Word: dust
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Scott-Heron and Jackson have a message for everybody from the junkie in "Angel Dust" to he politicians in "Three Miles Down" in their latest encounter with the real world, Secrets. Secrets is part of a chain of messages that began in the early '70s. An earlier Scott-Heron/Jackson album, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, first called attention to the artists who sketched a scenario of the world's last revolution. Scott-Heron, who is also a poet, wrote a book of revolutionary verse prior to the release of his first politicized album, Winter in America. The album...
...water so scarce that for thousands of years peasants of these villages, armed with picks and shovels, have fought one another over rights to the flow of a tiny stream or canal. Summers bring searing heat; the harsh winds of fall and winter spread stinging particles of yellow dust from the Gobi, a desert as empty as Africa's Sahara...
...Most rooms are lit by dim naked light bulbs that dangle by electrical wires from the ceilings. Window casements are broken, cracked and stained. Nothing looks new or even recently painted. There is inadequate ventilation in the hot summer months. Small braziers, fueled by stamped cakes made from coal dust and mud, serve as the only cooking appliances in shared kitchens. Families live in two or, at most, three small rooms, decorated primarily with peeling propaganda posters or the still ubiquitous portraits of Chairmen Mao Tse-tung and Hua Kuo-feng lined up side by side like altar gods...
...kingdom, is also rife with American influence. Racial mixing can produce beautiful results; cultural miscegenation tends toward ludicrous juxtapositions. The snap of bubble gum is heard in the Koran school. Fashionably oversize sunglasses are worn by women in purdah while their denimed daughters in platform shoes kick up the dust in the streets of Istiqlal, the capital. Down in the slums the click of cal abashes and the muezzin's call to prayer compete with an alien rhythm, "with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant, that seemed to say. Chuff, chuff/ do it to me, baby...
...everyman's coffee table is The Herons of the World by James Hancock and Hugh Elliott (Harper & Row; 304 pages; $65). The authors have limited their choice of long-legged wading birds to a single family, the Ardeidae, which comprises some 61 species. The Snowy Egret graces the dust jacket, wearing the plumes, or aigrettes, that caused a heedless millinery trade to slaughter it to the brink of extinction in the early 1900s. But, as Emily Dickinson pointed out, hope is a thing with feathers, and today the protected Snowy has become a common sight-as well...