RAEKWON

Nectar Lounge

Seattle, Wa

May 08, 2011

A week ago, quick posts started showing up all across the internet, informing us that, “Gil Scott-Heron is dead.”  In recent years, the legendary poet/musician had struggled with fairly public substance abuse problems and had triumphantly returned with a his first full-length of new material in 16 years with last years, I’m New Here (XL recordings).  Although the title track was a cover song from the 2005 album, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love by SMOG (aka: Bill Callahan), it’s inclusion on the album and, perhaps more significantly, as the album’s title, were clearly decided upon for profoundly personal reasons.  With lyrics like “no matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around” and the titles of such other songs as “Me and the Devil“, “Running“, and “The Crutch“, it was evident that Heron was turning to more introspective subject matter than such politically driven classics as “The Revolution Will Not Me Televised” and “Whitey on the Moon“.  Often referred to as “the godfather of rap,” Heron‘s last collection of new material came with the album Spirits in 1994 and contained the lead-off track “Message to Messengers“, which criticized the direction of hip-hop and what he saw as superficiality and destruction of/within the artform.  Just as I’d like to view I’m New Here as his last big statement before his death, his warnings and pleas to the hip-hop community were one of his last big statements before his extensive gap in productivity.  Around this time, another album called, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was really beginning to pick up steam. Read the rest of this entry →