The Revolution will not be on the Internet

Hosted from Project Opus (www.projectopus.com)

Song Information

Album: only on the internet
Length: 5:29
Posted: Mar 30, 2006
Overall Rating:

"Top Music" Score: 2890

Statistics: 1102 people listened to this song.

900ft jesus angry del gil scott heron humorous modems mutabaruka positive powerful protest serious spoken word

Song Description

Sampled modems and dialtones bring Gil Scott Heron to the twenty-first century

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Song Style

Genres:
Alternative, Electronic, Rock, Punk, Spoken Word, Experimental, Spoken Word, political, sampled, modems, dialtones, post-rock, electronic

Moods:
powerful, positive, angry, serious, humorous

While you might think this tribute to Gil Scott Heron's classic, "the revolution will not be televised" might be a one trick pony- the repetitive structure of this repetitive structure works as well here as it did for Heron however many decades ago. If you spend anytime online, these are fantastic lyrics, and they grow on you, as Rath keeps mashing up the metaphors.

here are a few of my favourites from the Manifesto:

-The revolution will not need to be capitalized in order to SHOUT.
-The revolution will have no transparent background colour
-Adverstising will not make it free.
-The revolution may contain illegal characters

the delivery of the spoken word doesn't have the soul or fury of the master Heron, but in a geek-chic kinda way that sorta suits the song's theme and the softer hitting approach works ok.

the backing tracks--while hardly the point here-are...passable. Using modem bleeps as samples is a great idea, but they are largely masked by conventional guitar and bass sounds which aren't particularly urban let alone techie freaky. Man or Astro-man's "a simple text file" for example---THAT's the techie freaky I am talking about. To sustain Rath's derivative of Heron's predecessor to hip hop, we need more backbeat than the total experimental madness that Man or Astro-man deliver, but some more tech noise would suit this song conceptually very well.

Finally, i gotta be down on the sung chorus. While it's a good idea to have a hook to provide some respite from the intensity of the spoken word once in a while, this one is kinda weak.

For those of us who can identify more than half the IT references Rich Rath spins like a hurricane, this is a good listen.

I was wondering where 900ft jesus has been for the last 10 years! He moved to Hawaii! Check it out.