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

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.

sick chris cunningham "audio/video remix" of new york is killing me

http://pitchfork.com/news/40202-video-gil-scott-heron-new-york-is-killing-me-directed-by-chris-cunningham/

I'm gonna see his show in three weeks. What's he like live?

954767022
7 months ago 16
im white and im not gonna let the illuminati separate me from black culture and the truth peace yall

this and the grinderman album are the most interesting discs in reaction to -- or bristling against the idea of -- getting older that i've heard in a long time.

two of the best discs of the year imo.

i cant decide how much i 'really like this' vs. 'sounds like a moby rmx album'

I like this, and yes the production sounds like a Moby remix.

But I'm not sure this is up to the standards of Gil Scott from way back (and Daniel, I'm not sure that Grinderman is up to the standards of the Birthday Party)

both albums connect to the middle-aged guy in me (tho I was never a fan of TBP).

So there's a Jamie xx remix record of this out in Feb.:

We're New Here:

01 I'm New Here
02 Home
03 I've Been Me (Interlude)
04 Running
05 My Cloud
06 Certain Things (Interlude)
07 The Crutch
08 Ur Soul and Mine
09 Parents (Interlude)
10 Piano Player
11 NY Is Killing Me
12 Jazz (Interlude)
13 I'll Take Care Of U

I was gonna see him Thursday night in DC (he was scheduled to be in town through Sunday for 2 shows a night at small cozy Blues Alley) but he just cancelled due to "illness"

pretty sure the guy has an "illness", but uh huh that sucks. a friend just saw him and got talking to a guy who'd gone to see him five times ... and had never seen him.

he should do a tour with Sly

they could both get paid and no one would have to show up!

at least sly's been doing that since the 70s

So there's a Jamie xx remix record of this out in Feb.:

oh i heard this, it's ok then it gets really great at the end

with a rui da silva sample, no less

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*