Image via Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
Adam Steiner is also new here.
Gil Scott-Heron never sat still. The poet, songwriter, and restless spirit navigated artfully between the ebb and flow of blues, gospel, and jazz, while laying the foundation for the birth of hip-hop and neo-soul. Over nine studio albums released during the ’70s, the Bronx-via-Chicago native and his musical collaborator Brian Jackson, gave us some of the most politically-charged prophecies ever laid to wax. Expanding on the cold facts of the Last Poets, Scott-Heron cut through the bullshit to reveal ugly truths that clashed with America’s warped self-perception.
In these brimstone sermons, Scott-Heron searingly examined individual lives alongside national and global injustices. His commitment to social issues made him a revolutionary agent for change, and in the eyes of the FBI a public enemy – to the point where Melody Maker once labelled him “the most dangerous musician alive.” Half-jokingly, Scott-Heron titled his 1982 album Moving Target; its cover showed him running through a set of crosshairs.
But it was his final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, that remains Scott-Heron’s most personal work, a last will and testament from an original artist incapable of cliche. Since 1994’s Spirits and a performance at the resurrected Woodstock, he had essentially stopped recording. Live appearances were infrequent. His political outspokenness had largely been silenced, partially hampered by his ongoing addiction to crack cocaine. There had been short term prison stints for felony drug possession and parole violations; his world shrunk into a state of hermitude. One of the defining artists of late 20th Century New York had fallen victim to the same day-to-day struggles and uncertainty shared by so many trying to eke out an existence in the five boroughs. He borrowed money and dodged evictions. His primary occupation was survival.
A new beginning was made possible through his longtime fan, Richard Russell. At first, the head of XL Recordings balked at the challenge of even making contact. Here was a musician he had admired from afar for decades, who seemingly had disappeared into the darker edges of life. After discovering that Scott-Heron was in jail, the label boss struck up a slow and patient correspondence. As letters passed back and forth, plans for a collaboration coalesced. Russell offered to visit in person, but was turned away. Scott-Heron had told him: “if you were me, you wouldn’t want to be seen in here.”
Scott-Heron later claimed that Russell coaxed him into making I’m New Here. He even called it Russell’s album (the XL head produced it entirely). But in truth, the album brought out the best in Scott-Heron through its collision of industrial-accented blues and post-trip hop that met the 21st century head-on. The grimy beats seemed to reignite Scott-Heron’s spirit of resilience, and once again encouraged him to meet struggle and injustice with defiance. The silent scream of “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” had become real. “Your Soul And Mine” explained how Gil’s world hinged upon the dilemma of trying to “separate day from night,” finding rare moments of light in a place of retreat and recovery.
I’m New Here is a form of hauntology where the past is still alive and refuses to be forgotten. The dead remain unburied. Restless ghosts persist. Appearing as glitching interludes, these spirits seem to point to a spiritual existence lying beyond this waking life. We see Scott-Heron looking over his shoulder, feeling the aches and regrets of the past. We are swept into sleepless and alienated nights, where daily struggles and little defeats grimly mount. This growing tension swells into a hyper-real and abject state of anxiety. Scott-Heron states: “The thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from.”
“Your Soul And Mine” draws upon one of his earliest poems, “The Vulture.” Here, he finds himself lost in a dream, “standing in the ruins of another black man’s life.” The circling bird of prey flies high above, a harbinger of death, destruction and decay. Scott-Heron presents the black body as a cage within a wider prison of America, a culture born from false visions of liberty, a house already burning down.
Russell’s lean instrumentation and atmospheric production gives the album a claustrophobic intensity. Scott-Heron noted the phrase “spartan” in Russell’s letters, and it became an elemental theme of the album. The bouncing rhythms and warm electric piano lines of the Midnight band and the Amnesia Express are absent. Instead, Russell unleashes a subdued rainy day melancholy that channels Massive Attack, Caretaker and Burial. An emphasis is squarely placed upon Heron’s smoke-ravaged, rasping baritone. We envision the writer sitting solo at the piano, playing dense, persistent, ringing chords. His voice carries the familiar call to wake up, making the listener take notice while reflecting a new fragility.
“Me And The Devil” offers a more conventional take on a hip-hop beat with stepped synth drones and high ringing cymbals. This stands in sharp contrast to the title track’s acoustic guitar, poly-rhythmic handclaps and finger-clicks, or the crashing waves of distortion on “New York Is Killing Me.” This direct approach to percussion echoes Scott-Heron’s 1970 debut, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, Scott-Heron’s first approach to highlighting issues of racial injustice, imbued with a spirit of anger and passion.
By 2010, the track “Running” finds Scott-Heron submerged in a new pessimism, always running, seeking escape. Living within a racist society, he states that black lives have little value: they are already forfeited and sold short at birth. Always running, to get away, towards somewhere better. He seems resigned to a hopeless situation but finds there is no place of greater safety, and if there was: “I would go there and never come out.”
Though the energy of I’m New Here and the support of Richard Russell appeared to creatively revitalize Scott-Heron, he also seemed exhausted by life. A July 2010 New York Times article about a new felony drug possession court case ran with the headline: “A Ravaged Musical Prodigy At a Crossroads With Drugs.” In part, this reflected the struggles of his later years living with HIV, a fact which was only made public after the announcement of his death from pneumonia in May 2011. In this sense, the themes of Gil’s songs “Home Is Where The Hatred Is,” “Ghetto Blues,” and “King Henry IV” (an allusion to the growing AIDS crisis), were reflected in his own life, alongside the continued throes of addiction.
An August 2010 New Yorker profile found Scott-Heron painted into a corner by addiction mere months after the release of I’m New Here. But there was still the album that stood as a proud interlude within a long road of struggle, and The Last Holiday, a long overdue memoir that he was said to be working on (it would be published posthumously in 2012.) Trying to write his way out of the fog, Scott-Heron turned words over and over like flipped records. On the confessional “Where Did The Night Go?” he spoke to a lost time that he could no longer account for.
By keeping his manuscript unfinished, there remained a part of his life over which he still had some control — never having to arrive at the final word. And a part of Scott-Heron remained nostalgic for better, easier times. In the New Yorker piece, he tells the writer Alec Wilkinson to “remember me as I was.” Up until the end, he was living on borrowed time, haunted by memory.
I’m New Here supplies a coda to Gil Scott-Heron’s career, a work loaded with resilience and foreboding. It remains a timeless meditation on love, addiction, mortality and the spirit world. A final chapter of Scott-Heron’s protest music that brought the personal and political into a sharper focus. A fitting and poignant ode to what might have been, but also a powerful affirmation to an indelible artist’s legacy. Fifteen years later, his music and writing still endure, as does the struggle for justice and equality for which he fought and never lost sight of. – Adam Steiner
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