Stranger than Kindness

You wake up in the middle of the night. And the word 'kindness' is in your head. It's not like you are very good at remembering your dreams, so why wake up with a word? Let alone a word like that?

So you lay there thinking about it, turning it over almost as if it were an image from some lost place in your unconscious, tasting the sound of it quietly in a whisper that won't wake your partner.

"Kindness".

Your imagination is often more violent, sexual, angry or surreal. As if everything you suffer and which frustrates you finds some somnambulant catharsis in that boiling ocean of abstract visions and intense emotions we call a dream-life, thoughts given a sardonic narrative in your daylight hours that would shame Quentin Tarantino, thoughts let loose beyond the reach of even David Lynch in your sleeping ones.

Your friends talk about this violence as an emotional and fantastic condition in all their lives. This rage that snaps and crackles and pops in the mind's eye; they see it in themselves and others, laugh about it, acknowledge its presence.

We want to hurt people, they say to you, punish them, slap them around, beat some sense into them, even just hit them because it's just what you want to do and somehow it feels good to imagine it even if you would never really do it.

Consciously they don't believe in the capital punishment yet they fantasize murder. Politically they are of the Left or small 'l' liberal persuasion yet they dream of crushing all who are in their way. They oppose war and stand for peace - but they dream of private revenge.

How did we get so angry they ask?

You try to fathom it as they sit round and talk about road rage, strange and sick crimes from Belgium to Baghdad, irrational arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere. They talk about Eminem songs and the film Fight Club ("a bit passé" someone says) and the constant pull of a sport like boxing as well as the way modern cultural criticism has become so cruel and witless and nasty in the newspapers these days.

You all try to draw some sense from this, as if there's a thread that unites such feelings into something that can be analyzed, responded too, possibly changed. Maybe it's to do with this 'time of terror' says one friend, but this anger has been burning well before September 11 ever came along. Perhaps it's something about the inequities of society says another, the gross disjunction between the poor and the rich, but that's as old as the hills too. We've always been violent insists another, it's in our primal nature, which may well be true, but if that was once natural why do we all feel so sick and ill-at-ease about it now? We've lost touch with our morals and passions and we use irony to mask it till we turn cruel someone says - but is irony a mask or a brake - or the lid on a boiling pot? It's more about the crisis of materialism in a capitalist society says another, the absence of any spiritual succor and the intuited desperation and panic this engenders. Do you know that Saul Bellow line about modern entertainment, "the ecstasies of destruction"? Have you seen Into the Wild? Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and recognized the survivalist doctrine that underlines it? The connections and speculations roll on like a mad telegram from the frontlines of pop culture.

In an essay from 1996 entitled "Perchance to Dream" you know that Jonathan Franzen wrote of how "privacy is exactly what the American Century has tended toward. First there was mass suburbanization, then the perfection of at-home entertainment, and finally the creation of virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional - terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user."

As the conversation coheres around this finer theme of atomization and loneliness, it's vaguely agreed that rage sets in when we no longer truly connect, and so it is that angry feelings flow sociologically too, from the disenfranchised towards the relatively better off, from the intelligent towards the glib and stupid, from the stupid and oppressed and beaten back towards the superior and the condescending, from the average towards the different.

It is some conversation.

And it is all yours, all in your head, imagined as a dialogue between people you know and people you don't. This one night laying in bed. Play acting the drama of what is wrong with your world.

Are you still dreaming now you wonder?

Are you sick or is the society that spawned you ill? You want to hold your lover or your child or your parents in your arms and know the nature of softness and something like forgiveness, though you are unsure what there is to forgive. Let them know you are there - for them, with them.

There are days of course when you do generous-spirited things. Days when you hope a mere look from your eyes might send of rays of warmth over another troubled soul. When compassion lets you be a little better than you feel you actually are. In a funny way it as if you need to let go of the world, and by letting go you somehow release these bad feelings as well. You know it's not a feeling you can stay high on, but it is there as another option to foul cursing, a foot on the accelerator, a fist, a gun, an American Bad Dream.

Is it about some form of tightness, you think, that finally closes around you. Yes, you have become tight, and even closed. Like that Paul Kelly song where he sings it so fatal and so sweet:"I've been careless, I've lost my tenderness, I've taken bad care of this."

"Kindness."

The word leaves you. Hovers close above you in the darkness like a being. A car passes by. And the night goes on. You don't have an answer. But you let it go and the word travels through the streets with that car, an angel in a slipstream, visiting people in their beds in the darkness, while you dream and finally sleep, a thing of wishes and forgiveness in the black, black world.

- Mark Mordue

* First published ABC Online, the Drum Unleashed, 9^th January 2009

The Song Remains The Same

Just got off train. Pretty amusing ride. Heard this voice at back of carriage going 'Fuck!' 'Fuck.' 'Fuck!' 'Fuuuuck'. Then a staccato set of 'fuck fuck fuck'. And so on. I was trying to work/ read but he drove me crazy. Then after a while I started to enjoy it. Like some weird John Cage performance art music piece. 

I was amazed this unseen guy could get so much variety out of one word. We're talking a twenty minute train ride here. During it people slowly started moving by me, an evacuation. Eventually I could not resist and turned around. Fatal move, the eye contact thing. And I see this very grubby street guy moving towards, steel wool hair, the spider shuffle. I turn away as quickly as possible hoping he wont sit next to me. Lucky me, he goes for a big seat just ahead of me and lays down on it in a state of frustration, rubbing his temples. Nut case. 

Then I hear the voice again - from behind me - 'Fuck!'. So even the mad street person seated in front of me now cannot bear this crackpot behind me cursing. Then all of a sudden the curser sounds surprised, even happy and expands his reportoire with a 'fucking hell'. It's almost cheerful. The musical climax. A eureka moment. Then its back to 'fuck fuck fuck' again, by which time I leave the train.

- Mark Mordue

Ceremony (The Poem of the Dead)

The poem of the dead is made of this:

dirt or fire, bones and skin, worms or ash,

favourite things, a book, a ring, a guitar or just a toy,

a song to carry out the coffin out, tears and wine and tea that’s not too strong,

a cruel blue sky, consoling rain, the weather as a voice,

one shiny car, quiet movements made, a stunning Bible line,

a few lyrics from Dylan Thomas’s light, white flowers, a Stop sign,

a priest whose words just sink away, the incense in the air,

a friend who laughs, a mother’s cries, a father’s face of stone,

a hand upon your shoulder now, a strange car ride, a bird’s cold tune,

a child who lost another, cakes and bread and garden chairs,

the note they left, the will they wrote, the things that we have heard,

their favourite clothes, and when it passed, take a handful of this soil,

the milk is here, the beer is there, an aunt from way up north will speak to you,

new machinery creaks them into fire, a curtain closes slow,

a hallowed be thy name is called, the sunlight on the graves,

smoke rises from a chimney slow, we turn our eyes and walk away,

by night the loved ones, still, are gathered around the songs we used to know,

the family lives alone with loss, the ceremony is tomorrow.

- Mark Mordue


* Graveyard photo taken on south coast of New South Wales using my iPhone.

Gil Scott-Heron: The Questioner

Gil Scott-Heron greets me genially. He's slightly spidery in his dangled movements, surprisingly slight and aged. At 45 the man oft referred to as The Godfather of Rap is an undeniably emaciated figure.

Sitting on opposing beds in his modest hotel room, he asks if I mind if he smokes. Tender, even tentative, his gentlemanly persona and attenuated physicality are at odds with a ferocious political reputation as a songwriter, though not his dry dismissal of the O. J. Simpson case buzzing on the television. "I've just been watching the questioner question the questions of the other questioner," he laughs.

Exposing internecine political realities, attacking the absurd and the downright stupid, has always been Scott-Heron's forte. On his new album, Spirits, his first release in 12 years, he lambasts the Gulf War ethos and America's techno-Disney chauvinism:

"Yeah, there was some smart bombs. There was some dumb ones, too." He laughs. "Oh, I love that line!" Struggling to overcome a fit of chuckling, he says between gasps: "See, we don't want to get too heavy with our politics. We want to let people know we're here, not just tell them things all the time."


It's impossible to underestimate the significance of Scott-Heron in the history of contemporary black music. As one American newspaper observed: "If rap, as Chuck D. (of Public Enemy) said, is the CNN of the black community, then Gil Scott-Heron was its first anchor."

His music, however, is far broader than affinities to rap music via Beatnik poetry might suggest. Scott-Heron's soulful, smokey baritone, a little drier now but still like syrup at the bottom of a glass, his piano-based compositions and his potent grasp of bluesy jazz and soul can take seductive flight.

"I don't know about all this Godfather of Rap business," he says dismissively, hands trembling, legs trembling. "I just think people say that because they haven't listened to the people I was listening to; they just don't know about them."

On a song like 'Message To The Messengers', on Spirits, Scott-Heron takes rap, or more particularly gangsta rap, to task for its negativity. "And the media loves to use these 20-second grabs that perpetuate these violent images of our community, these sound bites. But they don't look at a guy going off to work, watch him coming home, trying to put food in the mouths of his children. They don't tell that story, which is the real story of 95 per cent of our community."

Scott-Heron lives on 125th and Lennox in New York, "right in the middle of Harlem. It's no heavier than a lot of places. Most people are just trying to go about their business, get on with living. We've got more than our fair share of depression, of unemployment, of poverty, but that ain't so different either from a lot of places I've seen in the world."

Understanding the heritage of hate that can take root in any oppressed culture, he tries to explain that "it's hard to act like you're equal when you've been oppressed for centuries. See, we're a colony of people who were transplanted through slavery into America - we don't have a claim on the land to bind us like the American Indians. But what we are as a culture was born there. Rap, jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, these are the things people think of when they think of America, but not many black people have profited greatly from them. When people see a lot of money being made out of their culture, but not by them, they don't feel very equal either."

Nonetheless, his debate with gangsta rap stems from a need to say they represent "1 per cent of what our community is".

Despite his proud emphasis on constant live gigging, the gap of 12 years between studio recordings before Spirits and highly mixed reports of his live abilities have been associated with rumours of drug and alcohol problems and snide references to "Gil Scott-Heroin".

That his physically imposing stature - in the '70s he was as lean and tough as the proverbial "black panther" - has given way to such a frail, middle-aged man only adds weight to those stories of dissipation and squandered talent. Scott-Heron boldly shows me his arms. "I ain't no junkie. You don't see trackmarks on my arms. I'm afraid of needles! I'm a diabetic and I still won't use needles.

"It's like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull or Taxi Driver. He's an actor. But while he's doing those parts, we believe him. That's because he does it so well. So when I sing a song like 'Home Is Where The Hatred Is' ("A junkie walking through the streets at night, I'm on my way home") it's a story. But I can't really blame people for saying all those things about me because it just means I told the story so well they believed it."

You don't have to be an addict to suffer foibles. And pay for them. Scott-Heron certainly looks well worn in. Glasses perched on a gaunt face with a greying, straggly beard, a beautiful smile, teeth tobacco crooked, everything about him hurting with kindness. Something most definitely catches in the image of the man before you, in the many years away from the studio, in the live shows that veer from sublime to average: Drugs? Maybe not now. Ill health? You can't escape the thought, but whether it be diabetes or some unspecified illness ravaging him, who can say.

Born in 1949 in Chicago, Scott-Heron was raised in Tennessee by his grandmother. He was one of the first black children to be used in the experiment of integration, one of three children brought into Jackson elementary school. It's been said that after the cursing and abuse from white children became unbearable, his mother moved him to New York City, to the Bronx, then the Hispanic-dominated Chelsea neighbourhood.

It was Scott-Heron's grandmother who bought him an upright piano from the funeral parlour next-door after it closed. "People see me as a writer who discovered the piano, but I'm really a piano player who discovered writing." Given his deep musicality, his writing skills cannot be overlooked: a published novel at age 19 called The Vulture; a book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th and Lennox, by 21.

The poetry led to recordings and music as a way to reach the masses at that point in American history in the early '70s when the civil rights movement was losing momentum and Black Power was showing its hand.

Not surprisingly, Spirits is about the spirits behind these movements. The tune of John Coltrane's 'Equinox' forms a trace-line beneath the Spirits title-track, a tribute "to balances. Coltrane was born on the September equinox, when night and day are equal." He likens this coincidence to a spiritual politic. "And the spirits have always helped me." Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela - they're all there among his muses. But you'd be a fool to mistake soul for cosmic naivety in Scott-Heron.

When a friend suggested his 1975 song, 'Johannesburg', came too early for the Nelson Mandela fever that much later gripped the world, he said: "Well, by the time my song was out Mandela had already been in jail for 12 years. I don't think he would have thought it was early."

Having broken out of a decade of obscurity, Scott-Heron is now working on an autobiography due later this year. It was inspired when he toured the United States with Stevie Wonder, who was working to get Martin Luther King's birthday established as a national day of celebration. Wonder succeeded. "Stevie always sees the positive in things." Spending time with Gil Scott-Heron can do the same.

- Mark Mordue

* This story appeared under the title 'A frail Godfather' in the Sydney Morning Herald dated 01.03.1995. Gil Scott-Heron played two shows at the Metro Theatre in the city: an extraordinary first night at the height of his powers, and a free-jamming and seemingly endless second night where people left wondering what the fuck was going on.