Pieces of a Man

The track ends with Scott-Heron repeatedly intoning the question posed so fiercely in the final stanza of "Comment #1": "Who will survive in America?" In wielding this voice West closes an album that drives maximalism to its breaking point with the stirring statement: this is still not enough, we must be still more than this, this business is serious. Gil Scott-Heron was not dead at the time My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in late 2010, but nor was he what had once been forty years earlier, and when the singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, and general man-of-arts passed away on May 27, 2011, I found myself listening to "Who Will Survive In America" before anything else, sounding now like a prophecy fulfilled. In a 2010 New Yorker profile occasioned by the release of what would be Scott-Heron's final album, I'm New Here, writer Alec Wilkinson described Scott-Heron openly smoking crack cocaine during an interview. A good deal of Small Talk at 125th and Lenox was also released in print under the same title in 1970, but to read works like "Comment #1," "Enough," or the brilliantly caustic "Whitey On the Moon" on the page is to lose the power of their purpose by half.