Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (15 page)

It was on one of these excursions that a kid named Nookie slipped a tape into my cassette deck. I just about drove off the road. The melodies were dark and percolating, a marriage of vintage jazz samples and loping beats. The lyrics were poetic without sentiment. “Who is this?” I said.

“Simeon and them other niggers,” Nookie said.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You
know
these guys?”

Nookie’s face assumed an expression of indulgence. He set about explaining the connection, which involved a cousin who designed the logo for Simeon and his crew, Lastrawze they were called. According to Nookie, they operated out of an apartment on West Dixie north of Cagni Park.

Then a song came on that was unlike anything I’d ever heard, a
swirl of sirens and trumpets and a single moaning note wrung from the neck of a guitar. “Where I’m At (Ghostland)” was a travelogue of the grim precincts where the Strawze had grown up. But it was really about the emotional state boys were forced to occupy in such places, which lay somewhere between sorrow and nihilism, which was exhausting because it required a constant expenditure of courage, which treated the smallest sign of vulnerability as an invitation to assault, and made it impossible for them, ever, to simply relax. There are some guys, Simeon explained “who run around and crack jokes/And now some nigs is in the cemetery doing backstrokes.”

This was all the more striking because the “Miami sound” of that era was dominated by 2 Live Crew, and expressly designed to inspire the greased vibration of female butt cheeks. Lastrawze cribbed obscure licks from Grover Washington and quoted Shakespeare. They rejected the gold-plated bluster of gangsta rap in favor of an authentic hip-hop naturalism.

And often there’d be some moment during my field trips with those boys when one or another of them was momentarily frightened or humiliated and the trust went flickering out of their eyes. I could see it happen. The part of themselves open to feeling simply vanished. They had slipped silently off to Ghostland.

One Saturday, I drove them to the zoo. The trip started full of hope but quickly went south because, as much as the boys hated the Canyon and dreaded the prospect of returning there, it was what they knew and where they felt comfortable. They were immigrants in the larger world, uncertain and fragile. It was Boo-Man who melted down at the zoo, no doubt because the zoo was on the same road that led to the correctional facility where his father was doing time. He threw himself against the fence of the peacock enclosure with an abrupt and
very real violence, startling the animals, and I bent down to comfort him, but he wouldn’t speak or meet my eyes and I could see he was gone to Ghostland.

So we headed home. Just north of the city my Tercel started to heave. I glanced down at the gas gauge, which read
D
for
Dumbshit
. I managed to coast halfway onto a shoulder. Trucks whizzed past us, blaring their horns. The car shook. Then an afternoon storm rolled in and brought with it a downpour straight out of central casting. At this point, the kids had the good sense to panic. I shouted at them to calm-down-calm-down-calm-the-fuck-down-and-stay-in-the-car and ran howling into this biblical deluge. I was going to find gas. That was my bright idea. I had no idea where we were. I couldn’t even
see
a sidewalk.

I fell down an embankment. I staggered some miles to a gas station. I paid two guys forty bucks to drive me back to my car. I failed to locate my car. I begged the guys not to abandon me. I considered what would happen if a police officer located my car before I could, what the state statutes might have to say about the reckless endangerment of five minors. Or would this be kidnapping?

It cost me another forty bucks but I did find the car. The kids cheered and talked all at once about who had cried and who hadn’t and we went to Little Caesars for a pizza party, during which it began to dawn on me how out of my depth I was. What was I up to, exactly? I wasn’t going to adopt any of these kids, or get them a scholarship. I was writing a story about them. I was designing a brochure of their hardships.

And it occurred to me then that hip-hop itself was a brochure, an invitation to consume the destructive grief of the urban underclass. Wasn’t that what made the genre so seductive—like the blues, like Negro spirituals—that its vitality arose from the cauldron of racial hardship? Was I supposed to ride with that? But then on the other hand was it right to impose a moral litmus test on music? That
seemed repugnant and silly. I was (let’s remember) a Drooling Fanatic in my formative days. These sorts of quandaries made me ache with self-importance.

In the end, I finished up my story and got the fuck out of the ghetto and stayed the fuck out of the ghetto (to quote Naughty by Nature) and shut up about my hip-hop fetish, much to the relief of all involved, though I did eventually convince my editors to let me write a story about Lastrawze, a miserably earnest profile I assumed would vault them to stardom. A few weeks later, Nookie informed me that one of the Strawze had gone upstate on gun charges. They were never heard from again.

This is as good a time as any to acknowledge Gil Scott-Heron, the great unsung prophet of American music who is often and stupidly hailed as the “Godfather of hip-hop.” He is, if anything, its inventor. In 1971, Gil released “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” the first song to fuse the tradition of the street preacher with that of the soul singer. “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang would not be released for another decade.

I saw Gil in concert only once, flying from Miami to Washington, D.C., for the chance. I remember almost nothing of that trip aside from the fight I got into with my soon to be ex-girlfriend. It was the sort of fight you relish in the late stages of a long relationship, when you’re both hunting for an excuse to hate each other’s guts. She took me to this Dominican restaurant that made the best chicken on earth—it certainly smelled that way—and we got up to the counter and she ordered a whole chicken without even consulting me. Wait a second, I
said, do you like dark meat or white meat? What does it matter? she said. And I said, It matters because I like dark meat, so if you like dark meat too then we should order by the piece and she sighed the Monumental Sigh of Womankind and said, Fine, I’ll eat the white meat! and placed the order and both of us stared at the chickens twirling helplessly on their spits. And of course when we got home she reached for a piece of dark meat and of course I said, See, I knew this would happen and she said, What? then shook her head and we proceeded to the feature attraction, starring the Woman Who Refuses to Think About Anyone Else and the Man So Petty It Boggles the Mind, which lasted for the next thirty-six hours, until I was scheduled to depart, without a farewell, and sort of intentionally peed on her toilet seat.

Why is this my dominant memory of that visit? Why does my mind so dependably seize on the awful? This was a weekend I’d been looking forward to for months, because I’d revered Gil Scott-Heron since my uncle Pete gave me
The Best of Gil Scott-Heron
as a high school graduation gift, back in 1984.

I had no idea what to make of the record at first. It did not sound like “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama. Nor did it sound like “Shark Attack” by Split Enz. The arrangements baffled me. Was this Latin music? Funk? And what of the strange instruments (flute? timbale?). Gil sang beautifully—when he chose to sing. But more often he delivered the words in a sly chant that confused and enthralled me. It’s the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His was a masterpiece: deep, resonant, slightly muddied by the South, learned but playful. It was like listening to Richard Pryor and Malcolm X and Barry White in three-part harmony. “The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia,” he explained, in the track “B-Movie.”

I’d never heard anyone explain, in language so simple and persuasive, the phony messianism of the Reagan Revolution.

Gil was so prescient as a social critic that people didn’t understand what he was talking about half the time. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was (and is) happily misunderstood as a call to arms. In fact, it was a jeremiad about the narcotic effects of screen addiction, how Americans had been lulled into a moral fugue by their televisions. The song was composed in 1970.

More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.

If this makes Gil Scott-Heron sound didactic, the fault is mine, for it is the unique talent of the prophet to convert rage into poetry. Gil did so by creating a musical lexicon that ranged from Marvin Gaye to John Coltrane, from James Brown to Tito Puente. “Shut ’Em Down” may have been about nuclear power plants, but it was also a joyous hymn, complete with horn charts and gospel singers. “The Bottle” managed to turn the ravages of addiction into a salsa party.

But I wanted to tell you about the weekend in question, my one and only encounter with Gil. Clearly, it would have been impossible for him to live up to my hopes. Like any good Drooling Fanatic, I expected an ascension. Why not? The club was small and we had good seats.

But Gil.

Gil was a wreck, a muttering wreck, jittery, coked up, or tweaked out on some other cruel amphetamine. He looked skeletal. He couldn’t remember the words to his songs and so resorted to vamping. Between songs, he delivered semicoherent soliloquies in which the essential topic was his own desolation.

It was this desolation (I think) that makes me remember the fight about the chicken, which epitomized my own failures, emotional and otherwise, the death of hope being the central drama of that weekend.

I was devastated. I was devastated because I have a birth defect, or possibly some other kind of defect, wherein I expect my musical heroes to shower the air with lilies of patience and wisdom. It didn’t occur to me that prophecy—a heightened sensitivity to our moral lapses, a compulsion to declaim—might arise from internal distress. Certainly not in the case of Gil, whose precision as an observer of American folly was the equal of Twain, and who enjoyed the refuge of music.

What I had failed to discern (forgive me, I was still in my twenties) was that true prophets are cursed. They wind up stoned to death. Or alone in the desert, naked and howling. We might take as proof the fact that none of Gil’s albums reside in
Rolling Stone’s
Top 500. Such lists are set aside for the true artists of our time, the Def Leppards and TLCs. Gil has become a curious relic, the original uppity rhyming nigger, though he has no more to do with the contemporary hip-hop stars who sample his tracks than Isaiah did with the idolaters of Judah. He preached—with a great and useless eloquence—
against
the delusions of materialism and violence.

Gil himself has become a spectral presence, arrested on drug charges twice in the past few years, imprisoned for ten months on Rikers Island. An old girlfriend of his (or a woman claiming to be) described him as a crack addict living amid squalor. Gil denies this. It’s hard to know what to believe. Still, I find myself wanting to defend the
guy’s honor. The prophet is an idealist unable to silence his disappointment, who lashes out at the world’s demons at the risk of awakening his own.

His fate certainly came as no surprise to me. It was clear from the moment I set eyes on him in that club. The years had ravaged his face. His long body flicked like a sparrow’s. Time and again he looked in sorrow at a snifter of cognac, which trembled on his keyboard. And when he sang, his voice—once a magnificent gravelly croon-sounded torn.

In Which Mr. Joe Henry (Rather Unwittingly) Becomes My Writing Coach