City College in Washington a few years later — Scott-Heron might have made an excellent old man, one with much to teach us. Some of the problems he wrote about in the ’70s and ’80s have since intensified: environmental disaster (“We Almost Lost Detroit”); consumer stupor (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”); the triangle of addiction, family implosion and jail (“The Bottle,” “Angel Dust,” “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”).

Advertisement But he slipped away long before his death. In the last decade, what one mostly read about Scott-Heron was a post-history of a living person: articles about his drug sentences and jail time, a missed parole hearing, an alleged act of domestic aggression against a girlfriend. He played concerts, but his final album — “I’m New Here,” released in 2010 — was his first collection of new material in 16 years, and seemed at least as much the vision of its assembler, the English producer Richard Russell, as that of its star. So it is with this book. In a letter included in the British edition of “The Last Holiday” — and not included in Grove’s American edition; a mistake, in my view — Jamie Byng of Canongate Books explains how the memoir came about.

Scott-Heron had been working on it in the ’90s as a third-person narrative, Byng says. Let’s call that Book A. The manuscript had been centrally about his 1980-81 tour as an opening act for Stevie Wonder, who mightily impressed him, and that singer’s campaign to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

With a federal holiday, culminating in a rally in Washington. (The holiday was first observed in 1986. Alice Madness Returns Product Key Pc. ) Presumably the story would have ended there; maybe it was a book about King and Wonder and only secondarily about the narrator, whom Scott-Heron called “the artist.” He rewrote it in the first person, with occasional verse, starting in 2004, at his editor’s request: thus, Book B.

Scott-Heron himself, along with two black classmates, desegregated a Jackson junior high school, and he writes lucidly about that experience and its aftermath — including his mother’s decision not to push him into it, and the strangeness of studying the Civil War in a white Southern school: “It was like reviewing it from the loser’s locker room.” He went to high school in New York, where he attended the Bronx public school DeWitt Clinton and then Fieldston, the Riverdale private school, which gave him a full scholarship and a sharpened feeling of otherness. He attended a black college, Lincoln, in Oxford, Pa., alma mater of Langston Hughes, Kwame Nkrumah and his beloved Thurgood Marshall. But he was an indifferent student, to his family’s frustration, and in various parts one feels Scott-Heron struggling with his own will to heroism — especially at the end, when he touches lightly on his stroke in 1990, the death of his mother in 1999 and his feelings for his three estranged children.

“I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love,” he writes. “And I’m not sure why.” Still, he offers a theory: because members of his mother’s family did not express love explicitly. This seems like an excuse for not doing right by other people, a tendency he criticized in songs like “Brother” and “Your Daddy Loves You.” Of his children, he says: “I hope there is no doubt that I loved them and their mothers as best I could. And if that was inevitably inadequate, I hope it was supplemented by their mothers, who were all better off without me.” And that is a jarring shift, because he talks with pride and honesty about family and learning before tailing off into self-recrimination. There’s no connection from the beginning to this, no middle-­period filling-in. Advertisement It would seem odd for someone like Gil Scott-Heron to write a book purely trading on his own fame and notoriety, because he never seemed to be in it for the money. He was not a born superstar or a beautiful loser; he was a newspaper-devouring songwriter who didn’t expect the success he got and took the time to be specific and engaged and curious in his work.

What leaps out of Scott-Heron’s best albums, like “Pieces of a Man” and “Winter in America,” is how uncheap the shots are, even when he’s exaggerating or being comedic. In his time, he was a great artist; when he started writing this book, his time, as well as some of his curiosity, was over. I don’t know if we can expect him to be great in a book that he only half inhabited.

[ Even his most topical protest songs are too packed with feeling and flippancy to become yesterday’s news, though—mostly because Gil’s way with a witticism keeps even his Nixon assault vehicle “H20Gate Blues” current. Gil’s genius for soundbites likewise sustains his relevance. We’d all rather believe the revolution won’t be televised than hear what he really envisioned beneath the bravado—that we may be too consumed with hypercapitalist consumption to care. And damn if we don’t keep almost losing Detroit, and damn if even post-Apartheid we are all still very much wondering “What’s the word?” from Johannesburg.

And in this moment of The Arab Spring we may “hate it when the blood starts flowing” but still “love to see resistance showing.” “No-Knock” and “Whitey on The Moon” remain cogent masterpieces of satire, observation and metaphor. “Winter In America” is hands-down Gil at his most grandiloquent and “literary” as a lyricist, standing with Sly’s There’s A Riot Going On (and the memoirs of Panthers Elaine Brown and David Hilliard) as the most bleak, blunt and beatific EKG readings of their post-revolutionary generation’s post-traumatic stress disorders. “All of the healers have been killed or betrayed and ain’t nobody fighting because nobody knows what to save.” In death and in repose I now see Gil, Arthur Lee of Love, and the somehow still-standing Sly Stone as a triumvirate—a wise man/wiseguy trio of ultra-cool ultra-hip ultra-caring prognosticators of late-20th-century America’s bent towards self-destruction and renewal. Cats who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild. Three high-flying visionary bad boys of funk-n-roll whose early flash and promise crash-landed on various temptations and whose last decades found them caught in cycles of ruin and momentary rejuvenation, bobbing or vanishing beneath their own sea of troubles.

Just as with Arthur, James Brown, and Sly, we always hoped against hope that Gil was one of those brothers who’d go on forever beating the odds, forever proving Death wrong, showing that he was too ornery and too slippery for the Reaper’s clutches. Even after all those absurd years on the dope-run, and under the jail, even despite all of Gil’s own best efforts to hurry along the endgame process. Not that I don’t think Gil spending most of the last decade in prison wasn’t a miscarriage of justice and an overly punitive crime against humanity. Or that “Free Gil,” like “Free James,” was a cry not heard often enough from an unmerciful grassroots body politic that had spent the ’90s rightfully decrying crack as the plague of Black Civilization. Or that when Gil took the Central [Park stage last summer he sounded less like the half-dead wraith and scarred wreck of his haunted last (rites) album I’m New Here and more like his lively, laconic, modal blues piano-pounding jazz and salsa-bending younger self.

No acceptance of HIV-positive status as a death sentence found here. Pieces of a man’s life in full, indeed.

Hendrix biographer David Henderson (a poet-wizard himself) once pointed out that the difference between Jimi and Bob Dylan and Keith Richards was that when Dylan and Richards were on the verge, whole hippie networks of folk got invested in their survival. But no one stood up when Jimi stumbled, all alone like a complete unknown rolling stone. Gil’s fall at the not-so-ripe age of 62 reminds me that one thing my community does worst is intervene in the flaming out of our brightest and most fragile stars, so psychically on edge are most of us ourselves. Gil’s song “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” seems in retrospect not only our most anguished paean to addiction, but the writer’s coldest indictment of the lip service his radical community paid to love in The Beautiful Struggle. “Home was once a vacuum/ that’s filled now with my silent screams/ and it might not be such a bad idea if I never went home again.” Mos Def reached out, gave back, magnificently soon as Gil got out the joint three years ago, bringing a rail-thin, spectral, dangling-in-the-wind shadow of Gil’s former selves to the stage at Carnegie Hall for the last time, if not the first. But end of the day, here we go again, just another dead Black genius we lacked the will or the mercy or the mechanisms to save from himself.

End of the day, It all just make you wanna holler, quote liberally from The Book of Gaye and Scott-Heron, say “Look how they do my life.” Make you wanna holler, throw up your hands, grab your rosary beads, do everything not to watch the disheveled poet desiccating over there in the corner—the one croaking out your name as you shuffle around him hoping not to be recognized that one late-’80s morn on the 157 IRT platform, where, even while cracked out and slumped against the wall, Gil was determined to verbally high-five you brother-to-brother. We all kept saying “Why don’t he just ‘kick it quit it/ kick it quit it,'” but Gil, more cunning, wounded and defensive than any junkie born, kept pushing back harder, daring any of us to try and rationally answer his challenge to the collective’s impotencies and inadequacies: “You keep saying kick it, quit it/ God, but did you ever try?/ To turn your sick soul inside out/ So that the world, so that the the world /can watch you die? ” What the funk else can we say in all finality now, but, uh, “Peace go with you too, Br’er Gil.”.