Arctic Reviews

You only have to be of a mildly paranoid frame of mind for the lack of recognition for Gil Scott-Heron to raise suspicions. Look hard through the pages of Griel Marcus' American music odessy Mystery Train - he isn't mentioned. The equally feted Shots From The Hip by Charles Shaar Murray doesn't trouble itself with the man. Even The Dark Stuff, the idiosyncratic memoirs of our own Nick Kent, ignores a career whose legacy would be creating the stylistic building blocks of rap, an artist who in the phrase "The Revolution Will Be Televised" created a universal aphorism for the black and urban struggle of the American seventies.

Ironically it wouldn't be totally inappropriate for a whole book to be based on Scott-Heron's life, a story of pride, pain, anger, fear and joy which would compel many an autobiographer. In recent years it's been no less chequered, two spells in prison on drug related offences punctuating the first decade of the twenty first century, the second in 2007 impacting on the I'm New Here sessions, the story of which is predictably fascinating.

But first back to the record, Heron's first since 1994. On the face of it slight at less than thirty minutes, it's contents however brief flow like the Hudson in the city which has become Scott-Heron's adopted home, a mixture of songs and poems that reveal austerity and beauty, often crafted from words that amount to brutally honest self-flagellation.

Bookended by two reflections on the powerful influence of women in his childhood ("On Coming From a Broken Home 1 & 2"), I'm New Here also contains more than a scattering of verbal interludes, during which Scott-Heron thinks out loud minilogues such as "If you've gotta pay for things that you've done wrong, I gotta big bill comin'". In the hands of many others, using his audience as a proxy shrink could feel like self-indulgence, but the almost voyeuristic self analysis on display is as powerful and heartfelt as anything the later years of Johnny Cash ever produced.

The songs here are built mostly out of fractured programming, lacking the contraptions of funk or soul, their nakedness offering up the singer, his voice and his words as the focal points, the likes of New York Is Killing Me augmented only by help from the Harlem Gospel Choir on pentecostal harmonies. Whilst soul-selling man of the delta Robert Johnson has been covered inauthentically a million times, the version here of Me And The Devil - abetted by Damon Albarn at his most minimalistic - feels almost autobiographical, that voice, that unique, lamenting voice adding airs of foreboding, resignation and doom.

Back for a second to the story of how the record was made. Producer and XL label impresario Richard Russell had long thought about a collaboration with the singer, a man notoriously shy of the press, but by 2006 found the subject of his proposition incarcerated on Riker's Island, where the two first met. I'm New Here was recorded over the course of the subsequent three year period, one which saw a hiatus caused by a further drug bust and return to prison. Much credit should be afforded to Russell for seeing his vision through when it can be that the easier option was to walk away. His reward is this brilliant, prodigious work, one which confirms the rebirth of Scott-Heron as an artist just as vital now as when he fought against the institutional racism of the Nixon-Moyhihan axis fourty years ago.

It would be wrong to suggest that this was in some way a complete makeover, a collaborators record filled with avant garde reinvention. I'll Take Care of You is a blues soaked love song, nothing more, whilst the title track is darkly reflexive folk. Either would be probably one of the most idiosyncratic pieces of music you'll hear in 2010, but neither are art for art's sake. We'll leave the final words though to the man himself, courtesy of "I've Been Me" : "If I hadn't been as eccentric..as obnoxious..as arrogant..I wouldn't have been me". Amen to that.