Gil Scott Heron is dead

I don't normally feel deeply sad over the deaths of public figures or celebrities - it's not like I knew them or anything, and I don't really buy the argument that something special in the world inheres uniquely in these people and is gone when they die.

But I do feel pretty sad at the news that poet/novelist/soul singer/hip-hop precursor Gil Scott Heron is dead. Mainly because I feel sad about his life, and pretty embarrassed about what future generations will think it says about our society.

Certainly, he brought a lot of his misery on himself. He'd been an addict for decades, to pretty much everything going; this New Yorker profile from last year pretty much captures what a life of using had done to him.

But what makes me angry is that he spent about a third of his last decade of life behind bars on non-violent possession charges. For someone who wrote such lucid music about the racial and economic injustices of American society and the withering effects of drug addiction, it's a horrible bitter irony that he ended up crushed in a system that combines all those things. Gil Scott Heron led anything but a model life, but his incarceration seemed to be much more the product of a sadistic justice system than any attempt to reform his own tragic life. Addicts need rehab and support, not the Hobbesian drugs supermarket of the US prison system.

Obviously, Scott Heron's experience is a long way from being unique. And he didn't deserve special treatment just because of his talent. But I think if we looked back at a Coleridge, or a de Quincey, and saw they had spent great stretches of their life in prison because of their addictions, we would wonder at the barbarity of a society that chose to punish a disease rather than treating it. No one deserved the treatment he received, but in the US, 0.7% of the entire population is behind bars. Half that number are inside for non-violent offences, a fifth of the total for drug offences.

Hopefully his music will outlive this system, at least in its current brutalising form. There's already a growing realisation that America can't really afford the lavish cruelty of its prisons.

Anyway, if you want an introduction to the music, 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' is justly his most famous track, while 'Home is Where the Hatred Is' and 'The Bottle' are his best-known addiction tales.

But I'm sending my link to Lady Day and John Coltrane. For one thing, it's a more upbeat and personal song to celebrate a life with. For another, just as Scott Heron is constantly sampled in hip-hop both for the beat and for the conscious reference to black musical history, there's a sense of that going on here in the name-dropping of jazz greats.

But what I think I like best is his sense of bitter, wry irony: the way that this upbeat tune has a huge groundswell of melancholy underpinning the lyrics, which are all about driving off anomie and unhappiness by listening to what is objectively quite melancholy music. Scott Heron was a huge fan of Langston Hughes and this reminds me of the Hughes quote about blues: "sad funny songs--too sad to be funny and too funny to be sad".