Gil Scott-Heron and The Treachery of Music

I recently wrote a review on Gil Scott-Heron’s utterly compelling new effort, I’m New Here (XL Recordings) for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. It’s his first album in 16 years, produced and largely guided by the creative vision of UK rave music pioneer (surprised?) Richard Russell. While listening to the record and trying to summon the right words to circumnavigate something of its significance, I ran into an interpretive difficulty that continues to puzzle me. I’m New Here is primarily spoken, sung, and told in the first-person–and when it’s delivered in third-person, it feels as if Scott-Heron is looking at himself from afar. Interludes catching Scott-Heron off-guard in candid moments help to paint a picture of raw personal confession; I couldn’t help but attributing the statements to his own life, the man behind the music. It’s a typical hermeneutic problem in art criticism, or more basically and profoundly, in the experience of art. How do we distinguish between an autobiographic or a confessional performative work? What difference might that diagnosis make in our experience and interpretations of the art?

Scott-Heron told the story differently. In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4, host Mark Coles attempted to address the subject of Scott-Heron’s personal trials during the paste decade, including trips in out of prison on cocaine and parole transgression charges. Scott-Heron interrupted, “Very few things have been autobiographical that have been included in my work … If you do a good job on a song and convince people of it, they’ll attach it to your biography as though it’s actually something that’s part of your life instead of a good acting job.”

It’s true that we tend to assume a cult of authenticity in musical narratives more so than in other art forms. After Nabokov, we no longer presupposed that the narrator of a fictional work is honest and transparent. After Magritte’s “La Trahison Des Images” (trans. “The Treachery of Images”, from which the title of this article makes reference), we realized with sharper clarity that the subject matter of a visual work of art lies strictly in the internal structures, relations, and style of the art work itself, not what it represents externally. New wave cinema reminded us repeatedly of the spectacular nature inherent to the cinematic experience, as directors would show the camera, implicitly forcing the audience to deal both with its voyeurism and the artificial nature of the art work.

In music, however, we expect sincerity from our artists: the expressive love and suffering from Billie Holiday, the rough individuality from Johnny Cash, the hustler and pimp stories from Snoop Dogg. As far as I know, musicians tied to confessional narratives tend to challenge our ingrained impressions autobiographic authenticity only after the fact, not in the medium itself (do we have any examples of otherwise?) Although it’s true that some musicians play with multiple personas (Quasimoto, MF Doom) in their music and use different monikers (Madlib has at least 5) for engaging varied aesthetic roles, they never explicitly let the listener know in the music that it’s all a matter of performance. We find that out later in interviews and press releases and blog spots. And for those musicians noted for their sincere confessionals, giving up claim to their supposed authenticity tends to frustrate, or even in certain cases, betray the audience. While listening, we hardly notice the treachery of music.

So, how do we go about determining what counts as an autobiographical work rather than a performance piece? Does it even matter? Then how do we judge the aesthetic value of a musical work? From what common thread might we engage in dialogue about the experience of listening?

Whereas viewing music from the standpoint of an autobiographic narrative may help to understand the musician’s creative process and personal strategy of exegesis, it may distract from actually honing in on the meat, the very life force, within the work of art itself–that potential for an art work to disclose freshly meaningful, common worlds to us all. Music produces an immediate effect on the senses, originating a stream of experiences for the listener, a sort of emotional and reflective storytelling. Characters, personalities, and insight might arise from those stories, but we do not need to submit ourselves to the temptation of fetishizing the artist. By assuming that the intention of the artist encases a cryptic source of rigid meaning behind the artwork, we would then have to embark on a nebulous hermeneutic journey of unveiling the artist’s intentions. As if the artist’s intentions had anything to do with the music anyway.

Let us imagine new ways of listening to music. Let us jettison lazy techniques of experiencing, relating, and critiquing its hazy autio-biographical references. Let us explore those characters, personalities, and passions that come to life, because as Scott-Heron attested, “they needed to come to life.”