Pieces of A Man - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

The album has earned a larger legacy based on its containment of the influential proto-rap song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". In a 1998 interview with the Houston Press, Scott-Heron discussed how much of the album was overshadowed by the controversial song and the social-consciousness displayed:

was the only political piece .... Very few people heard 'Save the Children', 'Lady Day and John Coltrane' or 'I Think I Call It Morning'. They just missed the point. The point became one of the 11 pieces. The least inventive one on the album was the one that was the most heralded.... Maybe people were intimidated by the things that we felt were normal to comment on because they were part of our lives.... To ignore part of your life and not speak on it because it might intimidate somebody is not to be very mature. —Gil Scott-Heron

In a review of the album, Nick Dedina of Rhapsody noted the album's influence on modern music forms, stating "Dance and hip-hop have borrowed (or stolen) so much from this album that it's easy to forget how original Scott-Heron's mix of soul, jazz, and pre-rap once was." In 1996, radio station WXPN ranked Pieces of a Man number 100 on its list of The 100 Most Progressive Albums, and in 2005 it was included in Blow Up's list of The 600 Essential Albums. Some of the recordings featured on the album, along with other Gil Scott-Heron compositions, would later be sampled by several rappers and hip hop groups, while the blend of sound and instrumentation featured on Pieces of a Man later inspired many neo-soul artists in the 1990s.