In the week that NME announced its 50 records of this past decade, I heard one of the next decade's best. I admit this sounds like an outrageous claim, especially in a world saturated with statements about what's fresh and hot. But when the album I'm talking about twists a 21st-century phenomenon in a refreshing way, and redirects it towards a rather interesting future, I think polemic is necessary. The record is by Gil Scott-Heron – the artist most famous for his politicised 70s jazz-funk – and it is called, rather wonderfully, I'm New Here.
The 21st-century phenomenon this album could reinvent is that of "heritage music". Rick Rubin became the creator of this new genre in 1994, sitting Johnny Cash in his living room and encouraging the spartan, sublime results. Rubin's reinvention of Cash's sound made sense artistically in the wake of grunge – a genre predicated on an authentic connection to raw emotions – and helped encourage new audiences to explore his back catalogue.
Fifteen years on, with the music industry in freefall and more beholden than ever to the back catalogue big-hitters, it's hardly surprising that these reinventions keep coming – Neil Diamond, Tom Jones, Tony Christie et al. Still, it's miserable how little they have moved on artistically. Take Shirley Bassey's recent album, The Performance, full of songs written by contemporary artists. Most of them swaddled her in cosy arrangements that added years to her voice, with only the sparky The Girl from Tiger Bay by the Manic Street Preachers making the Dame sound like she was far from the grave.
Which is where Scott-Heron's record comes in. Despite his absence from record studios in recent decades, and problems with drug addiction, this record sounds fiercely alive, tilting towards Cash's American Recordings, but also startlingly different.
Firstly, all bar two of these tracks were written by Scott-Heron himself, and the autobiographical details pack a particular punch because the words are his own. When Scott-Heron talks about the people that shaped it, including his guardian, he does so in unvarnished poetry – "Lily Scott, absolutely not your room service, mail order typecast black grandmother", he booms – and his a cappella narratives scatter through his record like shadowy hip-hop skits. The effect is respectful, yet staggering. You not only get a sense that Scott-Heron is trying to link hip-hop with a broader tradition of storytelling, but that he wants to expand the reach of this music, as well as himself.
Even more striking are the sounds that Scott-Heron's words weave around. Your Soul and Mine develops the dubstep atmospheres of Burial and Shackleton, while Where Did the Night Go conjures up the memory of The Dead Flag Blues by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and gives it a new, heavy pulse. The opening track, On Coming from a Broken Home (Part 1), rises from a sample from Flashing Lights by Kanye West – an artist who previously sampled Scott-Heron on a 2005 album track. Such a steal could suggest an old artist trying to appear modish, but it works – this risk instead showing a man embracing the music he helped create, and taking it to new places.
As the new decade comes in, let's hope other musicians undertake similar endeavours – stretching their prejudices about what older artists can do. I include Jack White in this request, who made a cosy album for Loretta Lynn in 2004, and who is to work with rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson next year. The indications are good – the 72-year-old Jackson saying to an Oklahoma newspaper that "[Loretta] just did her little Loretta Lynn songs ... but he's gonna stretch me some." And so White should. Rather than being treated as national treasures, artists such as Jackson and Scott-Heron are living, breathing icons whose talents we should encourage. And in this peculiar world in which music charges on, we should support them. After all, they are new here.