Winter in America

Week 25 - Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson - Winter in America

Right off the bat the electric piano dances back and forth from ear to ear, and coincidentally includes “now / more than ever”, giving Gil Scott-Heron a sturdy, panning plateau on which to stand and preach. He’s a master of tone and deliberation, deftly inserting and placing words like a journeyman bricklayer. There was a great interview in the New Yorker a few years back, just before he died; he was living in a little spot in New York, waxing thoughtfully on his own life, education, music, and Blackness in America. I let myself imagine coaxing him to town to do a show, because Gil Scott-Heron is the real thing, and his heart and sound is undeniable. This particular lp is perfectly reflective of its time, but also sort of supernaturally reflective of this time. The sound and content displays a nuanced and complex presentation of America, delivering emotional weight, a searching and curious narrative, and a distinct love of Blackness and family. It also lays bare the stark and brutal understanding of the inequity and hypocrisy of America, and the strange ways that that surfaces in day to day life; one only has to pay attention to observe the endless evidence.

“Just how blind will America be…” is a good summary of things both then and now. You might have tuned in to watch the first game of this NFL season, one of the only home games that featured actual people in the stands. Let’s not forget that professional football is testing each player and staffperson every single day, while enacting strict protocols and policies. It’s crazy to have to imagine what it would be like if schools were afforded the same resources. Anyway, at this game, the league had a moment of silence for people to reflect on police violence and racial injustice; all of the players on both teams kneeled, or locked arms in solidarity, bowing their heads. The fans, about 15,000 that night, in socially distanced clumps, booed. I’m not sure that there is a better way to illustrate the division of the citizenry right now. People co-opt their team into their identity; they are fans, they live and breathe football; they paint their faces and go all out for their players. However, to those who would boo, or not empathize with a cause that is obviously important to these men, these players are only entertainers, and not regarded as human beings. They are to play the game and shut up. I love football; I grew up really hating sports, and thought the whole thing was a racket. At a certain point though, as I got older, I was introduced to the drama of it all and started connecting with my father more while watching the Patriots. It struck me that each professional game is the career apex of every player and coach on the field; their entire lives have built to this moment that you are watching, and it’s true each and every game. That can be the height of drama and lends itself to some exciting viewing experiences. I accept the fact that there is a weird incongruence between loving football and understanding the violence of the sport and how the league has been on the wrong side of a lot of issues that I take seriously. But the sheer disconnect between loving a sport and refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the players is telling, and I’d bet would shake out along party lines.

I got my first apartment in the summer of 1998, after completing my freshman year at Keene. It was on Main St, above where Foodee’s Pizza used to be. I dressed like an unemployed college professor and smoked Camels, bashing the keys on my grandparents’ Brother typewriter in the window looking onto Gilbo Ave and the Corner News. The castanets from Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain reverberated off of the empty apartment, while I waited for my roommate to finish school and move his stuff in. I was trying to write; I mean, I was writing, but only really to regurgitate and trace the lines of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Langston Hughes, to make the rhythms and the folds, to try to fly this paper airplane, to make it glide toward the horizon rather than continually slamming it into the ground. There were things that I wanted to experience, because the writers I idolized had had such intense and fiery lives, I felt like they had blazed a trail that I should aspire to; to live hard and run the car into the ground. Of course for a white kid in rural New Hampshire, it didn’t take much for me to feel like I was well on my way. Before we moved into this apartment, my friend and I drove to Baltimore and Georgetown, went to jazz clubs and chess shops, sought out old shirts and revolutionary literature, shot pool and talked fast in the mid-Atlantic humidity. That long weekend trip was enough fodder for me to write shoddy beat poetry for the entire summer. I didn’t know at the time that Gil Scott-Heron may have been kicking around DC when I was there; the pre-Internet times were so full of unknowns, whenever we went someplace new, we just learned it as we went. We listened to people and wrote notes when told to check something out, or to ask for this fellow or that lady at the door. 

Gil Scott-Heron’s world is built on detail and relationships. When you hear him sing or weave his poems into the music, he creates an easy place to be. His pronouncements are manageable and accessible, and his understanding of love, to me, feels so gentle and quiet. To love someone doesn’t have to be a grand desire, but a calculus, a logical magic as effortless as the stars, their light reaching across impossible distances. His read on politics too is succinct and deep, but he lays it out for us with remarkable dexterity. I’m going to assume that Gil would have been a fan of Colin Kaepernick, and like me, felt that while it feels good to see white NFL coaches with Breonna Taylor’s name written on their masks, people still aren’t doing enough, and the league is still not doing enough. And I miss my friend Joel Green, who I used to listen to and talk to about this album, particularly “H2Ogate Blues”, where we would trip on the idea that GSH was so prescient in these lines: 

How much more evidence do the citizens need

That the election was sabotaged by trickery and greed?

And, if this is so, and who we got didn't win

Let's do the whole goddamn election over again!

This particular track is so jammed with weird similarities between Nixon and Trump that Joel and I would put it on and just shake our heads and laugh, as Gil Scott-Heron reacted to Watergate almost a year before Nixon even resigned, correctly shredding the government’s policies and warmongering in Vietnam, and drawing the proper parallels between American foreign policy and its violent dealings with its own citizens. He fires off lists of names and events, displaying his complete grasp of the tragedy of our country, during a time that is not unlike now:

How long will the citizens sit and wait?

It's looking like Europe in '38

Did they move to stop Hitler before it was too late?

How long America before the consequences of

Keeping the school systems segregated

Allowing the press to be intimidated

Watching the price of everything soar

And hearing complaints 'cause the rich want more? 

Thanks for hanging with me on this one folks; there is so much to process on a daily basis, and I didn’t even get to the west being on fire, or the president’s reaction of “science doesn’t know what is happening”. But it feels good to talk about music and reflect on loss and grief, and think about a kind and loving future; and yes even to talk about football. How can we believe anymore that things aren’t happening that everyone can plainly see? Just how blind can America be? 

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - Winter in America

Saturday September 19th 2020, 7pm

Just put it on at your house using a stereo or the internet or whatever you want.