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Gil Scott Heron, Brian Jackson: Midnight Band: The First Minute Of A New Day (Arista Arty 103)

Tony Cummings, Black Music, September 1975

THE REVOLUTION will not be televised... but then, neither will it be recorded. Gil Scott-Heron, the singer/composer/poet whose angry eloquence has gradually found the attentive ear of a larger and larger public suffers from the same paradox to have entwined all performers using their music as a platform for revolutionary political statements. The soft life which they see as the quintessence of social injustice to be dismantled by the oppressed (be they black or white) gradually comes a part of THEIR lifestyle too. So the bizarre manifestation emerges of revolutionary spokesmen (from Dylan in the '60s to Marley in the '70s) earning more in a month of gigs than the oppressed earn in a lifetime.

Total word count of piece: 232

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