Jamie XX and Gil Scott-Heron, "We're New Here"

For more than two decades, younger artists have been reinterpreting the work of legendary spoken-word poet and rap forefather Gil Scott-Heron. He’s been sampled, quoted, name-dropped, and featured by Common, Blackalicious, Aesop Rock, and Public Enemy. One of his famous poems from the ’60s took up a startling amount of real estate on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy last year, even as Scott-Heron returned with a stunner of a new album, his first since 1994, I’m New Here. The man’s relevance is established (gilded), so is a remixed version of his latest necessary, or is We’re New Here—a reinterpretation by The XX producer Jamie Smith—simply hype-mongering?

Read the rest of the review over at the A.V. Club.