Gil Scott-Heron | "The Bottle"

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"The Bottle" was released in 1974 from the Winter in America album and peaked at #15 R&B, becoming one of Gil Scott Heron's biggest chart hits. This is one of my favorites by him.

Music video

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#137 on Pitchfork's 200 Best Songs of the 1970's

Gil Scott-Heron had one of the most distinctive voices in American music. Better still were his lyrics—cerebral, witty, satirical, caustic, sometimes hilarious, informed by American history and the nuanced black experience within it. Scott-Heron was a poet—he had an MFA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins—but he was also a novelist, and his songs had the feel of indelible short stories. For “The Bottle,” though, he took a nonfiction approach, conducting interviews with alcoholics as background. The song, created with vital collaborator Brian Jackson, was rare for Scott-Heron in that it was danceable, and it was as close as the tandem came to a radio hit, despite the heft of the lyrics. Scott-Heron shows up as a character in the song (“They turn to me/And they ask me Gil/Now don’t you think it’s a crime…”) and then finally, foreshadowing a future that would be bogged down by substance abuse, it ends with his declaration: “Look around on any corner/If you see some brother lookin’ like a goner/It’s gonna be me.” –Michael J. Agovino