R.I.P. Gil Scott Heron

Rest in peace and power to Gil Scott Heron who passed away yesterday in New York city aged 62. He was credited with helping to lay the ground for rap with his spoken word tracks laid over sparse percussions, and his compositions were a favorite of DJs the world over. Via CP24:

Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected. "If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then." He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music." "Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.