Review Summary: “If I hadn't been as eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as introspective, as selfish, I wouldn't be me. I wouldn't be who I am.”
Gil Scott-Heron’s 2010 record “I’m New Here” is a brief, but striking account of rehabilitation, self-validation, and return to form. It is a statement of comeback from a man who has spent too long before this battling inner demons and outside vices, struggling with law and substance abuse. In his final years he has found peace, misbalancing sobriety, and new sense of artistic purpose, now rebranding himself as a “new man” and a sort of an up-and-coming artist again. Through the thin film of irony and self-deprecation, shrouded in mildly cryptic lyrics, he also reflects on the less favourable moments of his life and the decisions that have led him to where he was at that moment. But to what extent was this his definitive statement?
After 16 years of remaining largely silent from recording, Scott-Heron now suddenly comes through with a new record. Moreover, this new record features much lesser portion of socio-political commentary, observations, critique, and biting humour Scott-Heron is known for. Seemingly, after the period of self-reflection, the outside impulses compelled Scott-Heron to write poems more personal, less societally and globally critical.
Understandably his focus is now on some form of self-improvement or at the very least self-acknowledgement. There are nearly no moments on the album, where Scott-Heron cannot help but engage in some snarky, sharp commentary, as he has in the past, a crucial aspect of the album reviewers at the time paid a note to.
The eponymous track, mainly layered on paper-thin plucked guitar, sees a spoken word, almost prosaic delivery of a monologue: the centrepiece of the whole collection and a piece most emblematic of the album’s sporadicity and thematic weight. Although the lyrics were originally written by Bill Callahan for the band Smog, Scott-Heron perhaps saw them fitting enough for his situation, repurposed the song for his album, as the lyrics and the eerily intimate immediacy of the barebones instrumental and lo-fi production made it an apt representation of his own context. If taken as a tale told from Scott-Heron’s point of view, he is introducing himself as a newfound good person, as a new man in general, the way an up-and-coming artist might at a debut gig, or someone returning to a place they have long been absent from, or a distant relative might at an awkward family reunion they have previously not been invited. Scott-Heron has been out of public’s general focus or (arguably) interest for over a decade, apart from some unpleasant headlines outlining his arrests. Now he has the freedom to take charge of the narrative, as essentially world’s newest nobody with a voice.
“I did not become someone different/That I did not want to be” sees him reflect that, despite all mistakes and misdemeanour, he is now in a place of peace with himself, saying that he eventually did indeed become someone he wanted to be. “But I’m new here / Will you show me around” is a cheeky remark on the fact that now as a man he wanted to have become, while the phrase itself sounds like an introduction to someone literal. The theme is resounded through the refrain “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / You can always turn around” and its repetitions almost like a mantra, a plea for acceptance and a general advice to those who have made mistakes: all can be repaid and repaired, one can turn themselves around, even close to their deathbed. The sense of humour paired with self-awareness persists over the course of the text: a form of relief from trepidation, as all the worst has already happened, now a new self must be by all metric a better self too. The blame he puts for his being in a place of having to justify his misdeeds are on his upbringing, see the two tracks “On Coming From a Broken Home”, and his grappling with the suffocating business of a famous life in a filthy city, as in “New York is Killing Me”.
However, this is a mild fantasy, where Gil Scott-Heron’s reinvented persona strives to right the wrong of his past, to show the public he is still a capable visionary and satirical confrontational smut poet. The truth is a little twisted in another direction: the arrangements have not been engineered or composed by him, and six out of the ten non-interlude tracks are either covers or have been co-authored. He even had to be convinced to do the record by XL Recordings’ president and producer Richard Russell. Russell, in turn, saw this more as a personal dream than any favour or ideal project for Scott-Heron. Certainly not anything unusual for Russell, who enjoys using his position as a label leader to make some of his dream projects come true, gifting the world records from artists close to death. Just a year after “I’m New Here” he engineered and co-produced another soul and RnB legend’s swan song, Bobby Womack’s “The Bravest Man in the Universe”. Womack, curiously enough, was in much the same situation as Gil Scott-Heron, battling addiction and rehabilitation, on the brink of modern obscurity, having been out of the studio and out of touring for over a decade, dying of cancer and diabetes. This push for giving declining legends one last chance and their fans one last statement is on surface level an admirable one (the potential debate over whether or not it is Richard Russell’s vanity project aside), but it puts into question the proper intentions of Gil Scott-Heron. What are the statements he wished to enlighten, what are the ideas he wished to truly explore, and most importantly what is really Scott-Heron at his most self-reflective and what is Russell orchestrating a narrative because that is what he would have wanted a final Gil Scott-Heron album to be about and sound like.
See, he now rested easy with a sense of ease, having effectively come to terms with his demise through moderate sobriety, although it is unclear and not documented whether or not he viewed making the record necessarily a step further towards this redemption. Several tracks refer to this state. “His eyes half closed revealed his world of nod / A world of lonely men and no love, no god” on ‘The Crutch’, and “. Now a laborious recording process has started, rumoured for a long time and finally happening for almost just as long, as Russell was warned about as well, telling the Guardian in 2020 “People had told me horror stories” and “(…) he knew it was my dream, not his, he would have been equally happy not doing it, but he did.” Among other things uncharacteristic for Scott-Heron and seemingly at odds with the context of this album’s creation is the absolute lack of revolutionary, incendiary critique so synonymous with the artist. It is understandable that somebody at his stage of illness and in his state of mind would want to only write to make amends instead of continuing his gripes with the state of the union. Nevertheless, hearing the “Godfather of Rap” be un-rap-like was unusual.
The record releases in February 2010. A cult ensues. Within a year of its output, a remix album is released to great acclaim, produced by American electronic musician Jamie xx, “We’re New Here”. Ten years after the original album’s release, contemporary jazz drummer and band leader Makaya McCraven releases his own jazz-centred rendition of the album, titled “We’re New Again”. Both reinterpretations have been released on the very same XL Recordings label, the former even directly commissioned by Richard Russell once again. Both adding layers of intimacy previously hidden, even a sense of catharsis that Scott-Heron himself denied the album had.
One could say that all black political art is essentially personal and all to a white audience all black personal art is essentially political. In those terms even most personal and tender self-expressions of the likes of Ai Ogawa, who herself tried to be separated from a stream of black-specific authorship. But black art in general is often relegated to the realms of the political by proxy. For example, Angel Nafis’ “Black Girl Mansion” is a poetry collection centred around provocativeness, self-expression, and black identity. However, it is in its essence not a revolutionary statemen, but a confessional of one’s own experience. Outside of a few references and direct critiques of white patriarchal society, the collection is a personal testament, not a political manifesto. It is easy, however, to perceive such a work through the lens of political provocation, considering the fact that black art has been, again, relegated to the realms of the political by proxy.
“I’m New Here” is not political, but deeply, deeply personal. Its origin in a man who has spent his most productive years as a voice of the revolution and a social visionary creates a contrasting picture. With all the questions put forth above of true authorship and true intent of this album, one may also ask to what extent this exemplifies Gil Scott-Heron the political author. For the purposes of this polemic, ‘political’ shall be defined as “all that concerns itself with power structures, social and cultural issues, matters of historical rights.” Contextually, Scott-Heron was a product of his time: the drug crisis plaguing the black communities in America, as he narrates in “Your Soul and Mine”, telling a tale of the drugs like vultures gnawing on the community. A heavy substance abuser himself, Scott-Heron became addicted to crack cocaine at its absolute heyday in the 1970s, which eventually destroyed his marriage. His regret over destroying the married life is laid out on “Where Did the Night Go”. Matter of fact, Scott-Heron’s abuse resurfaced during touring. In the biography “Pieces of a Man”, Marcus Baram tells the story of how Lost Poets members Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan tried to rescue Scott-Heron from a crack den in Harlem. This marked a beginning of his definitive end, as his state only worsened from then and Gil Scott-Heron passed away in May the following year.
To that end, where does “I’m New Here” the personal statement of trials and tribulations end and “I’m New Here” the project by the fans for the fans start. Gil Scott-Heron’s mild disinterest in creating final legacy album was fuelled by his having said enough as a provocateur and a revolutionary, especially as the final record was mainly an effort of those wanting and pulling final words out of him. The black art aficionado was now lost in what he was criticised for by the general superficial critics at the time of his height. “Alcoholism and drug addiction were both illnesses, but people really only saw the condition and not the illness (…)” Scott-Heron wrote in his autobiography “The Last Memoir”. He was the one speaking truth to power in a poetic yet also clear way. Now he was nowhere near even the power over his own body (Baram’s book notes how he had to be pushed around on a wheelchair on tour ), his themes corroding to purely personal, his say in the creative process purely lyrical to a partial extent, his final statement arranged, orchestrated, and managed by a white fan. Only “Your Soul and Mine” leans back into the topics of ailments of Scott-Heron’s community he so often wrote about. But now, finally, he recognised that the vicious vulture from his metaphor has gripped him too, as it has in a federally orchestrated way gripped the entirety of the black community. In this song, a surprising amount of melodics grip the sparse ambient instrumental backgrounding the drum machine beat mixed to sound and Gil’s own brassy voice. And although ending without a crescendo or any necessarily dramatic note, the final words of “Only promise me a battle / battle for your soul and mine” resound into silence immediately following and holding its weight over the next half a minute. This silence and harrowing distant beat transposes itself into a later song “The Crutch” that stylistically reflects “Your Soul and Mine” and eventually, cathartically does evolve into a form of crescendo, just as muted, distant, impersonal, finally signing the album off with an interlude that encapsulates Gil Scott-Heron’s final and general thoughts. In it he essentially confirms that he regrets barely much, as he “did not become someone different that [he] did not want to be“ (as was previously said in the title track). This album is not necessary for him. He has no reason to say a final word. He has no interest in showing the world his growth, because…
“If I hadn't been as eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as introspective, as selfish, I wouldn't be me. I wouldn't be who I am.”
Disclaimer: Please note that the featured rating is purely obligatory, as I did not want to rate it at all, and this is not a review per se, more an explorative essay of sorts.
Bibliography:
Baram, Marcus. Pieces of a Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014
Nafis, Angel. Black Girl Mansion. Ann Arbor: Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012.
Petrin, Nate, “I’m New Here.“ review of I’m New Here, by Gil Scott-Heron. Pitchfork, February 10, 2010. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13893-im-new-here/
Russell, Richard. “Adele, Keith Flint, Gil Scott-Heron and me: Richard Russell, the XL records Midas.“ interview by Alexis Petridis. The Guardian, March 25 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/25/adele-keith-flint-gil-scott-heron-and-me-richard-russell-the-xl-records-midas
Scott-Heron, Gil. The Last Memoir. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013.
Scott-Heron, Gil. I’m New Here, XL Recordings, 2010.
Smith, Stephen. “The legendary godfather of rap returns,” BBC Newnight, November 16, 2009.
