Download this: Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here

I think there’s something comforting about soul music.  Even when it’s at its most mournful, there’s always the musical logic of blues and jazz to keep everything together, a solid, steady groove.  Soul is tight and unflinching at its core; it’s no surprise that hip hop producers are still dipping into 70s archives in search of melodic loops to be sandwiched between their beats and the swaggering spit of MCs.

The road runs both ways, though, and especially in the case of Gil Scott-Heron; his 1971 spoken-word anthem “The Revolution will not be Televised” is just about as proto-hip-hop as they come, earning him “Godfather of Rap” references and the like.  But all godfathers get old, and two decades later, in proper geezer fashion, Scott-Heron released a finger-wagging track entitled “Message to the Messengers,” which encouraged rappers to get educated and respect their elders.  “They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person,” he said in an interview.  “Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.”

On I’m New Here, Scott-Heron’s first album in sixteen years, there is no posturing.  The territory is pain, and the pain is plainly visible.  If his project is for his audience to see “inside the person,” he has succeeded magnificently, and the unsettling soundscapes that producer Richard Russell has created to accompany his songs and poetry give the whole thing an edge it wouldn’t have with traditional musical accompaniment.

The feeling here is one of things unraveling.  On the opening track, Scott-Heron speaks of his upbringing in a “broken home” over a string loop from Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” that never gives way to the beat: all tension, no release.  The chilling second track, “Me and the Devil, is occasionally punctuated by samples of that sound glitch you hear when you’re listening to an iPod in a car and someone’s iPhone rings.  (Do you know that sound?)  And the lyrics: “You may bury my body down by the highwayside / so my whole human spirit can Greyhound buses ride.”  It’s an unforgiving blues.

There is, however, something about how the album is presented that makes me a bit uncomfortable.  The 20-second interludes of Heron speaking evoke not hip hop sketches but rather documentary segments, as if this album belonged to Russell and Scott-Heron himself were a mere piece of audio art trouvée.  But the success of the project is not the artistic juxtaposition of wise old Gil and these “cutting-edge” sounds; the success is Scott-Heron’s own.  Russell’s unstable musical world, where there isn’t always a brass section to tie things up nicely, serves to highlight Scott-Heron’s continuing refusal to yield any comfort to his audience.  The revolution will, still, not be televised.

I’m New Here will be released tomorrow (Tuesday, 2/9) on XL recordings.  Watch the creepy black and white video for “Me and the Devil” here.

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