Before there was rap, there was the music and prose of this prescient and troubled performer.
In the summer of 1991, when I interviewed him between sets at the Blue Note in New York City, Scott-Heron's complexity was apparent. He surprised me twice, once by defending Clarence Thomas on the grounds that "self-determination means that everyone gets to choose who they want to be rather than be who other people want them to be." He also noted that he was no fan of rap music. He shrugged it off as a generational thing. "My parents didn't like my music, even though I felt it was in the tradition of what they listened to. I feel the same way about rap." During the interview, he chain-smoked marijuana.
Scott-Heron returned to recording in 1994 with a song "Message to the Messengers," where he advised rappers to use their newfound power in the mainstream judiciously and a fine recording, "Spirits" (TVT). Then he all but vanished for more than 15 years.
Scott-Heron revealed in a 2008 interview with New York magazine that he had contracted HIV after years of battling drug and alcohol addictions. He was jailed on drug-possession charges in 2001 and 2007. In 2010 he returned with a short but moving work, "I'm New Here" (XL Recordings). During interviews for a profile in the New Yorker in August 2010 by Alec Wilkinson, Scott-Heron repeatedly smoked crack.
Scott-Heron was right about the role of self-determination in our destinies, but an artist's legacy is left to his constituency. There have been scores of artists whose careers were marred by drug abuse, but no one who could write poetry and songs with so much social awareness and political bite as Scott-Heron. And no one could sing them with such depth and passion. His artistic legacy is far too great for the sordid details of his final decades to ruin.
Martin Johnson is a regular contributor to The Root.
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