“The Bottle” by Gil Scott-Heron

Gil Scott-Heron wrote "The Bottle", and he and Brian Jackson put it out on Strata-East in 1974: a hard look at alcohol abuse riding a Caribbean beat you can't sit still to. The people in it aren't abstractions, either. The song follows the drinkers of the Logan Circle neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Scott-Heron plays keyboards, Jackson takes a flute solo that walks off with the whole record, and the two produced it with engineer Jose Williams.

It was the only single taken from its album, and it became an underground cult hit, reaching number 15 on the R&B chart. Critics have called it the best thing on that record, and its success helped land the pair a deal with Arista. Champagne Records reissued it in Britain in the mid-'80s, and hip-hop artists have sampled it again and again.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.