‘Songs the Lords Taught Me’ – For a small sentimental education of this humble scribe of yours. Episode 1: That time we almost lost Detroit, but discovered a world.
'É del poeta il fin la meraviglia'
It was one of those summer evenings when everything had gone wrong.
An argument too many with the significant other of that time, with her about to leave for a holiday alone and you once again questioning the meaning of life: were we born to suffer? always? Damn it.
Moreover, with the suffocating heat of that late July humidity, 40 degrees perceived, which melted the asphalt and the humidity that filled your lungs with a sort of laughing gas. You felt like you were training at altitude, at 3,000 meters, like those Colombian cyclist-fakirs who, as soon as the oxygen became rarefied, left you there, mouth open drooling to recover every possible breath of wind and they instead up there sprinting, taking the summit like unreal chamois of the Andes, uncatchable.
But what do you want to do? Go home? But no, crank down all the windows - pardon, and the deflectors? those you really have to unjam!! - of your run-down A112 Elegant which, however, can still rev up nicely on empty roads and get whatever breeze you can, take the semi-silent city, the one where only night guards and hardened womanizers roam.
And you drive, drive, drive aimlessly.
Moreover, this time you don’t even feel like listening to YOUR music on that crackling car radio. No, not even the desire to sing. This time let's listen to the radio, just a need to wander and not think.
It was exactly that blessed night that I met Gil Scott-Heron.
Don’t ask me who the DJ-messenger of my future joy was, nor the station. I had at least three preferential radios and I can't remember for sure.
Because THAT SONG's attack had just started.
Booom!
The end of everything.
The mind is suddenly captured, then slowly, like in quicksand: resistance is futile, any sudden movement you make worsens the situation, so the only solution is to let yourself be SWALLOWED, slowly, like by a seductive carnivorous plant.
At that time, I was completely unaware of a million things, of ‘black’ quite zero. Or almost. I listened to rap, that Old School, the militant one, let's say of the second wave (that there was already a ‘first wave’ rap I would discover much later...).
And I liked it, the rap. Oh yes. Revolutionary. But I couldn’t grasp even a sample, not even half of it. Gil Scott-Heron was one of the Noble Fathers of rap, revered Master by my militant heroes of the late '80s. This I didn’t even know.
Therefore, I was petrified, like in front of a Medusa of soul-jazz-funk (what did you know, then, of these labels?), upon hearing that deep and beautiful declamation on an electric piano base (his buddy and close friend since University days, Brian Jackson, to whom the magnanimous Gil even granted the honor of co-participation on the cover). A slightly synthesized Fender piano. But how? Certainly, my young ignoramus: you still hadn’t heard, just to name one, any, the Stevie Wonder of the grace period, thus your astonishment at a music that seemed alien to you but... irresistible. Increasingly irresistible.
Elements of structure: what you would later discover was called ‘groove’, the pace, in this case slow but tremendously sexy of the ‘rhythm’. The bass that pulses like a ventricle, the drum that fits there, suave but inexorable, a punch to the stomach and a hook to the synapses of your still fully functioning brain, to never let you go (at the end, to make things easier for you and not knock down all your vacuous stylistic standards at once: yes, here come the horns, framing the continuous crescendo of tension of the track. That’s fine, but you had to leave me some certainty, right?...). Is it soul? Is it jazz like Herbie Hancock? Is it funk? Well... maybe it's all together but certainly what you need, at that moment.
And then. THAT VOICE.
Yes: three octaves below, beautiful, mysterious, intriguing and even though you were looking for coolness, enveloping and warm like your most beloved wool sweater. A voice that here ‘declared singing’ (yes, a fragment without bases of his ‘singing the voice’, I believe today I could recognize it in the third second) a very HARD text.
It talked about the risk of nuclear disaster, about a plant that for everyone is a source of energy but in a moment can become a risk of death and destruction. Of an entire city and its County territory. Then, for those who worked in it, at the plant, the macabre dance with the Great Leveler was a tragic fact.
That’s what Karen Silkwood had said, after all.
You will later discover that this person was much more (infinitely more) than a simple musician.
He could write, lyrics of immense visionary power that complemented the music score. But also novels, speaking to the Black Nation and inviting them to action, after the ebb caused by the End of the Peace & Love Dream.
MLK was dead, Malcolm X was dead and not even WE were doing very well, the Poet warns us. Although the Revolution, which for Gil should have been LIVE, in reality, will never happen, or if it does, it will be repressed by the system.
Even Gil, Poet of the Never Born Revolution, Public Enemy number one for the CIA and intelligence, will be swallowed by the ebb and unfortunately in his personal abysses.
But for me, he will always remain the one because that evening, the night suddenly brightened up and the cool air arrived all of a sudden.
‘Chi non sa far stupir, vada alla striglia’
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