Saturday, February 13, 2010

I'm New Here: Gil Scott-Heron is Back Again



Good stuff. It is nice to see one of the founding fathers of contemporary black music reinventing himself. All respect due to The Last Poets, but I am excited to see what Gil Scott-Heron does in this, the third act of his life.

Courtesy of the Guardian:

Gil Scott-Heron: the Godfather of Rap Comes Back

One of the most moving songs on Gil Scott-Heron's long-awaited new album, I'm New Here, is called "Where Did the Night Go". Over the most minimal electronic pulse, his familiar deep drawl, now more ragged and reflective than ever, intones the lines:

"Long ago, the clock washed midnight away, bringing the dawn,

Oh God, I must be dreaming,

Time to get up again, time to start up again,

Pulling on my socks again

Where did the night go?"

For those of us who have kept an ever-hopeful eye on Gil Scott-Heron's faltering musical and personal journey over the past three decades, the song has an added resonance. Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Where, to be more precise, did Gil Scott-Heron go in the long silence that began in 1982 after the release of his last album for Arista Records, Moving Target, and was broken only briefly by the appearance of Spirits, in 1994.

"People keep saying I disappeared," the singer tells me, laughing heartily, when I speak to him. "Well, that's a gift I didn't know I had. You ever see someone disappear? That makes me a superhero, right?"

The humour, though, conceals a great deal of heartbreak and an epic struggle with addiction, both of which are referred to obliquely on his raggedly brilliant version of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" on the new album. "Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door", he sings, "And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go."

Though Gil Scott-Heron insists he did not disappear, that he kept playing club gigs in America and did the occasional tour, that he was writing, if not recording, the news that kept on filtering back from his long winter in America was always bleak. It seemed at times as if the most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle. On the sombre and still-startling "Home Is Where The Hatred Is", recorded in 1971, he described a junkie trapped in a blighted inner-city ghetto who lived inside "white powder dreams". Thirty-odd years later, he seemed to be living those lyrics.

Gil Scott-Heron's creative trajectory has, in many ways, run counter to that of the traditional troubled artist insofar as he fell into hard drug use at a time in his life when most of his peers had either sorted out their addictions or succumbed to them. What we can say for certain is that sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, the man the critics were by then calling "the godfather of rap" and "the black Bob Dylan" developed a cocaine habit that, if his ex-partner, Monique de Latour, is to believed, spiralled out of control into full-blown addiction to crack.

By then, like Sly Stone before him, Scott-Heron had a reputation for showing up hours late for concerts or not showing up at all. It seemed scarcely believable that the lithe, loose-limbed performer who sang "The Bottle" – about the alcoholics he observed queuing at a local liquor store every morning – and "Angel Dust" – about the mind-destroying drug of the same name that brought down the great James Brown – had fallen so low.

"I've had bad times in my life when I'd rather be somewhere else doing something else, for sure," he tells me when I ask about his troubles. "But you get to my age, that shit happens. You get in trouble; you maybe lose some folks – a parent or a friend. Maybe your marriage breaks up, you lose your wife, lose touch with your kid. But what life does not have those things in it?"

the piece continues here...

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