Gil Scott-Heron”Spirits” TVTThe Kurt Cobain suicide will...

Gil Scott-Heron

“Spirits”

TVT

The Kurt Cobain suicide will likely be the pop world’s story of the year, and it’s the most profoundly disturbing one to come out of that world in years. There is not much worse than promise rubbing itself out.

So what we need right now are survivors’ tales, stories of resiliency in which hard experience is faced, and, if not transcended, then at least endured.

Gil Scott-Heron’s first U.S. album in 12 years comes just in time. “Spirits” is a moving and eloquent argument against despair, delivered by a man who has won the right to make that argument, given that despair seems to have been his close acquaintance. In the early ‘70s, Scott-Heron emerged with a series of distinctive albums that combined intimate soul and blues vocals, jazz and funk instrumental backup, poetic lyrics and spoken monologues. His wide-ranging music was catchy enough to please the ear, and his lyrical vision alternated between tough, biting political satire (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Whitey on the Moon”) and a yearning and heartbroken humanity (“The Bottle,” “Winter in America”).

Rappers often cite Scott-Heron as a founding father, and it might have been tempting for him to slant this comeback release toward a hip-hop audience. While he alludes to rap rhythms in the album’s opening and closing tracks, “Spirits” stays true to his ‘70s style. Instead of trying to replicate the booming, chaotic sound of today’s streets, Scott-Heron dwells for much of the album in the delicate, highly personal moods that can envelop a small, late-night jazz and blues club. It’s an album given over largely to saxophones, pianos and his own frayed and burdened voice.

Rap is very much on Scott-Heron’s mind in the opening “Message to the Messengers,” a quietly passionate address to young rappers that respects their mission but doesn’t mince rhymes about such common rap lapses as brutal sexism and foolish vulgarity. And Scott-Heron is a master rhymer. In “Work for Peace,” he assails an economy founded on a marriage of “the military and the monetary.” As the song progresses, he spins a widening web of “-ary” rhymes off that core phrase, illustrating in raw sound the point he is making: that the influence of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” is pervasive, and, absurdly but inescapably, destruction has become the engine of production.

At the heart of “Spirits” is Scott-Heron’s unsparing, yet ultimately forgiving depiction of how an idealistic man can fail, how an educated and motivated man can lose his way. In a reprise of his wrenching early-’70s song, “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” a poisonous mixture of pride and shame keeps a drug addict from turning to the only people who can help him.

But the album’s fundamental message lies in its concluding song title, “Don’t Give Up.” Take responsibility for your own life, keep trying to do better, get back up when you fall back down. Hang in there, Scott-Heron gently urges. Maybe the spirits will call.