Gil Scott Heron – I’m New Here (XL)
4/5
By: Tim Dellow
Pieces of A Man, Gil’s 1971 sophomore album, should be an essential part of anyone who really cares about music’s life. Crystallising his personally political street-rhymes with a soulful, jazz tinged production and gumption that commands attention through the ages; testified by those who hold him up as the (god)father of modern rap and certainly showing a lineage through Public Enemy to Kanye West who turned on a new generation to Gil through sampling perhaps his greatest song ‘Home Is Where The Hatred Is’. This is a path that producer and svengali Richard Russell is at pains to draw through completing the circle by sampling Kanye’s own ‘Flashing Lights’ on both the opening (and closing) track(s) of this new album.
However, like with Johnny Cash before him, there is a desire to whitewash and sanctify the artist towards latter stage of his career. This is a man made up of many faults. Passing on an anti-drugs and pro-black message through the ages to Public Enemy and Mos Def was a clear positive, but also in this transference was a hefty dollop of homophobia from debut album’s ‘The Subject Was Faggots’. Equally, from criticising their destruction of potentially great young black men, he completed his own circle by succumbing to drug abuse and the lengthy prison stays that came with them.
Like Rick Rubin before him, label head and producer Richard Russell has offered a hand to a man who testifies on this new album that “if I hadn’t been as eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as disrespectful, as selfish, I wouldn’t be me.” This persistent (and largely justified) un-repentance is tempered, as on his best records, with personal anecdotes that reaffirm the family line in a similar fashion to Jay Z’s The Black Album opening with ‘On Coming From a Broken Home’, in which he harks back to his earliest years. At his best when constructing these yarns, weaving and twisting lyrics through a refined metre and sense of rhythm that clarifies exactly why he is a genius. However, largely this is present on the stunning aforementioned opener, ‘Your Soul and Mine’ and ‘New York Is Killing Me’ – augmenting these tales with dubstep tinged blues; clicks and clunks provided by Russell turning it into something uniquely brilliant and refreshing.
However, as on those famed American Recordings, the minimal new (and up there with his best) material is augmented with multiple cover versions. The three most solid “songs” on the album are all covers, notably the title track ‘I’m New Here’, taken from Smog’s underloved A River Ain’t Too Much To Love album and a throat tearing take on Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and The Devil’. Both are sublime choices – again positioning both historically within the pantheon of great black artists on the latter and with a modern day egotist on the former, and both are conveyed theatrically and with style by Gil.
With a few nuggets of wisdom in the brief skits that pepper the record, you’re left with a sense of epitaph to this album – both expanding on his legend and, as with Edison’s original intentions for recorded sound, leaving messages from the past for future generations to learn from, in this case for better and worse, from all of the compounds that make up the pieces of this unique man.
Artists in this article: Gil Scott-Heron
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment