The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Critical Analysis Essay Example

the album as Scott-Heron has battled addiction for decades.

Drugs were a big issue in the 70’s as he was a drug addict and saw many other African-Americans who were addicted to drugs such as LSD and heroin. So what we can take from this refrence in this poem During the 70’s the president of the U. S. was Nixon. Nixon’s Americas was a very strange place to be, with the horror of the Kent State Massacre fresh in everyones’ minds and the Vietnam War still raging. The poem says “The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. What Heron means by that is during Nixons Presidentcy John Mitchell handled the day-to-day operations for Nixon. He also played a central role in covert attempts to sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Accords which could have ended the Vietnam War. As for General Abrabs who trained Vietniese gurriella war tactics The last issue Heron is speaking about in the poem is the people. How the people have become complacent through television culture. How people are controled and manipulated by the images they are fed by the media. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds. it seems to suggest that the revolution will not get at the substance or core of the problems that the media manufacture in us, like the striving toward sex appeal and thinness. refering to the texture of African-American hair, and

how many African-Americans have used different products over the years to straighten their hair so they can look white. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal could be applying to the Ultra brite toothpaste advertising commercial in the 70’s.

The capitalist corporations used television adds to successfully manipulate people into buying their products and doing as they say. We can learn from this poem is not be manipulated by images and adds on the TV and learn how to think and make decisions on our owns and not what we see on tv. Im sure that things do not always go better with coke, or that using Ultra Brite tooth paste makes your mouth sexy. If we want to make our society a better one we must learn to think on our own and not be controlled by the consumption of television adds.

That’s what we can learn from this poem. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. The message of the song is the elusive nature of political culture in Nixons America and the inability of the mainstream to capture the real heart of the people. Heron uses cultural refrences from the 1970s to express his angerin the 1970s.

What he is trying relay in his poem that In a country where everything was becoming increasingly sanitized and pre-packaged, ”The Revolution will not be televised” is partly a call to arms and partly an acknowledgement that there was an alternative, but that

it wouldn’t happen if people just stayed at home staring at their TVs. In the poem where Heron takes jabs at political leaders, his central issues are drugs, President Nixon and the vietnam War, and the brain washing of television. Knowing and understanding these issues that happened in our past can help us deal with the same issues we our facing now.