Whereas much of the artist's earlier albums contained backup jazz-funk music from Brian Jackson, many of these tracks, which address contemporary issues such as Watergate, the pardon of Richard Nixon and the Attica Prison riot, are either live recordings or studio-recorded songs with little more than sparse drum backing or occasional instrumentation.

"Jose Campos Torres" is about Jose Campos Torres, a U.S. Army veteran who was arrested and then murdered and tossed into a bayou by two police officers in Houston in 1978, spurring the Moody Park Riot.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Heron's poetry on this album is his use of chemical formulas to refer to certain people and events.

The original vinyl release of the album contained a 24-page booklet featuring transcriptions of 22 Gil Scott-Heron compositions.

In 2011, the Chicago Tribune wrote that, "in the lineage of the Last Poets and Oscar Brown Jr., these proto-raps embody Scott-Heron's maxim that 'there are at least 500 shades of the blues.