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

it's made several magazines' EOY lists. personally, it faded away for me and i didn't end up going back to it much - one of those records i admire more than love.

Reviewing the remix album (which I love) sent me back to I'm New Here. What there is of it is so good I feel like it should be Top 10 but then it just stops - there's not enough there, especially given the fact there were other good session tracks that only appeared on the vinyl version. But it is damn good.

i was really sceptical about the remix album - kind of like, it has good beats and good sounds, but i didn't really see the point of it - it almost seemed a bit cynical. why remix that particular album other than that the idea is a critical banker and you're on the same label? what does it add to the original album? the original was dark, moody, menacing; so is the remix album. and for a lot of it, the music wasn't quite good enough to justify it. then it got really really amazing in the last 15 minutes, so, yeah.

couldn't help but compare it to the cassie remix compilation that local action has just released though (producers inc altered natives, slackk, 8bitch, brackles, lunice, jacques greene taking on various cassie songs) - that feels like an actual labour of love for a one-hit-wonder babydiva that most of the rest of the world has forgotten. rather than a bid for cred set up by a record label that doesn't actually take too many risks.

it was funny going to the playback though, all these very serious young men looking very serious and occasionally nodding their head, and then that vague ripple of confusion when the rui da silva sample came in, and you could tell none of 'em recognised it.

Have you heard it since the playback? The subtlety grows on you, like the way he sets up a dialogue between Gil and Gloria Gaynor on I'm New Here. And I love the Burial-style ghosts-of-rave vibe that he applies to deep house and mid-90s drum'n'bass. I agree that the motive might have been a little cynical but I honestly think it stands up as a companion piece to the original.

i haven't, must remember to ask for a copy. yeah i expect it will grow on me, i didn't dislike any of it, it's just...a companion piece is all it is, y'know? a curio. when - going by what the various members of the xx have done together and individually - i think it could have been a lot more surprising and risky than just reworking one of the year's most critically acclaimed albums with a different sonic palette but broadly similar mood. i'm sure i will like it, it just seems like the safest thing jamie xx could have done to announce his solo career.

i wonder if the record's suffering critically because it doesn't sound as good as a lot of the content on there. the production doesn't really add a lot. the material on the record, the poems especially, is stronger than the lp versions imo.

I find your take on it a bit cynical Lex, especially since you've only heard it once... I think it's a brilliant album and I didn't feel that way the first two or three times I heard it. "The point" is that its much more coherent and contemporary than the original, which does Gil Scott Heron quite a large favour.

I haven't heard the remix yet, and am wondering what you mean about it being "more coherent" than the original?

And by "contemporary" do you mean that it sounds newer than triphop?

i dont see the point of the remix album - of all the people, why jamie xx? its like those generally pointless modern remix albums of old motown or verve vaults or whatever. id rather hear a live version of the album.

stream of the new remix album: http://bit.ly/1shUwb

Someone could put together the best of the remix stuff with almost all of the original album, plus the vinyl-only tracks, and you'd have a seriously excellent album.

Listening to “We’re New Again- A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven. Not bad . Although listening to it after just hearing songs Pieces of a Man, Your Daddy Loves You, and Home is Where the Hatred Is, makes me sad how his health disintegrated

Although on second thought the comeback vocals are still pretty good, despite the more limited range

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*