VIDEO – MUSICAL INTERLUDE –
4.4 Million views – 14 years ago: This was one of the very first songs to address the issues of alcoholism & alcohol abuse! I am a Native Man who was career drinker for 25 years, have been sober for 20 years now. I am now NO longer LIVING IN THE BOTTLE! I’m an Italian 20 year old fella. After months of knowing about this song I’ve just decided to comment under one of its videos on YouTube. I had to leave my mark too on this masterpiece. Scott-Heron’s link to the world of hip hop came about in his lifetime, but it wasn’t something he sought out, nor was it something he was even proud of. “I don’t want to tell you how embarrassing that can be,” he told The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson in a seminal piece entitled “New York is Killing Me,” published shortly before his death. “Long as it don’t talk about ‘yo mama’ and stuff, I usually let it go. It’s not all bad when you get sampled—hell, you make money. They give you some money to shut you up. I guess to shut you up they should have left you alone.” He hated what he saw as posturing without substance, and in 1994’s “A Message to the Messengers,” he warned that art would inform life:
“Tell all them gun totin’ young brothers/That the man is glad to see us out there killin’ one another.”
