Gil Scott-Heron, arguably the most influential poet to come out of America in the last fifty years, the master chronicler of American mistrust and arch social provocateur, has released his first album since 1996’s Spirits and twenty-eight years after his last release for Arista Records, Moving Targets. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap has emerged from this extended hiatus, part spent incarcerated on Riker’s Island for cocaine possession, with the searingly brilliant I’m New Here and, if he has taken a step away from the acid-jazz and soul that made him famous a quarter of a century ago, placing him among yet detached from the pantheon of great soul revolutionaries of the era, including Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, a new rawness acquired with age makes this album a match for anything that he released at his zenith.
It is an album so sparse, so rare and desolate, set against the simplest electronic and acoustic canvas, that it exploits every nuance and shade of Scott-Heron’s ravaged vocals to the most magnificent, hypnotic effect. Me and the Devil is a cover of Robert Johnson’s blues classic remolded with a dark electronic undercurrent; Bobby Bland’s ambiguous blues appeal, I’ll Take Care of You, is rendered dense with hope and heartache, positively bending under the weight of love’s ambition, impelled by a steady bass drum and lingering beautifully over measured piano chords; Where Did the Night Go is a short, sharp burst of ambient darkness tracing the singer’s unresolved relationship with his own existence and ideologies; while The Crutch mines the similar territory with stripped back and powerful effect. Throughout Scott-Heron displays the most captivating, free-flowing and soulful curiosity and the effect is mesmeric.
I’m New Here is an album that advances Scott-Heron’s reputation as an outstanding poet but one that simultaneously strips away and demystifies all that made him such a powerful revolutionary force in the first place. No one more than the man himself is as acutely aware that his legacy means little across the time that has elapsed and the changes that have occurred in his absence and from this modest, introspective foundation a new, more meditative artist has emerged. It is a hugely charismatic album, soaked in a lifetime’s experience and wisdom; it is bold, beguiling and triumphantly fashioned. I’m New Here might just come to be the album that defines this mighty artist’s career.
Photograph: Terrence Jennings /Retna Ltd./Corbis
