Must be this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**********, who knew? Apparently Native Americans have some issues. Per wiki: Controversy Early derogatory uses Nevertheless, in some 19th- and 20th-century texts ********** is used or perceived as derogatory. Most of these uses are not sexual. One author, for example, referred to "the universal '**********' - squat, angular, pig-eyed, ragged, wretched, and insect-haunted" (Steele 1883). ********** also became a derogatory adjective used against some men, in "********** man," meaning either "a man who does woman's work" (similar to other languages) or "a white man married to an Indian woman and living with her people" (Hodge 1910). (This was a popular literary stereotype, as in The ********** Man.) In a western novel by Max Brand (1926), a male character asks a female character about her intentions: "And follow this fortune hunter like a—like a ********** behind her man?" "Like a **********," she answered steadily, "if you choose to use that word!" The writer Mourning Dove (1927), of Colville, Okanagan and Irish ancestry, showed her mixed-race heroine's opinion of the word: "If I was to marry a white man and he would dare call me a '**********'—as an epithet with the sarcasm that we know so well—I believe that I would feel like killing him." Perhaps in view of such uses as those above, one early-20th-century dictionary of American usage called ********** "a contemptuous term" (Crowell 1928).[2] The activist LaDonna Harris, telling of her work in empowering Native American schoolchildren in the 1960s at Ponca City, Oklahoma, recounted: "We tried to find out what the children found painful about school [causing a very high dropout rate]. (...) The children said that they felt humiliated almost every day by teachers calling them "**********s" and using all those other old horrible terms" (Harris 2000).
RIP Bobby Wheeler http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b243287_jeff_conaway_dies_after_being_taken_off.html
The last time I thought about him was reading a New Yorker profile on him last year: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_wilkinson Sad how he ended up.
I think this thread was a good idea. There are way too many marginal (if that) people who are given RIP threads of their own and are lucky to get a single response. No point cluttering up the forum. Frankly, there should also be an RIP thread exclusively for rock and other forms of non-artistic music so I don't have to waste my time going through them to get to the obits of people who actually contributed something of value to the world of music.
I'm glad riverplate at least gets the importance of Gil Scott-Heron to the rap artform. Rock 'n roll could never hip hop like this and whatnot.
For me, one of the most frustrating things about the obits of Gil Scott-Heron that I've seen has been the emphasis of his influence upon rap. To me, that's a tiny fraction of what made him interesting/important.
I agree on "interesting", but for the mass audience, his biggest legacy will always be "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".
Sure. But the press has represented that particular piece, as well as everything else he did from then and before, as influential on hip hop -- and that's it. As far as the obits have been concerned, that's all there is to say about "Revolution," or "Whitey on the Moon," or anything else -- it was influential on hip-hop. It's a very facile representation of his work.
That's a fair point. But the press doesn't really get hip hop so it makes sense that they don't get its influences (musically, hip hop has stronger roots in disco and reggae, and Scott-Heron's contribution had more to do with the attitude and narrative style). Also, I don't know if a lot of writers know which genre to place him in, so maybe "rap influencer" might be the easiest one?
His exposure was enough that some cable-channel startup used the tagline "The Television will be Revolutionized". I thought that was as good as the real-estate sign which read "The Greatest Earth on Show".