The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is a spoken-word poem in which an authoritative Black speaker denounces the passivity of members of their racial community and encourages true activism, which has to happen through rejection of consumerist culture, engaging in critical consumption of mass media, and active participation in social protest.

In the first stanza, Scott-Heron establishes the tone and theme through anaphora (the repetition of a phrase or words at the start of several lines). The repeated phrase “You will not be able to” (Lines 1, 2, and 3) is a stern denunciation of the current inaction of the audience for the poem. The root of this action is the television, a symbol of popular culture and obsessive focus on material consumption. The audience in the text is a “brother” (Line 1)—a member of the same racial community, one guilty of “plug[ging] in, turn[ing] on and cop[ping out” (Line 2). Like “skag” (Line 3) and “beer” (Line 4), television and popular media have so dulled the consciousness of Black Americans that Black consumers believe the “revolution” (Line 5) is something they can sit out. The implied metaphor here is that television is a drug.

If television is a drug, then the dealers are those who package media for consumption—corporations and the government. A typical television program of the day might include an opening or intermittent commercials of businesses and companies that serve as sponsors for the programming. The mention of “Xerox” (Line 7), a corporation that created the market for photocopiers, highlights such companies as reproducers of the deadening culture on television.

Such companies would never show political figures like President Richard Nixon and supporters of the Vietnam War like General Creighton Abrams for what they are, lovers of war. Scott-Heron uses satire to hold these figures up to ridicule. Nixon and the other powerful figures in this stanza eating “hog maws / Confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary” (Lines 11-12) is something that would never show up on television. “Hog maws” (Line 11) are fried or (rarely) gravied pork stomachs, a traditional dish associated with Black American culture of the American South. The idea of these figures eating stolen soul food is an ironic statement about how the powerful consume Black Americans and Black American culture. When the “[y]ou” (Line 1) of the text mindlessly consumes what is on offer in popular media, it is the equivalent of offering themselves up for sacrifice to corporations and the government.

Scott-Heron includes a series of allusions to pop culture figures and organizations to critique American consumer culture. “Natalie Woods / And Steve McQueen” (Lines 15-16) were popular actors of the day, with McQueen being a figure associated with the counterculture. “Bullwinkle” (Line 16) is a foolish cartoon figure, while Julia is the title of a late 1960s sitcom that broke the color barrier by having Black American actor Diahann Carroll in the lead role as a professional Black woman. Scott-Heron relies on these allusions to make the point that the revolution will not be a countercultural revolution made more palatable for mass consumption. Lines 17-19 include allusions to consumer products designed to make bodies conform to societal expectations. Consumer culture as it appears in these allusions diverts Black Americans from the work of internal and external revolution.

The fourth and fifth stanzas mark a shift from the humor and irony of the second and third stanzas as the speaker reveals that the same media that delivers bland culture for mass consumption also offers highly stereotyped and dangerous representation of Black Americans. The stolen “color TV” (Line 23) and “stolen ambulance” (Line 23) in the hands of the addressee is a reference to popular representations of Black uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as occasions for theft of material goods rather than political statements about the political and economic oppression of Black Americans. Elections should be at the heart of a representative democracy, but the reference to “8:32 / Or reports from 29 districts” (Lines 24-25) indicates that even voting is presented as entertainment, entertainment that diminished the participation of Black precincts in that process.

The tone becomes even more somber in the fifth stanza, which is the shortest one, and which repeats the lines “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down / brothers on the instant replay” (Lines 27-30) back-to-back. This repeated line (Lines 27-28, Lines 29-30) underscores that Black death, especially at the hands of law enforcement, is situated as entertainment rather than tragedy, or the occasion for outrage and action. The diction, especially the use of the term “pigs” (Line 27, 29), popular with Black nationalist groups like the Black Panthers, shows that there is a political dimension to Black riots that popular media erases.

The biting, sarcastic tone returns in the sixth stanza, which is a counterfactual vision of Black political moderates signifying their turn to more radical Black politics (Urban League president Whitney A. Young being ejected from Harlem by angry Black constituents and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins wearing an outrageous suit in Pan-Africanist colors). The implication is that revolution won’t ever be sights like these because power brokers have co-opted Black political figures by making symbolic concessions.

Scott-Heron returns to his critique of the way popular media diminishes the potential for real change in the seventh and eight stanzas. This time, the critique is more narrowly focused on Black women. Like most Black people, Black women will be too busy being “in the street looking for a brighter day” (Line 41) to watch soap operas or be among the “hairy armed women liberationists” (Line 44), whom Scott-Heron presents as figures so ineffectual that they appear on “the eleven o’clock news” (Line 43) instead of the prime-time news slot. A charitable reading of that description of women protestors is that, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, their grievances and grief are just more fodder for consumption.

The ninth stanza includes more pop culture references, only this time, they are all taglines for ads for products designed to homogenize American bodies and households, down to the “bedroom” (Line 52) and “toilet” (Line 53), by whitening them, that is, erasing Black Americans from culture and the funkiness of lived experience. There is a turn in the poem in Line 56, “The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat,” which includes a tagline from a Hertz rental car jingle. These lines show that the revolution will do what renting a car cannot—give Black Americans the ability to be self-determining.

The final stanza ends with repeated lines that are a call to action. When the speaker says that “there will be no re-run, brothers / The revolution will be live” (Lines 59-60), the point is that readers must feel the same urgency about engaging in activism as they do about catching their favorite program.