Resumen de Lights, Camera, Police Action!
“The revolution will not be televised.” Poet Gil Scott-Heron put that 1960s Black Power slogan to music (flute, bass, and drums) in 1970, turning it into one of the most iconic spoken-word recordings of its time (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Vincent 2014; Wald 2015). A frenetic critique of corporatization, political opportunism, and the anesthetizing distractions of popular culture, the tune traffics in a discussion of what some academics took to calling “the hegemony of vision” not too long ago (Levin 1993). In the Scott-Heron anthem, a fusion of jazz, blues, and funk, televised stands in for a neo-liberal logic that would seek to domesticate revolutionary possibility, relegating it to what fit inside network TV’s standardized commercial breaks or to what could only be beamed into living rooms commercial-free if a large enough conglomerate was willing to underwrite such televisual anomalies (in that bygone era before broadcast TV became the successful pay-TV model of HBO).
Proffering an overly romantic notion of “revolution,” one perched categorically outside of all mass-mediated co-optations, the song includes dismissive references to television coverage of looters stealing TV sets and nightly news recaps of urban unrest. There is even a specific allusion to recurring media imagery of police officers killing young black men. “There will be no pictures,” Scott-Heron raps, “of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay.” The line is repeated for emphasis. Particularly striking in this provocative formulation are the unapologetically derogatory term used for law enforcement agents and the suggestion that killing “brothers” can be likened to sporting events (recreational hunts?), complete with instant replays for bloodthirsty fans
