Truth Tellers Gregory Porter's Popular Voices

# Boy, you hear me calling your name The bridge is your time

# Your engine rolls hot

# If the bridges fall down

# Don't lose your head of steam... #

The voice. It's the one instrument we're all born with.

We all love to sing.

# Oh, young man... #

Singing is my life. It's what I do and who I am.

# I didn't make it too far

# But, baby, you are... #

I'm going to take you on a 100-year celebration of the mystery,

joy and pain that lies behind the soul's instrument.

# Boy, you hear me calling your name

# The bridge is your time... #

I'm Gregory Porter and these are my Popular Voices.

# Young man

# I'm counting on you

# And whoa... #

Hey, you. Yes, you.

Come here. I'm talking to you.

I want to tell you a story about a century of street jive -

how the blues' original growlers

gave us the rhyme and flow of hip-hop,

how the truth became a quest of rock and roll's greatest poets,

and how great voices don't have to be technically perfect to be truly

great. This is the story of talking voices.

# Right, shake it over I heard a humming... #

# Everything you touch is gold

# I'm in love with your soul

# Everything that you're sayin' is all

# I love you. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Everybody loves a magnificent voice.

But not all popular singing is about virtuosity.

Sometimes, the message takes centre stage.

And for 100 years, great singers have shouted, moaned, groaned,

and even just talked, in an attempt to tell us the truth.

So this time, I'm on the hunt for singers with something to say.

It's all about telling it like it is and keeping it real.

# Judge, Your Honour

# Hear my plea

# Before you open up your... #

And my search begins with the Empress of the Blues.

Born in Chattanooga in 1894,

Bessie Smith was one of the first stars of the recording era,

whose life was laid bare in her guttural growl.

Aiding me is an actor and a singer

who has devoted her professional life to playing Bessie -

Miche Braden.

-Hi.

-Glad to be with you.

-Thank you.

-Who was Bessie Smith and why was she so important?

Bessie Smith was the baddest woman

that you would ever want to hear, or see.

# No, no

# I wouldn't pay 25 cents to go in nowhere

# Cos listen here

# Up in Harlem every Saturday night... #

You may as well say she was a shouter. Blues shouter.

Because they didn't have the microphones and things we have now.

-Yeah.

-So she had to be powerful.

And she's doing tent shows for 1,500 people.

She was just one of those kinds.

She just, bam, it was there! Bam!

I don't need to be doing a woman's job!

There was a lot of things she talked about, as far as being abused,

actually. Because a lot of women were dealing with that.

-Yeah.

-And then the men in general, you know,

they were the players and that.

So she was singing about their lives.

So when they recognised themselves...

-Mm-hm.

-..they were at home.

-Yeah.

-They were at home.

And it was too wonderful.

# I don't care

# I feel just like I wanna clown

# Give the piano player a drink because he's bringing me down

# He's gotta rhythm, yeah, when he stomps his feet. #

Bessie's truth-telling approach to singing

made her both a star of record and screen.

# My man's got a heart

# That's a rock

# Cast in the sea... #

In 1929, she made a film appearance -

a two-reeler shot in Queens, St Louis Blues.

# Cast in the sea. #

This is a really rare piece of footage.

This is the only time I've ever seen Bessie Smith moving.

And I'm really struck by

really the sound and the quality of her voice as well.

# Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today

# Feelin' like I did today... #

When I think of Bessie Smith,

I think of just this powerful and commanding presence...

Yes, she was.

..that says, "This is how it is and this is what I think."

As I listened to music, I needed to believe what I was hearing.

I needed to know that maybe some kind of way,

their life had something to do with the song they're singing.

Now, Billie Holiday used to say, if she hadn't lived the song,

she couldn't sing it.

And I totally understand that.

And you can definitely tell that Bessie Smith lived these songs.

Like a modern-day MC,

Bessie Smith spoke to the lives of the audience

that bought her records,

100 years before hip-hop.

She died in a car crash in 1937, at the age of 43.

# The man I love

# He would not gone nowhere

# Gone nowhere... #

Even though it's a Hollywood,

er, concoction, if you will, it still is great to see her sing.

And quite frankly, it's actually beautiful to see

these talented black people from a film in 1929.

And nice suits too!

# St Louis woman with her diamond rings

# Oooh, yeah

# Pulls that man round

by her apron strings

SHE VOCALISES

# If it wasn't for powder

# And her store-bought hair

# The man, the man

# He wouldn't go nowhere

-# Nowhere

-Yeah. #

Yeah, cool.

The blues was all about frank truth-telling,

and it gave rise to a form of speech-singing -

the talking blues.

And we can actually pinpoint the very first time

the talking voice was immortalised in wax.

# Standing in the corner by the mantelpiece

# Up in the corner by a bucket of grease

# I greased my feet with a little axle grease

# Went slippin' up and down that mantelpiece. #

Christopher Bouchillon was a white country blues musician from Carolina,

who was billed as the "Talking Comedian of the South."

In 1926, he recorded the song Talking Blues.

It's rumoured he talked on the recording

simply because he couldn't sing.

Could this guy really be the godfather of hip-hop?

Conversational singing was a major influence on my next truth-teller...

# When the moon's kinda dreamy... #

..Billie Holiday.

# Starry-eyed and dreamy

# And nights are luscious and long

# If you're kinda lonely

# And nobody only

# Then nothing but blues are brewin'... #

Jazz diva Annie Ross was a very close friend of Billie Holiday.

Lady...

..was extraordinary.

She was very down-home.

She was very definite in her opinion.

Once you heard Lady,

you could never forget that voice.

It was...

..as if a higher being had spoken.

# ..nothing but the blues are brewin'

# The blues are brewin'... #

Billie possessed a vocal style that hovered effortlessly between speech

and jazz singing. She pulled the listener into her world with her

conversational phrasing.

# You only got a gleam in your eye... #

I would just say Billie was like, you know, a great saxophonist.

She reminds me of Lester Young, who I know she recorded with a lot.

She's not always singing on the beat, it doesn't feel like.

It feels like she's just kind of there, moving slowly through it,

at her own pace. The music has to follow her,

she's not following the music.

It feels like she's always teetering on, er,

not just being in the pocket, vocally.

But it's there. Because there's a cry, there's an emotion,

there's a sadness, a melancholy, that's just so powerful.

# He wears high-draped pants

# Stripes are really yellow... #

You hear every bad thing that ever happened to her in her voice.

# He wears high-draped pants

# Stripes are really yellow

# But when he starts in to love me... #

Like Bessie Smith before her,

Billie's voice had a lived-in feel to it.

As she grew older, a world-weariness chipped away

at the range and tone of her instrument.

You can hear it in the speech-song confessional of her final album,

recorded in 1958.

-Lady In Satin.

-Yeah.

# I'm a fool to want you

# I'm a fool to want you... #

She made every word count.

The expression

of agony,

of hurt, of love,

of being,

came through in her voice.

And she reached me and she touched me.

And it was...

It was kind of inexplicable, but you would listen to her

and once she was finished,

you would say, "Oh, wow!"

# ..not mine alone... #

I love the way the orchestra waits for her.

-Yeah.

-Those moments, er...

There's moments where there's nothing but her.

"Fool. Fool."

-Just...

-Her phrasing...

-These moments. "Time."

-"Time."

-Yeah.

-It's like...

..it's screaming without screaming.

-Inside.

-Yeah. Yeah.

# Time and time again... #

When you hear Billie's voice when it was, like, in its worst -

in the later '50s - erm, that's what we're hearing, in my opinion.

-Yeah.

-It's her soul singing.

-Yeah.

Because she sounded like she had been chewing rocks

and swallowing fire.

-Yeah!

-Because her voice was so raspy.

But you could feel the emotion in it.

You know?

# My tender love

# Without you. #

That's real.

You just said it, that's real.

That's real.

-Billie Holiday.

-Yeah.

And now a tune written specially for me, Strange Fruit.

In February 1959, with just three months left to live,

a weakening Billie performed her bestselling record

for an ITV variety show.

Her performance was a masterclass of unflinching understatement.

# Southern trees

bear strange fruit

# Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

# Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

# Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees... #

Strange Fruit - it's...

..they're hanging the body of a... of a black man...

er...

..for some unnecessary reason.

# The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

# Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh... #

Nobody's face, or eyes, could so...

..dryly tell the story

of such a painful thing.

# Here is fruit

# For the crows to pluck... #

This is the point at which jazz becomes this

thing of

social and political import.

# For the sun to rot

# For the trees to drop... #

I feel like Billie Holiday was put on Earth for this song.

# ..and bitter crop. #

It almost feels uncomfortable clapping after Strange Fruit.

Singing in a colloquial style,

in an effort to reveal a deeper truth about the world around you,

wasn't just limited to African-American jazz and blues.

This is Bakersfield, California, where I'm from.

It's an oil town and there are nodding donkeys everywhere.

People came here originally as part of the Gold Rush but, in 1899,

oil was discovered by migrants from Texas and Oklahoma.

Okies came here looking for work and cheap land.

It was a time of economic depression for America,

and its great artists chronicled the times.

Photographer Dorothea Lange took pictures of economic refugee camps

around Bakersfield.

And the great folk singer Woody Guthrie

travelled with the dispossessed, going West.

# Well, the Captain said to John Henry

# I'm gonna bring my steam drill around

# I'm gonna bring my steam drill out on the job

# Gonna whup that steel on down... #

Guthrie's style of three chords and the truth

set the template for folk music.

His best-known song, This Land Is Your Land,

was a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America.

# As I was walking that ribbon of highway

# I saw above me that endless skyway

# I saw below me that golden valley

# This land was made for you and me... #

We listened to this song when I was in second, third grade.

We learned it. We sang it.

In a way, it felt very...

..Bakersfield. Erm, very hometown for me.

It was like a farmer singing in the open plain.

# ..her diamond deserts

# And all around me a voice was sounding... #

An alternative national anthem of the heart, in a way.

Guthrie would inspire legions of folkies, including one future poet,

who would start his career as a Woody Guthrie disciple.

Bob Dylan was from Minnesota,

but that didn't stop him

from adopting Guthrie's talking-blues twang.

# Well, I got up and walked around

# Up and down the lonesome town

# Just a-wondering which way to go

# I lit a cigarette on a parking meter and walked on down the road

# It was a normal day

# Well, I rung me a fallout shelter bell

# And I leaned my head and gave a big yell... #

It's great. I love how Bob Dylan is conversational in his delivery

of the lyrics, which are...

..which seem to be just something that he's doing.

He's throwing out some, in a way, very serious,

very cutting things.

# Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand

# I seen a man I said, howdy, friend, I guess there's just us two

# He screamed and down the road he flew

# Thought I was a Communist... #

You have something to say,

but you just throw it out there and keep moving.

It's a very profound thing that he just said,

but he's moved on to the next thing.

And it's up to you to rewind the tape to listen to what he said

over and over again.

# I got into the driver's seat

# And I drove down 42nd Street

# In my Cadillac

# Good car to drive after a war... #

You're not intrigued by the flutter of his melisma, in a way.

You're intrigued by the unfurling flower of his lyrics.

In a way, he almost sounds like he's from Oklahoma in his delivery.

It's very American.

And it's, er... It's precious, in a way.

It's precious to me.

When I was in my teens and listening to a lot of Bob Dylan,

I tried to write a poem about how he made me feel.

And I said his voice reminded me of bark, of sand and corduroy.

And all of those are, like, rough things.

-Yeah.

-And then there's the beauty of the way it all sounds, you know.

The flow of the language and the alliteration,

and the rhythms that he...

..that he taps into.

-Yeah.

-So it's not just about, like, an image,

but it's the way you tell the story as well.

In his shape-shifting career,

Dylan brought the art of poetry to the talking voice.

As much as he was concerned with truth,

he could also be equally enigmatic.

# Early one mornin' the sun was shinin'

# She was lyin' in bed

# Wondering if she'd changed at all

# If her hair was still red

# Her folks, they sit their lives together... #

So, if you think about Billie Holiday

and the way that she hits pitch and swoops on one note,

you notice it in Dylan a lot.

He'll take something and he'll go, "Aaah!" on it. "Aaah!"

And that swoo-oop thing there - that you find in Billie Holiday.

# Tangled up in blue... #

I think Tangled Up In Blue is a really good example of it.

It's almost like singing conversation. So, suddenly,

you find the place to put your pitch and say what you want to say.

# But I used a little too much force

# They drove that car as far as they could

# Abandoned it out west... #

These things are statements that are important,

because it makes them seem so, because you're talk-singing them.

The things all sit together.

They all kind of bind together in a cluster.

And they reinforce the message that, what I speak is the truth.

What I speak is the truth because I'm not dressing it,

I'm not refining it, I'm not putting some beautiful wig and Mozart on it.

I'm just giving it to you from my heart, my naked heart,

and that's it.

Monsieur Cohen? Onze heures.

Temps de vous lever.

Merci.

A lady journalist in Winnipeg once described him as having

"the stoop of an aged crop picker

"and the face of a curious little boy".

# Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

# You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her

# And you know that she's half-crazy... #

Leonard Cohen began as a poet.

I think music was an afterthought with him.

I first came to his music from his novel Beautiful Losers.

And, in fact, Lou Reed once told me that it was one of his favourite

books, so there is a kind of continuum there.

As a singer, he's very simple.

And actually, as a lyricist, his imagery is pretty simple.

He's not, er...

as abstruse a poet perhaps as some.

He's very of the common mind, of the common touch.

Dylan came to poetry via the world of folk music, but for Cohen,

it was the other way around.

At the age of 32, he moved to New York,

to pursue a career on the folk scene.

There, he would have an epiphany.

I remember saying to my lawyer...

In a state of panic, I said,

"I don't know what I'm doing here, I can't sing."

And he said, "None of you guys can sing.

"When I wanna hear singers, I go to the Metropolitan Opera."

And I think that's more or less the position I had anyways.

I never thought we were singers.

I certainly never had any...

..musical standard to, er...

..tyrannise me.

I thought that it was something to do with the truth.

That if you told your story, that's what, er...

That's what...the song was about.

# It's true that all the men you knew

# Were dealers who said they were through with dealing

# Every time you gave them shelter

# I know that kind of man

# It's hard to hold the hand of anyone

# Who is reaching for the sky just to surrender... #

Leonard Cohen, a singer of song.

The most important thing here

is the words. The poetry.

# And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind

# You'll find he did not leave you very much

# Not even laughter... #

It makes me lean in and listen.

# Like any dealer he was watching

# For the card that is so high and wild

# He'll never need to deal another

# He was just some Joseph looking for a manger

# He was just some Joseph looking for a manger... #

You always heard every word.

There was never any kind of breath issues, you know.

Or, you know, he never over-extended himself.

-Yeah.

-He always managed to kind of present this sort of...

I'm not going to say it's a mask, but it's kind of a...

..a mist before him that obscured his true self.

# I told you when I came I was a stranger... #

In terms of this mystery and in terms of this construct,

-it's a cathedral. You know?

-Mm-hm.

And the voice is whoever did, you know, the gargoyles!

# I said to Hank Williams

# How lonely does it get?

# Hank Williams hasn't answered yet

# But I hear him coughing all night long

# A hundred floors above me

# In the Tower of Song... #

When Leonard Cohen sings his own songs,

you get this beautiful sense of intimacy, of, er...

It's very sensual.

It's very, again, very plain-spoken.

And there's a lovely, again, sense of flow, er...

It's not that hard-driving way that Bob Dylan does.

-Mm-hm.

-It's a little more melancholy.

-Yes. Mm-hm.

-Yeah, and there's a little more sense of finesse.

# I was born like this, I had no choice

# I was born with the gift of a golden voice

# And 27 angels from the Great Beyond... #

I just fell in love with him, with his whole world,

with the world that he sang about, with the sound of his guitar,

the sound of his voice.

And, of course, those angels that he always had.

The female singers singing behind him.

THEY HARMONISE

Some people say, "Oh, he couldn't really sing," or,

"He kind of had," you know, "a mediocre voice,"

in the sense that he just didn't have this huge range or whatever.

-Mm-hm.

-But I do feel like the tone that he started with, and certainly,

the one that he ended up with at the end,

which was one of the great basso profundos...

-Mm-hm.

-..of our era, was just...astounding.

Cohen's last album was released in October 2016,

three weeks before he died.

If you listen to him in his early years

and then you come to You Want It Darker, what happens is this,

this trajectory of down is going on.

And when you get to the end,

it's like a dark preacher riding into town.

And it's, erm... Somebody said, what did they call him?

The Velour Fog.

# If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game

# If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame

# If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame

# You want it darker

# We kill the flame. #

It's almost speech-singing at the end.

It's almost...

It's almost Brechtian.

But it's got all this quality of the cantor in it as well.

Then, of course, he's talking about candles, and redemption.

They bind together again in this whole of

Leonard "man who knows everything".

You know, the confessor that you can come to,

the person who knows your soul,

because his soul is right there for you to see,

right there in the voice.

# I'm ready, my Lord. #

In the late '60s, as Dylan and Cohen were taking off,

a new style of rock and roll street jive was also growing in New York.

Lou began as a poet.

He took education from Delmore Schwartz when he was up in Syracuse.

He always loved the printed word.

In a sense, his music sometimes is really simple.

He would always say that if it has more than two chords,

it's getting complicated.

# I don't know

# Just where I'm going... #

What spoke to me about Lou Reed was his bluntness.

He's not a guy who really used a lot of metaphor.

But the other people I was listening to, like, I would say Leonard Cohen,

for example, very metaphoric, beautiful imagery, mysterious.

-Yes.

-Lou was not like that.

Very frontal. He always let you know exactly where he stood.

Some of it was his style, but some of it was that he was

writing about violent things that happened in New York City.

Real things that happened in the street,

-and also writing of his time.

-Yeah.

# Paralysed by hatred and a piss-ugly soul

# If he murdered his father he thought he'd become whole... #

So, when I listened to Woody Guthrie and I was daydreaming

and fantasising about being on a freight train, like,

getting out of New York, it was a fantasy I had.

So that was kind of what I would listen to to fuel those fantasies.

But Lou Reed was about reality.

# In the gay bars in the back of the bar

# He consummated hatred on a cold sawdust floor

# While the jukebox played backbeats, he sniffed coke off a jar

# While they danced to a rock minuet... #

And as his music progressed toward the end of his life,

it was pretty much like chords, and he would be talking his music.

# It must be nice

# To disappear

# To have a vanishing act

# To always be looking forward

# And never looking back... #

Lou Reed's voice was so distinctive.

It was so cool and so dry.

That made his presentation even stronger, because he never shouted.

He was edgy but he never yelled.

He wasn't like some of these other punk rockers who were always, like,

screaming into the microphone

or using distortion to get their point across.

Lou was always understated, dry, cool, and straight.

He had no vibrato in his voice.

Sometimes he wasn't even really singing.

He wasn't projecting.

It was just a straight, cool, dry voice.

# How nice it is to disappear

# Float into a mist

# With a young lady on your arm

# Looking for a kiss. #

New York is the thing that seduced me

New York is the thing that formed me

New York is the thing that deformed me

New York is the thing that perverted me

New York is the thing that converted me

And New York's the thing I love, too.

The first time I played with Patti was at a poetry reading,

over at St Marks on East Tenth Street,

46 amazing years ago.

All I did as a guitar player,

and in those days I was a pretty simplistic guitar player,

I haven't moved further from that,

I would just kind of listen to her breathe.

To follow when her delivery would slow, and then it would speed up,

and it would rise in intensity.

# He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny

# The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees

# Started crashing his head against the locker... #

So we became more into our improvisations.

It became a way to negotiate a song.

# When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by

# Horses, horses, horses, horses

# Coming in in all directions

# White shining, silver studs with their nose... #

And as it turned out,

what we would do would be to segue into a song

as the poetry reached its emotional peak.

# Do you know how to pony like Bony Maroney?

# Do you know how to twist? Well, it goes like this

# It goes like this

# Baby, mash potato, do the alligator, do the alligator... #

There's a tradition of the talking singer.

Do you... Do you consider yourself one of those?

I do.

# If you want me

# You can find me

# Left of centre

# Off of the strip... #

In the '80s, Suzanne Vega emerged from Greenwich Village

with a cool take on the poetic voice.

# If you want me

# You can find me

# Left of centre

# Off of the strip

# In the outskirts

# In the fringes

# In the corner

# Out of the grip... #

There's a kind of history of the talking singer.

And you can hear it in some of the work of, like, Bertolt Brecht,

who had the great Lotte Lenya singing.

I happen to know for a fact that Lou Reed was influenced by

Bertolt Brecht and Lotte Lenya,

and she had one of those crazy voices.

High and weird.

And, again, very plain-spoken.

# Show us the way to the next whisky bar

# Oh, don't ask why

# Oh, don't ask why

# We must find the next pretty boy for you

# If we don't find a nice, pretty boy

# I tell you we must die

# I tell you we must die

# I tell you I tell you

# I tell you we must die. #

One of the first songs I wrote back in the '80s

that became really popular was a song called Tom's Diner.

And I used to sing it a cappella.

An a cappella song for me is...

One imagines it could be kind of tricky

because I have this small voice.

But it always worked.

So I used to begin my shows with it.

Singing...

# I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner...

# I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee

# And he fills it only halfway

# And before I even argue

# He is looking out the window at somebody coming in. #

And people would stop drinking and stop talking

and they would turn around and they would watch the show.

Suzanne Vega, especially,

when I worked with her on her first couple of records,

it was very interesting to see her cadences.

How words flow.

How they can become poetic images.

And become...music that talks.

MUSIC: Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega

On the trail of my final New York street poet,

I'm off to a neighbourhood that is very close to my heart -

Harlem.

We are now at St Nick's Pub.

This is where I got my feet, in a way, in terms of singing.

And St Nick's pub was instrumental for me because

the neighbourhood people come here, and pay 3.50 for a beer.

-"Where's the CD at, man?"

-Oh! It's coming, soon, soon, brother.

# I found out on my way to Harlem

# Ellington, you don't live 'round here

# He moved away one day so they say

# Away from Harlem. #

Yeah.

One, two, three, four...

MUSIC: I'm New Here by Gil Scott-Heron

# I did not become someone different

# That I did not want to be... #

Gil Scott-Heron combined a political voice with a poet's skill.

His spoken word was on the money for the times,

like a CNN for the streets of Harlem.

# No matter how far you've gone

# You can always turn around... #

He had a special gift,

his voice managed to reach back to the blues and forward to hip-hop.

The revolution will not be televised.

This is the original recording

of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Gil Scott-Heron, just a voice and a couple of congas.

# You will not be able to stay home, brother

# You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out

# You will not be able to lose yourself on scag

# And skip out for beer during commercials

# Because the revolution will not be televised

# The revolution will not be televised

# The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox

# In four parts without... #

Gil Scott-Heron was at the cutting edge of

an African-American revolutionary consciousness

that took a hold over poetry, art, music,

and Black Power politics in the late 1960s.

Is that Gregory Porter?

Yeah, brother Brian Jackson.

-How are you, brother?

-I'm great, man.

-Good to see you.

-All right, yeah.

Thanks for having me.

For Gil Scott-Heron and his long-term musical partner,

Brian Jackson, Harlem was where it was at.

Harlem was the repository of African-American knowledge.

Gil saw himself as someone who could verbalise those traditions.

And that was called the griot.

A griot is someone who can take those cultural perspectives

and relate them to what is going on now.

# Looking for a way... #

Can you tell me about the timbre and tone of Gil Scott's voice?

One of the things that I think was...

..was so hypnotic, or compelling about Gil's tone,

his rich baritone, was that it was kind of soothing, you know?

Which was really important to someone who might be giving you

some news that might be a little hard to swallow.

Gil Scott-Heron was raised by his grandmother in Kentucky.

And grew up hearing a lot of blues music in the house.

It really set the bar for him

in terms of truth telling in conversation.

# See that black boy over there, runnin' scared

# His ol' man's in a bottle

# He done quit his 9 to 5

# He drink full time

# So now he's livin' in the bottle... #

There's something unique to the way black Americans put trauma

into their popular music.

This is the sound of people who've experienced a great deal of loss,

a great deal of pain, a great deal of violence,

and it keeps occurring through Gil Scott-Heron

all the way through to Kendrick Lamar.

Originally, Winter In America was an album that we wanted to do

as a musical novel.

And it was about

a vet who had come back from the war.

And some of the trials and tribulations

that he had experienced. But it was songs about us, really -

it was songs about our own lives and what we experienced

as young 20-something black men in America.

And what we saw happening to the country,

how it was falling down around our ears.

# They never had a chance to go

# Cos somebody won't know

# Tell them it's winter... #

You kind of saw the handwriting on the wall.

# Nothing goes in the winter in America... #

Gil Scott-Heron, first of all, his music hit us before he did.

Obviously the song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,

a couple of other songs, as well, those were like

what we would call hood favourites.

# ..something wrong

# Hate in your heart, it's winter

# I can see you like winter in America... #

It was beyond anything that we were getting as young people.

This was early rap, you could even say.

People on the street corner spitting poetry

about their socio-political condition at the time.

# When it come to making music and, sure enough, making news

# People who just don't make sense and people making do

# Seems a mass of contradictions, pulling different ways

# Between the folks who come and go, and ones who've got to stay

# It's a massive irony for all the world to see

# It's the nation's capital, it's Washington DC. #

Heron became known as the godfather of hip-hop.

But the man himself was ambivalent.

"I don't know if I can take the blame for rap music," he quipped.

MUSIC: The Message by Grandmaster Flash

Hip-hop began as a home-brew party culture, based around DJing,

break dancing, graffiti writing, and MCing.

Rap was new technique of talk singing, based on wordplay,

candour, and flow.

# It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder

# How I keep from going under... #

The first cut of political records are Hard Times by Run DMC.

And then, you know, The Message.

Most of the time until The Message it was, like, an album cut.

Melle Mel put out a record called The Message.

"Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage."

# No, they just don't care

# I can't take the smell, can't take the noise

# Got no money to move out

# I guess I got no choice

# Rats in the front room, roaches in the back

# Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat

# I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far

# Cos a man with a tow-truck repossessed my car

# Don't push me cos I'm close to the edge

# I'm trying not to lose my head, ah huh-huh-huh... #

That hit us like a bolt of lightning.

It energised us.

Because that was the first time we really heard, in our language,

somebody describing our socio-political condition.

The Message was released in 1982,

but it wouldn't be until the late '80s that rap's protest voice

would be truly crystallised.

# 1989

-# The number, another summer

-Get down

# Sound of the funky drummer

# Music hittin' your heart, cos I know you got soul

# Brothers and sisters

# Listen if you're missin' y'all

-# Swingin' while I'm singin'

-Hey!

# Givin' whatcha gettin'

# Knowin' what I know and

# While the black bands sweatin'

-# And the rhythm rhymes

-Rollin'

# Got to give us what we want... #

Public Enemy came along

and they really made it their entire reason for being.

# We've got to fight the powers that be

# Fight the power... #

I guess it's Chuck who drew that incredible logo.

The combination of the logo and then the lyrics.

There was a visual component to it that said, you know,

"This is what we're about philosophically."

The entire visual spectacle that they presented

was war about politics,

war about social commentary, war about battling white supremacy,

war about a kind of black nationalism.

It was a number of stances.

It wasn't just making a record.

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da police

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da beast

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da police

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da beast... #

This is the trick to MCing -

believability, it's everything.

We're probably one of the only art forms

that you have to actually be believed.

Like, it's not about your rhyme, it's not about your talent.

First, are you real? That's the first thing people want...

Are you real?

# Stand clear!

# Don man a-talk

# You can't stand where I stand, you can't walk where I walk

# Watch out!

# We run New York

# Policeman come, we bust him out the park

# I know this for a fact, you don't like how I act

# You claim I'm sellin' crack, but you be doin' that

# I'd rather say, see ya

# Cos I would never be ya

# Be a officer? You WICKED overseer!

# Ya hotshot, wanna get props and be a saviour

# First show a little respect, change your behaviour

# Change your attitude, change your plan

# There could never really be justice on stolen land

# Are you really for peace and equality?

# Or when my car is hooked up, you know you wanna follow me... #

You may go down as a legendary artist,

but the real truth of it is that you yourself know,

to yourself when you go to bed at night, "I sang for freedom.

"I sang for justice."

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da police

# Woop-woop

# That's the sound of da beast... #

Anybody can say anything they want to say about me,

about my music, they can rate me, they cannot buy my music,

but I go to bed at night knowing

that I'm the force for change and good.

Good change. I'm the force for revolutionary thought.

And that puts you to bed at night.

That's... And I'm quite sure Bob Dylan sleeps well.

MUSIC: Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

The idea of keeping it real in the 1990s

wasn't purely just a hip-hop notion.

One rock band emerged whose entire ethos was based

on frontman Kurt Cobain's ability to mirror the inner lives and feelings

of his audience.

-How are you?

-I'm great, man, thanks.

-Good to see you.

-I'm glad to be with you.

-Thank you.

-I always felt like

Nirvana was, like, Generation X blues, man.

The punk rock scene that we all grew up in

was sort of like our generation's folk music.

The songs that we were writing and playing when we were teenagers,

they were really emotional and direct, and political.

There was this honesty and integrity to everything

that we just wanted to be real.

# ..hello, hello

# With the lights out it's less dangerous

# Here we are now, entertain us

# I feel stupid... #

Kurt is one of my favourite singers of all time,

because he had such a beautiful tone in his voice.

It's kind of stuck in his throat, in a way.

# ..my libido

# Yeah... #

When we would record,

you know, he was singing so hard because he felt it,

that you'd get a couple of takes out of him and then you have to

take a break. I think that's one of the reasons why, to this day,

you listen to those records and it still has that same feeling,

because it was for real, you know?

# He's the one

# Who likes all our pretty songs

# And he likes to sing along

# And he likes to shoot his gun

# But he don't know what it means... #

I'm pretty sure that he never had any formal training in singing.

But I don't think he needed it.

-He just had it.

-You don't need it if you ARE at it.

Actually, it's funny, when we were making the record Nevermind,

he started blowing out his voice, so he went to see this vocal coach.

And he comes back from this vocal coach and we said, "How did it go?"

And he said, "Check this out."

And he put this cassette in the cassette player

of the warm-ups this guy was wanting him to do.

And it was, like...

# Mi, mi, mi, mi, mi, mi, mi

# Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy. #

And we sat and we laughed like hell as we listened to it.

And then threw the cassette away.

-Because it was, like, you know...

-I can just see Kurt Cobain doing that.

It didn't really, no. Yeah, no.

In November 1993, Nirvana appeared on MTV Unplugged.

Cobain chose to include songs by artists that had influenced him,

including the blues number Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

The Leadbelly song, that song is, it's a beautiful song, that's dark,

you know? It's about heartbreak and death.

# My girl, my girl

# Where will you go... #

So, when we did the song that night, we'd rehearsed it before,

I don't know if we'd done it live before,

but you could feel it in the room when we were doing it.

# Where the sun don't ever shine... #

And you could hear a pin drop.

So, you could hear every last bubble in Kurt's throat

as we were doing it.

# My girl, my girl

# Don't lie to me

# Tell me where did you sleep last night?

# In the pines, in the pines

# Where the sun don't ever shine

# I would shiver the whole night through... #

And that's when we knew, after we were done with that, we thought,

"OK, that worked."

# ..where will you go

# I'm going where the cold wind blows

# In the pines, in the pines

# Where the sun don't ever shine

# I'd shiver

# The whole night through. #

When Kurt Cobain goes to that place,

it's almost like the screams that you might hear in a horror film.

Straight out of Central Casting.

It's like, you know, we need the scream, the scream, you know?

He almost screams in a chord.

There's more than one note coming out when he goes to that, you know,

that place that he goes. And it's...it's...

It shakes you.

And yet, it's satisfying.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# Up in the morning

# Out on the job

# Work like the devil for my pay... #

Keeping it real, writing about what you know, and where you're from,

these are the key ingredients of the talking voice,

but there's one other thing I've learned

from exploring my favourite truth tellers.

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday,

these are all singers that worked within a set of limitations.

But that didn't inhibit their ability

to express extraordinary emotion.

They proved you don't have to have a perfect voice to be great.

Welcome, everybody.

We are here, Legendary Cyphers, Union Square.

Normally we're here every Friday night from May to November.

As you can see, this is a special Cypher,

we have our guests here from the BBC, my main man right here,

Gregory Porter, you know what I mean?

So we're going to show him what we do.

# Party people, are you ready, ready, ready?

# Party people, are you ready, ready, ready?

# Party people, are you ready, ready?

# Say hell yeah!

# Hell yeah!

# If you lovin' the Cypher then throw your fist up

# If you lovin' the Cypher then throw your fist up

# And if you lovin' the Cypher then throw your fist up

# And say hell yeah!

# Hell yeah... #

To speak in the language of how we speak

makes something, sometimes, more impressionable

than the most flowery and imagistic poetry.

# We do this in the spring, summer and fall

# But we chillin' on that winter tip

# We never been with this

# I'm like a genius but I take it to the Genesis

# I've been to Geneseo in my jeans again

# I sound like...

# I lost my memory like Wolverine and my exile to me is a game

# You ain't seen no game

# Stick it to the programme

# Rip my shirt like I'm Hogan

# And at the worst, I'm more like the Hulk, man

# Sipping on that green juice, now, tell me what you mean... #

I feel like...it's not so much truth telling

in the sense of some intellectual desire to tell truth,

it's people really writing about what they know...

# I'm so official, you woulda thought I worked at Footlocker... #

..and finding the poetry in that experience.

# Got to understand, the way to try and defeat me

# Never that

# Understand the way this got to be

# Shout-out to the people

# Understanding's a starter, it's a slaughter

# Shout-out to the homie Gregory Porter

# You gotta understand, man

# I'm not a sinner

# And by the way, he's a Grammy award-winner...

# Tell 'em how you spitting Nina Simone to boot

# I'm getting tired of seeing my brothers

# Hanging from them strange fruits... #

I noticed in a lot of modern music, the words are very...

..they're very of the moment, and I like that.

Because it preserves the speech patterns of the time,

as, in some ways, the speech patterns of Appalachian English

balladry were transmitted over the seas

and took root in the mountains of North Carolina.

# Take it over

# I hear the humming in the back, he 'bout to take it off...

# Everything you touch is gold

# I'm in love with your soul

# Everything that you're saying is

# Oh-h

# I love yo-o-ou

# Mama always said

# Money lasts forever so I'm better well-bred

# I love you

# So watch, I'll catch the come-up

# As your chief-in-commander that flies over the desert

# Lost souls and minds that reflect something deeper... #

The talking voice,

that voice that places high value on the lyric,

on the words that he or she is trying to communicate.

Make some noise for them.

THEY CHEER

# Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name

# Vilified, crucified, in the human frame

# A million candles burning for the love that never came

You want it darker

# We kill the flame. #