In his 62 years, Gil Scott-Heron was multifarious. At 13, he was a trailblazer, one of three students to desegregate Tigrett Junior High School in Jackson, Tennessee. At 21, Heron—born in 1949—became a published author, releasing a novel, The Vulture, and a poetry collection in 1970. Later that year, Heron began the recording career for which he’s best known, adapting the latter work into a live album entitled Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Jazz titan Ron Carter played bass.

The release established Heron as a dynamic force in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement and included two tracks that would be associated with him for the rest of his life. While “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” left an indelible mark on the evolution of contemporary music, “Whitey on the Moon”—Heron’s biting send-up of NASA’s inaugural lunar landing—reveals his most overlooked prowess: prophecy.

Today, oligarchs race to space in an egomaniacal sprint (healthily aided by government subsidies and tax breaks), all while the social safety net grows tattier by the hour. “Whitey on the Moon” is prescient and more relevant than ever:

A rat done bit my sister Nell / With whitey on the moon / Her face and her arms began to swell / And whitey’s on the moon / I can’t pay no doctor bills / but whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still / While whitey’s on the moon

After describing an untenable rise in taxes, rent, utilities and groceries, Heron seizes on the culprit with an emphatic “Hmm!” that packs a comedic and damning punch that three letters shouldn’t be capable of:

Was all that money I made last year / For whitey on the moon? / How come I ain’t got no money here? Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon

Heron’s ability to identify and excoriate the enemies of the American people only grew sharper in the years that followed. Unfortunately, given the morbid and morally bankrupt essence of so many of his subjects, so too did his power to predict the shape of the world in which we find ourselves today.

Heron’s third album—done with long-time collaborator Brian Jackson—was 1974’s Winter in America. It paired his vatic political commentary with a more polished musical vehicle. On the title track, a kind of funeral march featuring Jackson's extraordinary reed work, Heron paints a haunting picture of democracy in decline, summoning broken promises and lost hope.

While that song deserves an entire essay of its own, it’s the album’s penultimate entry, one in which Heron returns to the bare bones style of his debut, that captures our present moment with alarming accuracy.

“H2O Gate Blues” was penned, as the title suggests, in the aftermath of the scandal from which it got its name—the suffix that would lend its name to so many subsequent scandals. And while the title might indicate a narrow scope in the spirit of “Whitey on the Moon,” Heron sets his sights on too many targets to count across the track’s eight minutes and fourteen seconds.

After an irreverent introduction on the metaphorical significance of primary colors, the poet diagnoses the civic detritus of his day in words that evoke the current ailments facing our country:

Lemme see if I can dial this number… / Click! Whirr ...Click! / "I'm sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative ...Click! Inoperative!" / Just how blind will America be? / The world is on the edge of its seat / Defeat on the horizon. Very surprisin' / That we all could see the plot and still could not

The inability of our elected officials to be the stewards of anything that even remotely resembles operative government is one thing; as of this writing, the government shutdown has just hit the month-long mark of 31 days. Going further still, our collective complicity in the rhetorical gymnastics each side of the aisle deploys to point the finger at the other is a failure of equal measure.

Just how blind, America?

Heron’s characterization of US foreign policy, too, rings as true today as it did half a century ago:

America! / The international Jekyll and Hyde / The land of a thousand disguises / Sneaks up on you but rarely surprises

When one tries to make sense of the current government’s approach to diplomacy, the schizo-schism between its statements and subsequent actions is emblematic of nothing if not a strange case. And it is one invariably ending in murder and death.

While one must be wary of intellectually lazy comparisons of our present democratic crisis to that of Nazi Germany, it is difficult to deny that the discourse is full of them. Like so much else, though, that’s nothing new either:

How long will the citizens sit and wait? / It's looking like Europe in '38 / Did they move to stop Hitler before it was too late?

And while this charged query mirrors those made all over the internet today, unlike the members of the media and Congress who shout these shallow missives from their massive platforms, Heron adds a depth to his fifty-year-old question that is too often absent from the modern versions.

His is a litany of bureaucratic betrayal that we’ve yet to explore, address or amend:

How long, America, before the consequences of / Keeping the school systems segregated / Allowing the press to be intimidated / Watching the price of everything soar / And hearing complaints 'cause the rich want more? / It seems that Macbeth, and not his lady, went mad / We've let him eliminate the whole middle class / The dollar's the only thing we can't inflate / While the poor go on without a new minimum wage

Finally, after offering up a catalogue of unprosecuted crimes committed by all three branches of the government in the run-up to Watergate, Heron begins the number’s closing movement with a plea for a kind of concerted reflection, one we’d do well to consider now:

We leave America to ponder / The image of justice from its new wave of leaders

He proceeds to list the members of that then new wave: Frank Rizzo, Richard Daley, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Ronald Reagan. While some of these names might be unknown to listeners today, their contemporary iterations still rule the roost. Wallace and Thurmond—vocal segregationists of yesteryear—would welcome the xenophobic machinations of Steven Miller. And Trump, the hero to the right the same way Reagan was forty years ago, made his name like his presidential forbear: as a star of the screen. If Gil Scott-Heron were still around today, he’d be a spry 76. Younger than our last two heads of state. But in his absence—Heron passed away in 2011—all we can do is turn to the legacy of his musical prophecies and find succor in his ever relevant diagnoses of American life. Each time we pull the curtain closed on a ballot box, remember that last verse of “H20 Gate Blues”:

Four more years, / Four more years, / Four more years, / Four more years of THAT?