Gil Scott-Heron
Spirits (TVT) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
With his jazz-talk baritone, Gil Scott-Heron reminds us that civil rights is an ongoing struggle. Scott-Heron’s riveting “Spirits” latches on to some familiar catch phrases and crafts more for good measure. The Chicago-born singer stresses unity, but the record is more a clarion call to the black community to mend fences within, particularly on “Message to the Messengers.” On that song he directs invective toward rappers crooning “about women-folks, when on one song she’s your African queen and on the next one she’s a joke.” Urging resistance, he tells the upright to remain steadfast: “If they tell you that you’ve finally lost your nerve/That’s the same thing they said about us a long time ago/When we said `Johannesburg.’ ” The military-industrial complex gets skewered in “Work for Peace.” On the topic of the Gulf War, he sings of “pot-bellied generals as luminaries.” “Yeah, there were some smart bombs, but there were some dumb ones/Scared the hell out of CNN in that Baghdad hotel.” Scott-Heron’s pledge of unity veers when he speaks of insidious plots against the poor. But there are universal truths that Scott-Heron delves into and portrays convincingly and stylistically cool.
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