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I’m New Here by Gil Scott-Heron

2011; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00930.x

1467-8330

Kevin Ward,

American Literature and Culture

Scott-Heron, Gil , I’m New Here , London : XL Recordings , 2010 I have believed in my convictions And been convicted for my beliefs The focus of the struggle has shifted in the 70s. We’ve become more aware of Pan-Africanism and international responsibilities. If we recognize that it's all part of the same battle, more will be accomplished. Different fronts, the same battle. But it's really about cleaning up your own neighborhood before you try and clean up the city, the state or the world (Scott-Heron 1978b: np). Gil Scott-Heron wasn't a geographer. Indeed, he was not even an academic. Nor is I’m New Here a book. You won't find it cited in many journal articles, nor on many student reading lists—more's the pity. I’m New Here is, of course, Scott-Heron's last studio album before his horribly untimely death on 27 May 2011. It was the first studio album for 16 years for an artist labelled by others as “the Godfather of Rap”, or in his death as “Black America's Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Bob Marley all rolled into one” (McTernan 2011:np). He preferred to describe what he did as “bluesology”—a fusion of poetry, blues, jazz and soul. Over the last four decades, as an author, poet and musician, Scott-Heron provided a series of critical commentaries on many of the most pressing social issues facing different societies around the world. The cold war, exploitation, nuclear power, oppression and racism: Scott-Heron spoke and sang about them all, with a quite wonderful mix of harsh words and soft, rolling pronunciation. His work featured in academic discussions around a series of issues, including black activism (Jennings 1992), jazz poetry (Wallenstein 1980) and race and music (Ellison 1985; Ramsey 2003). Heralded as both a “political troubadour” (Ballard 1978:np) and “perhaps the most influential American poet of the past four decades” (Yates 2010:np)—although Scott-Heron (1978b: np) regarded himself as “an interpreter of the Black experience”—his work was no stranger to academic scrutiny. While Ben Wisner and others were busy assembling the first issue of Antipode in the summer of 1969, Scott-Heron was recording his first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, which was released in 1970 and which was also published as a book in the same year. The mid to late 1960s and the political and economic context that gave birth to this journal—opposition to the ongoing Vietnam War, the May 1968 uprisings across the world, US inner-city riots around rising racialized economic and social inequalities, the suppression of student dissent by the military—was also the social climate out of which Scott-Heron emerged. While those at Clark University wanted to change the world through establishing Antipode, to challenge what was acceptable in the academic discipline of geography and to provide a publishing space for “radical” geographical scholarship (http://www.antipode-online.net/editor-reflections.asp), Scott-Heron opted to leave behind his formal education. Instead he took to communicating through the medium of music and poetry. Seeking to blend the two and to speak on a range of injustices, he strove to “convey in a variety of ways, contemporary social ideas and political circumstances …. [These]… may not have been common to most people on an individual level, but when placed in a creative context by the artist they dramatize, politicize and promote a group level of conscience and awareness” (Scott-Heron 1978a:3). Through his books—The Vulture (1970), The Nigger Factory (1972)—and his poetry—Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), So Far, So Good (1990) and Now and Then (2001)—he wrote and spoke of the cultural, economic, environmental, political and social issues that have also populated the pages of this journal over the same 40-plus-year period. His 15 studio albums and his nine live albums bear testament to this. From nuclear power (Shut ‘Um Down, South Carolina (Barnwell), We Almost Lost Detroit) to the South African Apartheid system (Bridging, Johannesburg), from the US political system (B Movie, H20 Gate Blues, Re-Ron, The Ghetto Code, King Alfred Plan, We Beg Your Pardon America), to the conditions experienced by many people of color in the US (Angel Dust, Gun, Jose Campos Torres, Paint it Black, The Get out of the Ghetto Blues, Whitey on the Moon, Winter in America), and to US cultural-cum-racial politics (Ain't No New Thing, Black Men and Monster Movies, Evolution (and Flashback), Who’ll Pay Reparations on my Soul?) Scott-Heron's focus was high and wide, but it never missed its intended targets. In striving, in his own words, for “group consciousness” (Scott-Heron, 1978a:3), he did not shy away from using his own experiences to pass comment on the kinds of contradictions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies that informed the initial establishment of Antipode (see Peck and Wills 2000; Castree and Wright 2004). For Scott-Heron politics was always deeply personal, period! He may or may not have read the feminist writing of the 1960s, though I am sure he was aware of their “the personal is political” rallying call, and the drive to acknowledge that the political was to be “seen everywhere and as a matter of everyday relations” (Kofman 2003:621). Over the years he wrote about his own life and his relationship with others, particularly his maternal grandmother, Lillie, his mother, Bobbie, and his daughter, Gia, demonstrating a deep sensitivity to the relationship between his own upbringing and the experiences and issues of wider resonance. Songs such as Grandma's Hands, Home is Where the Hatred Is, Pieces of a Man, Save the Children, The Bottle, and Your Daddy Loves You to name but six reveal an understanding of home as “a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear” (Blunt and Varley 2004:3). No less political than some of his other writings, it is this theme that is most in evident in his last studio album. As Gill (2010:np) writes: Rather than tackle big-scale political issues in the manner of classics like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and B-Movie, however, the focus … is on his own situation, about which he harbours few delusions. I’m New Here is a short, at times painful album. His distinctive voice looms large over the sparse, electronic and folk soundscape. Gone are the jazzier sounds of his past, replaced with a more sombre canvas on which he paint pictures through his words. That this album consists of 15 tracks is only partially revealing of the ways in which the different types of recordings are stitched together to produce an emotion-laden patchwork of sound. As befits an urban blues poet, one third of the tracks are “interludes”, recordings of Scott-Heron's musings on a series of issues, including his own past and the art of parenting. These are spliced in between songs. Four of the ten songs are covers, including Your Soul and Mine, which is a reworking of The Vulture, one of his earliest poems. From its opening line, “[s]tanding in the ruins of another Black man's life”, he sketches a bleak picture of his life, of his personal journey and its costs. With reference to Greek mythology, he speaks of Charon, the ferryman of Hades, who carried the souls of the recently deceased across the rivers of Acheron and Styx. More generally, his choice of songs after such a long period out of the recording studio is revealing. Three issues appear and reappear throughout. First, in I’m New Here Scott-Heron picks up on the theme of autobiography and the life-course. He makes Robert Johnson's Me and the Devil his own, stretching the words to fit his life, turning it in into an autobiographical recollection of his darker moments. I’m New Here continues in this vein, as Scott-Heron again uses his voice to make you feel like it is his song. Reflecting on past mistakes, he declares “no matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around”. Finally, Where Did the Night Go and Running are two short vignettes on Scott-Heron's own life, rich in evocative language and underpinned with ominous, sparse, bleating electronics. Second, New York is Killing Me finds Scott-Heron reflecting on his relationship with New York City. It is not the first time he has written about the global metropolis to which he relocated in the early 1960s. The 1976 recording, New York City, found Scott-Heron considering why he loved the city, suggesting that it “could be that you remind me of myself”, the two of them having, in his words, been “misused and mistreated”. Thirty-five years later his feelings towards the place appear to have changed. “City living is not all it's cracked up to be”, suggests Scott-Heron, as he advocates returning to where he spent most of his childhood—“home” in his words—Jackson, Tennessee. Given his two spells in jail over the last decade for drug-related convictions, in writing about escaping New York City he's also reflecting on leaving behind a life that is the subject for the semi-autobiographical The Crutch: the life of a drug addict. Third, Scott-Heron picks up the theme of care, love and support in On Coming from a Broken Home (Parts One and Two) and I’ll Take Care of You. While the latter is a Bobby Bland cover, it is in the former that Scott-Heron is at his lyrical best. Both parts consist of spoken words over an evocative series of loops and samples. It's a tale of absent men and present women. There is no reproduction of the stereotypes of “black women being strong”, however. As he puts it: “if you’re weak you’re gone”. Scott-Heron seeks to distinguish between what society names as “broken” and what he values as the labor that is involved in making households loving places. This is always a work in progress in his view. Absences do not have to mean that homes are less loving, less supportive and less worthwhile. As he puts it: I came from what they called a broken home But if they really called at our house they would have known how wrong they were We were working on our lives, at our homes, dealing with what we had, not what we didn't have Academic tradition decrees that I should end this review by declaring whether I’m New Here is good or bad, whether it is worth purchasing or not. Since it was released at Easter 2010, it has met with near universal acclaim in the musical media. I’m New Here is a profoundly personal and political offering, one that shares more with Scott-Heron's past catalogue than at first might appear to be the case. It may not be the Scott-Heron of the 1970s, but the commitment to his own brand of radical urban blues poetry remains undiminished. In this, his shift in emphasis mirrors that of Antipode. If there ever was, there no longer appears to be, universal agreement over what constitutes “Left”, “critical” or “radical” geography. These terms have been the subject of vociferous debate in the pages of this journal over the last decade. Underpinning their questioning has been an ongoing rethinking of what constitutes “the political”. This continues to be a healthy and lively debate amongst many in academic geography. Scott-Heron's I’m New Here does not junk “big” issues such as “class”, “gender”, “inequality” and “race”, but rather reminds the listener that these are not just abstract concerns but are ones that are experienced, challenged and resisted by many people daily. For that Scott-Heron remains the benchmark against which others in the genre will always be measured. Buy this album, enjoy listening to it, and then work your way through his back catalogue. As-Salaam-Alaikum.