Boss Soul: The Blues Aesthetics of Langston Hughes and Gil Scott-Heron: A Foreword

Pardon Our Analysis: A Special Issue on Gil Scott-Heron breaks new ground as the inaugural publication to offer a blend of critical and creative perspectives on the writer and musician Gil Scott-Heron. For many scholars, the prospect of analyzing him in tandem with Langston Hughes may seem counterintuitive, and the notion that he elaborated on Hughes’s aesthetic might raise a few eyebrows, particularly since Scott-Heron is often pigeonholed as the Godfather of Rap. Additionally, the two artists were born generations apart; and at first glance, Hughes’s mild-mannered disposition may seem incongruous with Scott-Heron’s colorful, Black street lingo and orientation, not to mention his well-known drug abuse. But philosophically, Scott-Heron may have shared more aesthetic commonalities with Hughes than with any other writer. This is especially evident in their commitments to and conceptualizations of blues aesthetics, which largely determined how their frameworks stood at variance with mind-body dualism. Besides, Scott-Heron was quite vocal about Hughes’s influence. In his liner notes to his album, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron (1978), he muses:It is apposite, then, that Scott-Heron, like Hughes, published two novels, The Vulture (1970) and The Nigger Factory (1972), as well as an autobiography, The Last Holiday (2012), in addition to several collections of poetry, including Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), So Far, So Good (1990) and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron (2000). Moreover, both artists had brief stints as university lecturers; Scott-Heron earned an MA in creative writing from John Hopkins in 1972. And whereas Hughes released albums such as The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston (1955), The Weary Blues with Langston Hughes (1958), and Tambourines to Glory: Gospel Songs by Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley (1958), Scott-Heron elaborated on his example, blending poetry and music in over twenty albums.Of these, Winter in America (1974), the third of Scott-Heron’s nine collaborations with multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson, deserves special mention because it exemplifies the trademark versatility that distinguishes his aesthetic: an expansive breadth of talents in multiple artistic mediums and genres. Winter in America rose to six on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums, though it included “The Bottle,” Scott-Heron’s soulful hit single, which peaked at fifteen on the R italics added). Of course, Baraka published his classic study Blues People: Negro Music in White America three years earlier, in 1963, and he later reconceptualized African American poetry along similar lines. However, Hughes’s criticism of Baraka’s and Baldwin’s playwriting point to problems and criteria that literary scholars have long ignored.Anticipating Harold Cruse’s criticisms in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967), Hughes underlines the underdevelopment of African American publishing houses—and by logical extension, independent Black cultural institutions. At the time, the Johnson Publishing Company was America’s sole Black-owned publisher, creating obstacles for Black writers who, according to Hughes, were often compelled to satisfy “two audiences—one white, one black. And, as long has been America’s dilemma, seldom ‘the twain shall meet’” (“Black Writers” 476). This paradoxical pickle led writers to make unfortunate compromises. At times, “some writers” confused “artistic truth with financial success” and “personal integrity” with “critical acclaim” (“Black Writers” 476). Among the main issues, claims Hughes, was the young writers’ determination to avoid “being white-ized” (“Black Writers” 477) during the high point of the civil rights movement when activists like Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) were proselytizing that the word “Black” should supersede “Negro” as the term for African American identification.However, Hughes believed that writers’ responses were too often reductive. In his view, Baldwin’s and Baraka’s plays represent specious expressions of radicalism that essentially conflate profanity with profundity, and he denounces them as “fingerpaintings in excrement on America’s lily white canvas” (“Black Writers” 475). Of course, the subject of profanity in Black Arts writing is a complex matter that was widely discussed. Protest writing is generally a limited mode of cultural resistance, and it should be noted that poets Carolyn Rodgers and Eugene B. Redmond later addressed similar issues, though poets like Rodgers herself sometimes cleverly resorted to expletives. Nonetheless, Hughes’s underlying question remains pertinent today: What are the ratios of compatibility between Black writers’ and scholars’ criteria and everyday Black people’s sociocultural experiences?Of course, the irony is that the writers’ employment of profanity reflected their sense of solidarity with Black urban youth, that is, “soul brothers” and “soul sisters” in mid-1960s vernacular. The language that deeply offends Hughes represented an attempt to express the “artistic truth” that he valued so highly. The young writers imagined a Black poetics commensurate with styles, views, and attitudes evinced in Black street culture, particularly the lingo and idioms commonly used in songs, games, toasts, fashion, and conversations. And as it happens, the cultural synergy that Hughes envisions is unmistakable in poet Nikki Giovanni’s collaborations with the New York Community Choir, a gospel-soul ensemble, on the albums Truth Is On Its Way (1971) and Like A Ripple On A Pond (1973). More to the point, Giovanni’s rationale epitomizes Hughes’s idea: “people can put the album on and listen to it and really understand its message” (qtd. in Neal).Nevertheless, Hughes’s core idea is valid: expletives are banal substitutes for the inimitable qualities, characteristics, emotive power, and wisdom that reside in blues aesthetics, which invariably foreground psychosomatic epistemological modalities in Black expression. For instance, the modern-jazz musician Milt Jackson sang gospel before his professional career, and when asked about soul, he replied, “It’s the part of playing you can’t get out of the books and studies. . . . Soul is what comes from within; it’s what happens when the inner part of you comes out” (qtd. in Hirshey 77). Scholars have all but ignored the implications of Jackson’s statement, and the fact that he was such an admired figure among jazz musicians (he collaborated with Ray Charles, one of Hughes’s favorite artists) bears significance. Jackson describes a phenomenon distinguishable from language as such, and Hughes imagines an analogous model in “Black Writers in a Troubled World.” He suggests that Baldwin’s and Baraka’s plays were problematic because, unlike blues and soul, they could potentially appease Black people’s sense of injustice and play to white people’s sense of guilt (prefiguring trends in Black academic writing), while simultaneously avoiding or downplaying elements of traditional African American aesthetics, which were invariably blues-tinged and soulful.As it turns out, Black Arts poet Askia M. Touré (then Rolland Snellings) had previously addressed this incongruity in his 1965 essay “Keep on Pushin’: Rhythm and Blues as a Weapon.” In the following years, Baraka, Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, and others followed suit through the tenets of Black cultural nationalism, which was influenced by Maulana Karenga’s Kawaida theory, a (masculinist) Black urban American interpretation of Africanist principles that diminished the historical significance of traditional Black culture, especially Southern-based forms such as the blues, whose frameworks were largely African-derived.All the same, the fact that Hughes placed his soul-statement after his critique hints at signification. In a gesture of one-upmanship at once subtle and imbricated, Hughes represents soul as traditional Black aesthetics, particularly relative to African-derived aesthetic principles. But at the time, he that Baldwin’s and Baraka’s works are of soul, an idea that later through his Hughes his as literary of such soul as the “Keep On and and the in the These recordings and many others civil rights their and attitudes that through the the the of Hughes’s criticism the of Scott-Heron’s Of course, point out that Baldwin about blues aesthetics in his but Hughes’s criticism is on the idea that forms and audiences are closely as playwriting foundational elements of the blues, it also and of Black expression. In other the plays represent Black people in the of racial while simultaneously the and principles that the making of songs, and so that such essentially cultural into an of writing and are and to that are and Black cultural is artists cultural and principles at variance with the through aesthetic that and political In the of is the Hughes therefore that the B. of a and he Baldwin’s and Baraka’s plays as literary of Hughes basically suggests that they to audiences of the who believed in an “The most of the young Negro writers have America’s of . . .” (“Black Writers” 475). For Hughes, is to the of the blues, and he the plays as . . . to . . . . . .” Hughes countless aspects of Black life, especially in his for and is therefore to understanding his vision of African American literature. In 1963, Hughes Black . . . a of gospel in at about at when were in in essay he the or he during his years in “The music and of Negro churches of and so that to this not really churches their from and the to the beat of a that is so like gospel Hughes’s important on his artistic similar were among musicians who, like Jackson and Charles, often their as young Hughes’s comments also his to elements of Black as for forms and in Black literary Hughes the of his blues aesthetic from those of blues musicians more closely than any other writer. For Hughes, the term and critical thinking. 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The of course, is But Scott-Heron’s understanding of is so that his is to Scott-Heron’s comments about his song “The Of American and with the blues Scott-Heron that contradictions in American And for Scott-Heron’s into Black often and responses to the of in by which Hughes’s notion of as well as his statement at the Writers in in are the people who have long in the of the word . . .” But while language appears in academic has been focus on the of in the such works as White The Truth of Our is a of by the professional of that is, scholars and creative writers in and In several Black public have about this that raise an in The New published in for instance, the the the the of John and of has a of . . . of the or to the he in have be for years and a movement that can get what we as a people than to be and we in the . . .” this was thinking. a the when asked about his he to the and quoted the A of can’t one of of Hughes’s of and his criticism of of his that Baldwin and Baraka . . . often the of our of is in Hughes’s critique in remains all too In the the are of The the political of and which in exemplifies Hughes’s central point when he in “Black Writers in a Troubled World,” between “artistic truth” critical and “critical The more a in the the of to and that foreground everyday Black people’s a as as in a of Black like Hughes, as and John John B. and other often critical perspectives to while and perspectives quite from those in Scott-Heron a of this For all Hughes’s criticism of Black he any the of America’s racial which our a political then, is when political independent Black is as as Black academic and the blues is in social attitudes and psychological that Black people At the of Hughes’s the about and or who into it also the frameworks What of we as artists and For Hughes, Scott-Heron, and other Black the blues not as a to the blues as its critical and the of social underlying America’s to Among several Hughes of between racial attitudes among white and after World had consider that Scott-Heron in to in the well before the among the in Scott-Heron as a in politics, though he was generally as a of which to Hughes’s central idea: of Black includes and and to consider of compatibility with of Black influenced Hughes’s and Scott-Heron’s aesthetics and the of and of the poet argues, is “a the of . . . other of multiple of (qtd. in it to Scott-Heron’s recordings on Hughes’s he and into vernacular forms that had been and to such a that and people often them as of But reminiscent of artists in music as well as and Scott-Heron that is foundational to the blues the literary he an of the Black who in of the . . .” Hughes and Scott-Heron a can the soulful