“Whatever happened to the people who gave a damn?” Gil Scott-Heron once asked in song.

The Chicago-born artist was a voice of dissent in a music industry that was turning into a big business during the ‘70s, transforming pop hits and party tunes into profit. It wasn’t a particularly hospitable place for Scott-Heron, who died Friday at 62. But he never set his sights on the charts. Instead, he devoted his life to writing, speaking, agitating and thinking out loud about the world. He gave a damn.

He made poetry of confrontation and art out of everyday life. As the critic Nelson George once wrote, Scott-Heron was a “keyboardist, poet, singer, rapper, and teller of uncomfortable truths.” Those truths could encompass everything from chastising the President of the United States to musing about how difficult it sometimes is for a man to tell his child, “I love you.”

An uncompromising artist working in a machine that thrives on compromise, Scott-Heron was an imperfect fit for the disco and MTV eras, though his “uncomfortable truths” resonated with those who wanted more out of music than  just escapist good times. His music was scattered across a hodgepodge of labels, and several of his best albums weren’t widely available until decades later.

The best of his music occurred in a rush of creativity through the ‘70s as he emerged from his teen years, already a published author and a serious student of blues, jazz, Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones. He stumbled into the business of making records because a respected elder, veteran jazz producer Bob Thiele, encouraged him. He had a lot to say, producing an album a year for a decade-plus while touring relentlessly with the band he built with his college friend, keyboardist Brian Jackson.

Though Scott-Heron is often typecast as a rap progenitor – a label he steadfastly rejected -- he more accurately suggested a mix of Richard Pryor’s darkly comical oratory, beat poetry and blues-inflected ballad-singing. Musicians more steeped in jazz than funk accompanied him, and the music embodied many of the values of ‘70s jazz fusion, for better or worse. There were elastic time signatures and flowing keyboard melodies, but there were also plenty of meandering flute solos. Even amid the pastel arrangements, Scott-Heron’s rich, mahogany voice commanded attention.

He left behind dozens of recordings. How to get a handle on this multi-faceted artist? Here’s where to start:

Public Enemy’s Chuck D once said hip-hop was black America's CNN. If so, Gil Scott-Heron was the network’s first great anchorman, presaging hip-hop and infusing soul and jazz with poetry, humor and pointed political commentary.

Scott-Heron died Friday at the age of 62, according to his U.K. publisher. The Pitchfork Web site said the report was confirmed by a record-company publicist.

His songs, including “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “The Bottle” and "Johannesburg," were hard-edged yet melodic, influencing subsequent generations of soul and hip-hop artists who revered him as a pioneer, including Common, Erykah Badu, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Kanye West. (A guide to Gil Scott-Heron's essential recordings is HERE.)
 
Scott-Heron was born in 1949 in Chicago and spent most of his childhood in Tennessee and then New York. He showed an affinity for writing at an early age. His first novel, “The Vulture,” was published when he was 19, then he shifted to music in an effort to reach a wider audience. He teamed with Brian Jackson, a gifted musician he met while attending Lincoln University in Oxford, Pa.

"I had an affinity for jazz and syncopation, and the poetry came from the music," Scott-Heron told the Tribune in a 1998 interview. "We made the poems into songs, and we wanted the music to sound like the words, and Brian's arrangements very often shaped and molded them."

In the ‘70s, Gil Scott-Heron bridged jazz, soul, protest music and poetry into a singular sound, one that anticipated hip-hop and influenced everyone from Chuck D to Michael Franti. But in the last 25 years he has released only one studio album, while battling drug addiction and serving two prison sentences for cocaine possession and violating a plea deal. “I’m New Here” (XL), released 40 years after his debut, finds the 60-year-old artist sounding not just world weary, but exhausted.

In contrast to the politically charged material that defined his finest recordings, the new album is meditative and introspective, laced with reminiscences about his childhood and his personal struggles. Producer Richard Russell frames Scott-Heron’s ravaged voice in a variety of settings, all of them sparse: spoken word over a snippet of Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” an electro-thump loop, undulating acoustic folk. This music is all shadows and flickers, distorted voices and static-encrusted vibes, interspersed with spoken-word interludes that sound like decaying voicemail messages. There are interpretations of Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker blues, a Smog cover and a reworking of a Bobby “Blue” Bland ballad.

Indeed, this is a postmodern blues album as conceived sometime between closing time and sunrise, a dark-night-of-the-soul lament in which the artist tosses and turns while mumbling and slurring his words. On originals such as  “Where did the Night Go,” “Running” and “New York is Killing Me,”  the artist testifies to a life without rest or solace, a kind of eternal sleeplessness where everything is blurred and anxious. After a career steeped in baritone authority, “I’m New Here” is startling for the vulnerability and fragility it reveals. The 28-minute length of this album adds to the impression that this feels more like a demo, a collection of fragments woven by Russell into a cautionary mood piece, rather than a major comeback.

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