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Gil Scott-Heron

by Graeme Thomson © Sunday Herald

On Running, one of several lacerating notes-to-self that run like barbed wire through I’m New Here, Gil Scott-Heron’s first album for 16 years, America’s great urban poet claims that he’s “not running for my life, because I have to be running for something of more value”. After decades of trying to preach positivity amid pain, poverty and political skullduggery, this is the kind of hard home truth that characterises Scott-Heron’s return from the wilderness. Utterly compelling it may be. Light relief it most assuredly is not.

Scott-Heron has always been a mercurial figure. His records draw lines between Malcolm X, John Coltrane, James Lee Burke and Marvin Gaye; between the Deep South where he was raised and New York’s Harlem, where he moved at the age of 13 and still lives; between highly literate rhetoric and righteous anger. He was one of the first artists to recount ghetto life using the spoken word and a bass-heavy rhythm; rap would certainly not sound the same without him, yet he also lays claim to pioneering work in acid-jazz, jazz-funk and neo-soul.

His upbringing is equally hard to define. As documented on the two deeply moving recitations that bookend I’m New Here, Scott-Heron was the product of a broken home, raised by his grandmother, Lily Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee, after his parents split when he was three. His father, Giles Heron, was a Jamaican footballer who became the first black player to sign for Celtic, spending the 1951-52 season at Parkhead and later turning out for Third Lanark. His mother was a college graduate who worked as a librarian.

From an early age his grandmother encouraged him to learn the piano and to write stories. Always drawn to words, he gained a Masters in writing studies and later lectured; he published his first novel, The Vulture, aged just 19. You can hear it all in his first four records, released between 1970 and 1974, which gave voice to a highly articulate young man, energised by anger, idealism, compassion and a startling feel for the power of language.

Scott-Heron has often been described as the black Bob Dylan, but it seems an unsatisfactory comparison. He shares Dylan’s lyrical skill, but he seeks direct hits rather than glancing blows. With his 1971 masterpiece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – a stunning mixture of jazz, soul, funk and scything social commentary – he created a counter-cultural rallying cry that has since lodged in the mass consciousness.

Throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron dissected Watergate, apartheid, addiction and inner-city violence, all the while playing music that couldn’t help but make you move. Reflections (1981) featured perhaps his last great anthem, the wonderful B Movie, but around the same time his life began to resemble that of the characters in his bleaker songs of ghetto life, such as The Bottle and Home Is Where The Hatred Is. In the mid-1980s he divorced, was dropped by his record label and succumbed to cocaine and crack addiction, documented in gut-wrenching detail on The Other Side Parts 1-3 on 1994’s Spirits, his last album.

In the 2000s he reached rock bottom, bouncing between jail and detox. It was at the notorious Rikers Island facility in 2006 that Richard Russell of XL Recordings contacted Scott-Heron and proposed making a new album. Following his release, work began in January 2008. The result is I’m New Here.

At first it seems a slight affair for such a momentous return. Whatever Scott-Heron has been doing for the past 16 years, he has not, it seems, been writing many songs. There are three covers on the album, while producer, arranger and all-round amanuensis Russell wrote the music for three further tracks. The entire album clocks in at under 30 minutes, even accounting for the many interludes, snatched from studio conversations, woven between the songs.

Notably absent are the jazz, funk and soul stylings of his landmark albums, replaced by sparse electronic backing tracks which take their cues from dubstep: raw, lo-fi and dark as a ditch. The dazzling wordplay and political proselytising has also been reined in; there is certainly no hint of post-Obama euphoria on I’m New Here. Instead, Scott-Heron’s poetry is as pared down and bone-hard as the music, though he can still turn an electric phrase when he wants to, moving from the haunting – “Long ago the clock washed midnight away” – to the characteristically pithy: “Hell, if you’re weak, you’re gone!”

The closest he gets to his trademark social commentary is Your Soul And Mine, a song about “ghetto vultures” which begins “in the ruins of another black man’s life”, and then proceeds to get really bleak. Elsewhere, he favours intense self-examination, at 60 years old opting for a series of succinct confessionals which are harrowing but remarkably effective. Told over a thudding electro-heartbeat, the smudged regrets of Where Did The Night Go are almost too much to bear, while Me And The Devil takes Robert Johnson’s primal blues and bends them into a synthetic hell hound clawing at his heels. The title track is an unlikely cover, written by Bill Callahan of US underground band Smog, and its urgent acoustic strum and deep rumbling vocal owes far more to Leonard Cohen than Scott-Heron’s previous side-kick Brian Jackson.

The highlight is New York Is Killing Me, a crackling, polyrhythmic riot of hand claps, heavy beats, lowering synths and a powerful female chorus. It’s an urban blues number in which Scott-Heron claims “city living isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”, yearning, as he does many times on this record, to be back in Jackson, Tennessee. He spends a lot of time looking back in that direction, kicking over the rubble of his immediate past to reclaim his blood ties, in particular the guiding light of Lily Scott, “who raised everyone she touched just a little bit higher”. Indeed, the few positives evident on I’m New Here relate to the women who have “guided his life”. Where Lady’s Song on Spirits was a schmaltzy Barry White-style smooch, here he cuts deeper in paying tribute to his female role models.

Still, it’s far from easy-going. Any trace of joy has been almost entirely excised from Scott-Heron’s work. His ravaged voice – somewhere between gasp and rasp – and diminished physical energy are painfully evident, but the album’s great trick is to make something extraordinary from what’s left; to unearth a terrible kind of beauty from its creator’s limitations.

I’m New Here is not the summation of Scott-Heron’s career. It does not tie up the loose ends of his talent, nor is it assured enough to count as a rebirth. It’s not a singer’s album, nor a musician’s album. It’s barely even a poet’s album. It is, however, a survivor’s album, and one that doesn’t shirk from laying bare the cost of making it through a world of darkness. The merciless gaze Scott-Heron previously turned on the soul of America and society’s manifold ills has now been aimed squarely at himself and his own shortcomings. It’s tough, spare, relentless – and as extraordinary in its own way as anything he has ever done.

photos Mischa Richter/XL Recordings