His words wrestle and fall, lapping over each other, a rhythm and purpose and song. It was neither poetry nor music alone, but both.
He was a social activist, and acutely politically aware.
'You need to have myths,' Oscar once said. 'You need to have people who don't give a shit about caving. And that what I wanted to be - that kinda guy. I always wanted to be with the stand-up dudes.'
And so he was. He wrote about breaking rocks with the chain gang, about conformity, about the poor and the weak. Brother where are you? he sang, looking into eyes of the people who pass by.
'The first time I voted,' he said, 'I voted for me.'
He wrote more than a dozen plays, more than 1000 songs, a dozen albums, and a Broadway musical for Mohammed Ali. He met his heroes (check out those interviews, they're *amazing*).
He was a beautiful, adept performer of his own work, an actor, a social commentator, a playwright and activist. He was not one thing, but several (for a person is never just one thing). He was remixed.
