As a young boy my music tastes were somewhat narrow, I was only into the then, relatively new genre of hip-hop. Heavy D, The Fat Boys, and Big Daddy Kane all went to make up the staple ingredients of my musical diet.
However at around the age of 16, I was introduced by some new friends, to the delights of rare grooves, jazz funk records from the 1970s. Suddenly James Brown, Bobby Byrd, and Lonny Liston Smith became the delicacies that replaced my earlier tastes.
It was in this period of my life, that I learned about revolution, a term that I believe I have only just become to truly understand.
Televising The Revolution
In 1971 in his seminal song, Gil Scott Heron told us that the revolution will not be televised, and ever since I heard the song for the first time, I have often pondered upon the meaning of the lyrics.
Gil Scott Heron grew up in a time of revolution, from the civil rights riots in America, to the wide swept (often C.I.A. backed) instability across Latin America, Scott Heron saw a lot.
Unless you were alive at the time, it's rather hard to imagine exactly how somebody living in the 1970s related to the media. TV of course was still in its infancy then, a product of just a generation earlier, however it had become the main source of information for many people.
In the song he talks about not needing a tiger in your tank, or a monster in your toilet bowl, paying reference to modern advertising slogans, whilst pointing out the way commercialism and news was often wrapped up in a nice easy to digest package.
Re-imagining The Revolution
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was perhaps saying that the real and final revolution will not have time to be televised. Because it will be happening too fast to show, events will unfold at a rate that will make it impossible to cover.
However with the dawn of the internet came a new way to cover the revolution; user generated content. Suddenly we didn't watch the news, we were the news, perhaps this was the revolution that Scott Heron spoke of?
The revolution of the internet, Orwell's Surprise, this was the thing that would give us our non-televised revolution.
Hmm, but alas no, if anything, the internet increased the chances of the revolution being televised . . .
The People's Revolution
The revolution will put you in the driving seat!
That was a line that struck me recently, perhaps Gil Scott Heron was talking of the ultimate revolution. One that isn't government backed, or funded by a nefarious security agency. This one would be by, and for the people, not fractured by arbitrary notions of belonging and geography and wrapped in a neat little segment to put in between ads for whiter teeth and bigger TVs.
To those ends, the crypto revolution begins to fit the type of uprising that he envisaged. Of course he could not have known about bitcoin 40 years before its invention, any more than he could have about the internet.
However the crypto-revolution surely is the type of revolution he meant. Gil Scott Heron perhaps knew that one day, there would be a revolution that the man, couldn't fight.
In that respect, I believe the artist was talking about the final revolution, the one that was most worthy of the term 'revolution'. To be called such, it must replace tyranny with freedom, for this is what it truly means to revolt.
The crypto-revolution puts us in the driving seat, we are the masters of our own destiny. We are writing our own economic and social rules, reducing the powers that be to the role of mere administrator.
Is It Live?
So is this it; are we in the midst of a revolution that is not being televised? Some may point to the rise and rise of Bitcoin, we have read and watched plenty from the mainstream media.
However they are not televising the revolution unfolding, merely the aftermath. They are not revealing the hundreds of crypto-projects springing up every month. They are not showing a blow-by-blow account of new systems being built and readied for the future. These events are happening right now in real time leaving behind no shockwave to rock the bows of mainstream media.
The TV is reduced to reporting events from the revolution after the event. Like Gil Scott Heron said, we won't be back after some message from our sponsors, because this time around, the revolution will be . .
. . . Live.
IS THE CRYPTO REVOLUTION THE ULTIMATE REVOLUTION? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!