Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Gil Scott-Heron / Brian Jackson
Winter In America
(Strata-East, 1974; reissue on Charly, 2010)
Anger, radicalism, humour and funk from the proto-rapper, thankfully restored to health and liberty.
Gil Scott-Heron's merciless intelligence - the hallmark of his '70s masterpieces, which pierced American political injustice and the compensatory delusions of its victims - made his subsequent downfall - sped by drug addiction and studded with jail time on narc beefs - all the more tragic. His latest, I'm New Here, is a poignant comeback, with an aptly wounded vibe, but to hear him in his imperial phase is to stare into the steely eyes of an artist with utter faith in his vision (he'd taught creative writing at Columbia, after all) and the chops, musical and lyrical, to back it up. This, his group's fourth alloy of Rhodes-laden souljazz with their leader's razor-sharp beat-poetry, is centred on the funky social-realism of The Bottle (confusingly, the track Winter In America would come later). "See that black boy over there, running scared," sing-raps Gil, "His old man's in a bottle." His horror seems absolute - the horror of a man, perhaps, who felt and feared the lure of narcotic analgesia. Meanwhile, co-headliner Brian Jackson, Scott-Heron's musical ally since 1967, takes time out from his mournful keyboard-tickling (gorgeously vaporous on A Very Precious Thing) to invent Acid Jazz with a hectoring flute part. Elsewhere, Heron lays into the black middle class ("You're my lawyer, you're my doctor / But somehow you forgot about me") on the sourest song entitled Peace Go With You, Brother, you'll ever hear, then hits the whole thing out of the park with the super-hip, Nixon-blasting rap, H2Ogate Blues. Great gags (""Click, brrrrrr... I'm sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative"), stunning wordplay, and blazing black oratory ("Afraid of shoeless, undernourished Cambodians while we strike big wheat bargains with Russia, our nuclear enemy: just how blind can America be?") ensue as Scott-Heron rolls up Black Panther Bobby Seale, the Watergate conspirators, "Napoleonic" Chicago mayor Richard Daley and the Kent State shootings, combining erudition and blinding insight in his depiction of Nixon as Melville's Ahab and Shakespeare's Richard III. In the '70s, America had voices like Gil Scott-Heron; now it has The Daily Show's Jon Stewart - and for all Stewart's established strengths, he ain't this funky.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 12:39 PM GMT 12/10/2010
Further Listening
Gil Scott-Heron – Pieces Of A Man (Flying Dutchman, 1971)
The Last Poets – The Last Poets (Douglas, 1970)
Public Enemy – Fear Of A Black Planet (Def Jam, 1990)
Previous Disc of the day
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Earl Brutus - Larky
Last salvo of Ginsters Pasty-Warholism from Britpop ramraiders.
12:04 PM GMT 08/06/2011
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Loudon Wainwright - T-Shirt
An overlooked small wonder from an unpredictable career.
6:00 AM GMT 03/06/2011
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Landscape - From The Tea-rooms Of Mars… To The Hell-holes Of Uranus
Dry computer club Futurists, upon hitting implausible chart paydirt.
6:00 AM GMT 17/05/2011
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Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
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one of the founding fathers of political Rap/ activism,Hip hop,poetry,neo soul.
Posted by Anonymous at 9:26 PM GMT 12/10/2010 Report Abuse
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one of the founding fathers of political Rap/ activism,Hip hop,poetry,neo soul.
Posted by Nigel Nelson at 9:27 PM GMT 12/10/2010 Report Abuse
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