Gil Scott-Heron
Aladdin Theatre
April 15
21+
Tickets
Without doubt one of the most important voices in 20th century music, Gil Scott-Heron has been called a Vietnam-era Langston Hughes, a proto-rap pioneer, and - offensively but not inaccurately - the black Bob Dylan, someone whose unfailingly sharp and ironic eye spared neither black-power phonies or scheming presidents. In 1971 he laid out the blueprint for the whole rap genre with his slinky, bad-as-fuck anthem “The Revolution Would Not Be Televised” – on which the then 23 year old poetically dismantled the entire 70s culture – while throughout a career spanning five decades, Scott-Heron’s deep, soulful voice spoke of nukes, Reaganomics or apartheid, always from deep inside the tradition. “There are 500 shades of the blues,” he told a club audience on ‘74’s Winter In America. “There’s the I-ain’t-got-me-no-money blues. There’s the I-ain’t-got-me-no-woman-blues. There’s the I-ain’t-got-me-no-money-and- I ain’t-got-me-no-woman-blues - which is the double blues.”
Back then, the club crowd laughed and singer-poet went into a razor-sharp satire of Nixon’s rogue’s gallery. Now, thirty-six years later - after hip-hop’s total corporatisation of spoken-word, the nation’s rightward lurch, and his own troubled path through jails and addiction – Gil Scott-Heron could easily sing his own brand of blues: The I-can-out-rhyme-Kanye-West, I-can-out-write-Cormac-McCarthy, I’m-a-60-year-old, ex-con genius blues. And we might reasonably assume that I’m New Here, his first album in 13 years, will reflect the bitterest man on earth. Ten seconds of the title track sets things straight. “I did not become someone different,” he declares with gnomic gravity. “That I did not want to be.” He speaks a few more lines over the nodding acoustic guitar of Pat Sullivan, from Oakley Hall, then, giving it the full weight of 60 hard years, gently the hopeful chorus: “No matter how wrong you gone/You can always turn around.”