The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

First published in 1970, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is one of the best-known works of New York musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron. Relying on repetition of its now-famous line, “The revolution will not be televised” (Line 5), the spoken-word poem is a direct address to a Black audience that has allowed consumerism and popular media to distract it from the psychological and political work of Black revolution. The poem relies on simple diction, strong images, and repetition that force readers to engage more critically with media representation of life, particularly the lives of Black Americans.

Scott-Heron’s poem shows the influence of Black nationalist art and countercultural movements in its stinging denunciation of the United States and political figures, both Black and white. The poem is an exhortation to Black Americans to reject simplistic notions of life and to instead embrace political activism as the antidote to a racist and consumerist status quo.

The poem first appeared in Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), a poetry collection, but Scott-Heron and his collaborators set the poems to music and released an album by the same name, which helped the poem go viral. Scott-Heron’s work is a culturally significant example of political poetry of the 1970s. This poem and his body of work are also part of the DNA of rap music and hip-hop culture, which was coalescing during the 1970s in the Bronx.

Content Warnings: Scott-Heron uses terms and descriptors for women, feminists, Black people, white people, and law enforcement that some readers may find offensive and denigrating. Those terms reflect the political and cultural context in which Scott-Heron wrote. This language is preserved in direct quotes only.

This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Poet Biography

Gil Scott-Heron was born in 1949 to a Jamaican American father who was a professional soccer player and a mother who was a trained opera singer and teacher. Although he was born in Chicago, Scott-Heron spent his formative years in Lincoln, Tennessee, where he was raised by his grandmother, an activist and musician who introduced Scott-Heron to Harlem Renaissance era poets such as Langston Hughes (“Gil Scott-Heron.” Poetry Foundation, 2023).

Scott-Heron later moved to the Bronx, New York, where he encountered the work of poets and musicians associated with the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of work that celebrated Black self-determination and sharp critiques of race and racism in the United States. Scott-Heron also attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1970, he published the murder mystery The Vulture, a thriller rooted in the street life of New York, and Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A Collection of Black Poems, a poetry collection with his signature political critiques of racism and popular culture; the diction of that work is rooted in Black life on the streets of New York.

During this period, Scott-Heron encountered important musical collaborator Brian Jackson and was a some-time collaborator and peer of the Last Poets, a group that used Black musical traditions such as blues and jazz, heavy percussion, and conventions of Black street poetry and spoken word; their work served as an important precursor to hip-hop music. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox became Scott-Heron’s debut album and included several signature tracks, including “Introduction/The Revolution Will Note Be Televised” and “Whitey on the Moon.” The blend of conga drums, Black-inflected spoken-word poetry, and denunciation of the politics and culture of the United States makes the album an important foundational work for hip-hop music.

In 1972, Scott-Heron published The N***** Factory, a campus novel in which Black students at a West Virginia Historically Black College/University revolt against the conservative college administrators. Scott-Heron completed his master’s in creative writing at Johns Hopkins that same year. In subsequent years, Scott-Heron released over 20 albums that included commercially successful songs such as “Johannesburg” (1975; with Brian Jackson), a song about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; and “Angel Dust” (1978), a song about the impact of PCP on people addicted to it. Scott-Heron continued to release albums and books, but by the 1980s, his output diminished due to addiction and incarceration (Sisario, Brian. “Gil Scott-Heron, Voice of Black Protest Culture, Dies at 62.” New York Times, 2011). Scott-Heron died in 2011.

Poem Text

Scott-Heron, Gil. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” 1970. Houston Community College.

Summary

The speaker warns the would-be Black revolutionary that it will take action to make change. Expanding your mind through psychedelic drugs, taking heroin, or drinking beer won’t be enough for revolution. Watching television in particular won’t lead to revolution because it encourages passivity.

Companies capitalizing on the reach of pop culture won’t be the originators of revolution, and Black people need to know that. Warmongering, lying, conservative politicians will have no place in the revolution, no matter how much they clothe their words in the lingo of liberty and freedom.

The revolution isn’t going to come just because pop culture and political figures of any color have decided to package the counterculture and sell it to you. You can’t buy a revolutionary consciousness. Fighting for change won’t be pretty: it will be hard.

When Black people revolt in the city by rioting and looting, it shows up on corporate media as Black people stealing televisions. The revolution won’t be anything like that. It won’t be like election night. There won’t be a clear beginning or end, so you have to pay attention to be a part of it.

People are accustomed to watching the killing of Black people by police as pre-packaged media that runs on the news, but the revolution won’t be that. Just imagine something outrageous instead, like the head of the NAACP being thrown out of Harlem or walking through post-riot Los Angeles in a suit in the colors of Black liberation. Things like that won’t show up on television.

When the revolution comes, no one will care about all-white shows focused on “backwards” country people. No one will care about the fake romances on soap operas because Black people will be too busy fighting for their freedom to consume this mind-numbing stuff.

If there is a revolution, no one will care about white women, whether they are protesting feminists or the president’s wife crying after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Black people will ignore the national anthem and white pop music because they’ll understand music like this has nothing to do with Black liberation.

The reader has to get out and fight for freedom before the revolution passes them by.