I’ve been seeing tributes to GSH since the news broke last night, but this one stood out to me for some reason. Here’s a taste.
“The fact that drugs took him under – and I don’t mean today, I mean over and over again ¬– makes it worse; makes me angry in a diffuse, perhaps unreasonable way: leads me into thought-rants like if he’d been acknowledged as the national treasure he was, if they (“they”) had given him a fucking MacArthur, then at least he would’ve been one of those enough-money-to-function drug addicts, and he’d be with us still, shadow-version of himself or not….
But none of that even get at his greatness, or at least not fully. The flipside of Gil’s panoramic political worldview was the depth of his self-analysis, the delicacy of his portraiture: for every world-shaking anthem, every “Johannesburg,” there is another song buried deeper in his catalogue, one that charts the quietest, most intimate of blues moments with sublime beauty, raw honesty, unfettered emotion.”
Read the whole thing.
