Hey America! by Stuart Cosgrove

Author:Stuart Cosgrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

The Prophets of Rage. Arguably the most politically militant hip-hop act in history, Public Enemy’s classic line-up here features hype man Flavor Flav (front left), Chuck D (centre) and the group’s Minister of Information, Professor Griff (right). The Security of the First World (S1W) flank Terminator X in the back row.

6

THE CNN OF THE GHETTO

Listen Up: ‘The Bottle’ by Gil Scott-Heron (1974)

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve coloured people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right. I don’t eat coloured people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’

Then these three white boys came up to me and said, ‘Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed its ass. Then I said, ‘Line up, boys!’

(Dick Gregory, Roberts Show Club, Chicago 1961)

Dick Gregory was a trailblazer, a stand-up comedian who laced his act with political invective, and a man who came to influence a generation of hip-hop artists who thrived on his punchy and enraged style. The New York Times described him as a ‘pioneering satirist who transformed cool humour into a barbed force for civil rights’. He was a familiar face on prime-time television, on the schools protests on Chicago’s South Side and on the marches for voter-registration rights in Mississippi.

From the early sixties, during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, Gregory dedicated himself to social activism body and soul, viewing it as a ‘higher calling’, more important than satirical comedy. He was arrested numerous times in the Deep South and spent time in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he claimed to have endured ‘the first really good beating I ever had in my life’. Increasingly, Gregory dropped out of club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups and came to be perceived as an unreliable performer by the networks. He released a string of comedy albums that were popular in ghetto homes across America, including Dick Gregory Talks Turkey (1962), Running For President (1964) and the black-power comedy album Dick Gregory’s Frankenstein (1969), which lay buried in bargain bins until it was seized on as source material by the first generation of hip-hop DJs. In 1965, he was shot in the leg during the Watts riots in Los Angeles and in 1967 he ran for Mayor of Chicago as part of a civil rights stunt. His campaigns for the presidency, much like schlock-rocker Alice Cooper’s, were never wholly serious. In 1968, he attracted more laughs than votes running for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, securing 47,097 votes.

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