Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie XX

Gil Scott-Heron's proto-rap polemics found unexpected afterlife when Jamie xx, The xx's producer, remixed his final album We're New Here in 2011. Scott-Heron, the Chicago-born poet and musician who died that same year, had spent four decades delivering spoken-word jeremiads over jazz, soul and funk arrangements. His 1970 piece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" became a counter-culture anthem, marrying Coltrane's modal sensibility to Last Poets-style agitprop. Albums like Pieces of a Man (1971) and Winter in America (1974) established him as progenitor of both conscious hip-hop and neo-soul, though addiction and incarceration fractured his later career.

Jamie Smith stripped Scott-Heron's swan song down to skeletal beats and bass weight, applying UK garage's syncopation to elegiac material about mortality and regret. The collaboration bridged generations, Scott-Heron's baritone wisdom floating over Smith's spectral electronics. What could have been mawkish tribute instead honoured the original's refusal of comfort. The record suggested that protest needn't be loud, that silence between words carries its own resistance.