Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here (2010)

hadn't dawned on me how specifically mezzanine some of this lp is, cf the crutch. i'm not mad on the production but i love the record nonetheless.

hadn't dawned on me how specifically mezzanine some of this lp is

lets cut to the chase, is it better than grace jones comeback album, hurrican, that dug into the moody dark trip hop groove ?
from the clips up there, i would say this could be a strong contender ...

The first of these was Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, a kind of oral blog from the projects, which included a stirring call to action entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a phrase which has since entered the language.

dude was podcastin before anyone

aforementioned crutch song also sounds a little like any scene in 24 when a helicopter takes off/lands

u_u at the "oral blog" line

Why aren't we all talking about this? It's streaming here http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/feb/02/gil-scott-heron-new-here and can be *found* in the usual places.

I'm waiting to buy it tbh.

the usual places

As a nod to the past, we also have a whole extra disc full of Gil performing versions of some of his classic songs on piano, which might serve to lead people to his existing body of work.

from an interview with his producer here

interestingly he mentions sitting down w/gil and playing him some smog and some other things; i hadn't thought of it as such a kinda rubin-esque curatorial thing.

His late period Scott Walker album. Pretty amazing, hope we can get a couple more LPs before he goes.

This is great - along with all the other things people have mentioned, reminds me a little of Alan Vega, beat poetry over looming industrial throb. Couldn't be anyone else but GSH in the end, though.

Mark: It's not comparable. It's more like his Johnny Cash: American III. But even then nowhere near close.

I mean it sounds more like Gonja Sufi or a King Midas Sound demo than Hurricane. It's very, very good. Out on its own.

listened to this yesterday. weird as hell. I like it.

The title track is very beautiful.

this sounds pretty good. think the whatchamacallits of time have added a quality to his singing voice, kinda like dylan on World Gone Wrong or that callous dude who said he preferred john prine post-throat cancer.

does anyone find that the interludes are kind of annoying not in themselves but in that they sort of ham up the American Recordings "old hero not only still alive but making decent stuff" impression. would like to hear the songs make their own context.

his father was the first black person to play for Celtic F.C. Also, Pope John Paul, David Icke, and Albert Camus were all soccer goalkeepers.

themoreyouknow.jpg

you forgot julio iglesias and nabokov even though gil heron wasn't a goalie

this record good and I can imagine it getting better

does every song sound on this album sound like the "the wire" theme or just 'me and the devil'?

hahaha fantastic

"'I was less the keeper of a goal than the keeper of a secret,' wrote Nabokov, who was to bring the notion of the dodgy guardian into still higher relief with his most famous book."

so wait has it not been like decades since this dude put out an album?

16 years, bub

"new york is killing me" is my jam, but otherwise i'm not crazy about this album just yet. i thought about deleting it but who knows when i'll be in the mood for old man spoken word over weird loopy beats, and i haven't got any other albums that satisfy that fix i don't think.

does every song sound on this album sound like the "the wire" theme or just 'me and the devil'?

― united arab amirites (samosa gibreel), Thursday, February 11, 2010 10:22 PM (1 hour ago)

dude right?

me and the devil is a robert johnson cover, isn't it?

yes

does every song sound on this album sound like the "the wire" theme or just 'me and the devil'?

― united arab amirites (samosa gibreel), Thursday, February 11, 2010 10:22 PM (1 hour ago)

dude right?

― vag gangsta (k3vin k.), Thursday, February 11, 2010 11:27 PM (13 minutes ago)

Yeah I pretty much immediately told my Wire-fanatic-friend about this album as soon as I heard it. It just seemed so appropriate...

funny new york is killing me reminded me of the sopranos theme. kind of treated gospel vox and all

Jeez this is great, almost unbelievably so. This is what the Massive Attack album should have sounded like.

the backing gospel vocals on ny is killing me are a bit pastichey.

but then this whole album is a bit calculated production wise isnt it? good though.

wasn't sure about the production at first but now think it's fairly understated and gil really comes through like gil of old but sounding like his dentures don't really fit

been listening to it for the past three days solid and love it

to me, this sounds too plainly like a producer's project that was sort of built around scott-heron. it seems to have more of an "agenda" than a comfortable sonic identity.

"Me and the Devil" is a good song. I'd lay a bet it will end up the title tune to some gritty crime drama.

Really got into this around halfway thru - pretty sure that IS a sneaky Portishead 'Machine Gun' sample on 'Where Did The Night Go'. hard not to think of 'New York Is Killing Me' as the highlight.

i find the ad for this on spotify (gs-h reading a piece about how to interact with a new record, in isolation, taking it home, listening to it while doing nothing else) interesting / infuriating

it's propaganda with a grain of truth

Beautiful and sad profile in the NYer which is unfortunately not available online.

Alec Wilkinson's profile on Los Tigres del Norte in NYer is hands-down one of the best music pieces of the year. looking forward to this profile (and the day when he supplants SFJ over there).

man that New Yorker piece depressed the hell out of me. beautifully done yeah but I am really bummed to hear that GSH is still on the pipe. cosign on the Los Tigres piece, though, that was completely awesome.

Which issue was that in? Just looked for it on the newsstand and doesn't look like it's in there?

it's from two weeks back with a woman dropping her iphone into a pool cover. can't recommend that piece enough.

this album is astonishing. right now i'm thinking this is the best full-length disc i've heard all year.

Just read the New Yorker piece a few days ago. It's so carefully structured, with that hint of the propane torch at the beginning leading to the heart of the piece.

My favorite GS-H song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDC_ZM48S0Y

is the new yorker piece online at all?

it's not. there's an abstract of it at the site but the whole piece is subscription-only. eazy way otm about the development of it - the first line about the propane torch and you go "no...not full-on like that, please no" and then he leads you into how the whole story panned out for him. hard stuff.

i don't know if this is maybe kinda a quagmire to wade into, but while i dug the piece and like any vehicle for GSH's theorising and rambling, i found the whole thing a bit problematic, in permanently juxtaposing GSH against this mythical, potential-fulfilling alterno-GSH that would exist if he were clean. this isn't a full-on he needs those drugs to create! thing, but it's awkward to me to set a benchmark of where the guy should be at, considering that in some senses, the guy is doing well - he's out, he released a record, he's an expressive guy etc. i don't think i'm just romanticising & compartmentalising how grim it is that he's got a problem, but it felt like the article went full-on towards painting his life as tragic and wasted, when he's still an autonomous guy.

I didn't read it that way. Before I read it a lot of people commented "oh, it's very sad" etc. but it's not totally sad. I thought it was quite fair. Gil Scott-Heron occasionally makes superb music, often smokes crack. And it's still very sad but it didn't feel like a "wasted potential" theme hitting you over the head.

Well, I mean, yeah, I fretted about that some as I read it - but, like, it's one thing to be strung out to the point where you leave your torch laying around. By the end of the interview, though, Heron is openly smoking rock in front of the interviewer. I thought, actually, given the reality of an interview subject openly smoking a crack pipe, the interviewer did a good job of sketching as complex a picture as he could. Autonomous or not, openly smoking crack in front of an interviewer from the New Yorker is way out there on the margins, imo. I mean yeah - he's doing better than he was a while back - but, you know, it's crack. It's just an incredibly destructive, suicidal drug - anybody who's addicted to it is living a pretty tragic life, imo, the more so when it's a titan of American music.

is the new yorker piece online at all?

Wish I had a way to read this... hmmm, anyone have a newyorker.com login I can use? O_O

yeah, it's not sanctimonious, it's only a small thing. it'd be pretty difficult to be open ended enough to keep everything in perspective and not quantify over a few pages.

Maybe some of you are talking about this on the rolling jazz thread where McCraven gets discussed

it's been briefly mentioned. I actually wanted to start a dedicated McCraven thread, but I've been super busy and have only managed to listen to the GSH project once. I quite liked it, but must admit I'd never heard the original.

Bill Callahan must be amazed at how far "I'm New Here" has traveled via Gil.

Yes. I had forgotten that his 2005 song was covered on the 2010 GSH album.

And now the 2020 mix of it

and the Jamie XX rework before that!

This album of reworkings is actually really good.

it is

Like I love Spirits, but this new one feels like that vibe perfected.

Love the Mcraven reworking, I still the original record but GSH just seems to fit in better with these arrangements, a couple of times I could have believed it was the Midnight Band

Exactly. It totally nails classic period GSH. The slight revisit of "Did You Hear What They Said?" would have stolen the show if it were a bit longer.

Maybe the Makaya McCraven revisit has made me a little more receptive to it, but going back to the Jamie xx remix album this morning has been fun. It does feel a little slight by comparison in hindsight, but enjoyable nonetheless. Also wild to think that Drake had yet another massive hit thanks in part to the album.

GSH is someone I’ve fallen for hard the past few years. But listening to this album and the two remixed versions bums me out. Classic Gil was a multitudinous fountain of anger and grief but also LOVE and community and family. His voice and words were so strong and true (I mean yeah he wasn’t the greatest singer but his VOICE if you know what I mean).

So to hear him sound kind of messed up and incoherent, and knowing about his problems since the 80s, it was sort of shocking. Definitely can’t hear it like his other works, it’s more like checking in on and old friend who used to be a bold beacon of light and has been beaten down by the same bullshit he once so lucidly lamented decades ago. Is it a Rick Rubin Johnny Cash type of thing?

idk I have feelings

interested in your thought Austin cuz I know yet a big fan of him too

checking in on and old friend who used to be a bold beacon of light and has been beaten down by the same bullshit he once so lucidly lamented decades ago

Would reckon that that's exactly what it is — and it began on Spirits, which I recommend. Maybe not highly, but I would say it's probably his most unfairly overlooked work. There was at least a bit of optimism still in him at that point (and a rare collaboration with a hiphop artist in Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest). Yet, the centerpiece of the album is a fifteen minute update of "Home is Where the Hatred Is" — oof. I think endless touring, the lifestyle that goes along with that, and the fact that he knew he was an addict who simply could not stay away really took a toll on him in his last twenty or so years. Also: jail time very much towards the end of a person's life can't be good for their mental health. I think part of the appeal of the I'm New Here (and related) material is that it's so nakedly personal. It's got to be soul crushing to simultaneously realize: your career is pretty much over, your voice is shot, and it's mostly your own fault for that. To me it makes sense that the things he had to say at that point were very loosely related (if at all) to the things he had talked about in the past. So it also makes sense that it's unlike his work from the 70s and early 80s and I often consider his discography the work of three different entities: 1) the early years where it was just him wanting to be a poet and orator 2) the Brian Jackson years where he got to work with an equal, musically speaking, to his articulating abilities (i.e. his "classic period") and finally 3) the late 80s until the end where he was seemingly too cynical to even take himself seriously anymore. Is it unfortunate, dour, and ultimately kind of sad? Probably so, yes. But, just as he did when he felt passionately about something in his youth, he talked about it in profound and upsetting ways. It's just that, at that point, what he felt so passionately about was his disappointment — not in the world, but in himself. And I don't know, call me a masochist I guess, but I find that there's something appealing in his willingness to be so unabashedly open about who he was and why he was.

Is it the greatest music ever? Not really, no. But it does have certain rewarding insights, to be certain.

Also, yes: I've always loved the sound of his voice. Call me a blasphemer or whatever, but I always assumed that, if one does exist and that He is a he. . . that it's what god's voice would sound like.

I read the biography by Marcus Baram to try to understand this decline. Even when you read his history step-by-step, it still remains a mystery. Starting as a drug-free youth, his addictions slowly grew over the years until they overran his career and his life.

The closest thing to self-awareness depicted in the book is when he tells a late-period girlfriend that seeing him the way he was then, she doesn't really know him.

great post Austin.

that nyt or new yorker piece on him circa this album was grim and powerful. An ex-colleague used to work at the Jazz Cafe in London when he'd play there regular, and his stories of Gil's unreliability, unpleasantness and general disolution were bleak.

Bleak is indeed a good word for it; and I would say for his last two studio albums as well. That "final act" period in an addict's life where they will talk openly and maybe too candidly about who they are and what they rely on to get them through their days. It's something that I've sadly seen up close and to know that one of my musical heroes was reduced to that is definitely upsetting.

I did something that I don't ever recall doing before or since when reading one of his interviews in the 2000s. He was being asked about his recent run-ins with the law, which of course were substance related, and he interrupted the interviewer mid-question to ask his own question: "Look man, do you like to party? Do you like to have a good time?" I closed the newspaper (or magazine, whatever it was) and never finished reading the interview. In fact, even at this point, I've removed the memory from my brain so much that I don't even know why he was being interviewed at that point — upcoming shows, new music, a PR piece in the face of his legal issues? Don't know. I will acknowledge that it happened, but I'd rather not think about specifics, for the exact reason that it didn't seem like the GSH talking that I thought I knew.

His choice and performance of covers seem to get past any problems with originals: covers are self-expressive w/o making it too real for him, maybe that's why so many brief originals---he stops when he feels that he has to, for whatever reason.
What I said on What Are You Listening To:
Still haven't heard the original album, or Jamie xx's reworking, but the unmistakable sound and sensibility of classic Gil come through: sharp, reflective glints in the dark, rough-edged a fluid, lyrical and realist, searching and on point, thematic and grooving---jazzwise, yet "blues is a feeling" the overall. Only thing is, some of the originals are really short, like down to 37 seconds: golden kernals of potential and realization---McCraven is def. not showboating, but I wish he extended these--maybe he was required to stick to the original track times? I'd like a bit more---more like---Laswell redoing Marley and Miles?? Anyway, it's all good, though faves are mostly because they have longer to make an impression: "New York is Killing Me," "I'll Take Care of You," "Me and the Devil"--yes, Scott-Heron and Robert Johnson and Mr. D. on the Greyhoud, seems natural. Speaking voice is worn but clear, singing voice not that different from 70s.

― dow, Saturday, August 15, 2020 4:11 PM

This album is a modern classic. Finally bought a copy on vinyl which is nice to look at (pink and green vinyl is weird for this album though) but it does seem to highlight the lo fi sonics more. Quite a bit of this sounds like it was recorded on low quality digital audio. Which is ofc a world away from his classic records. Now thinking it might be be best suited to mp3s.

*screams in WMA*