I’m New Here is a shock. It’s a wallop filled with big nasty beats, a wide range of sonic atmospheres, and more — sometimes unintentional — autobiographical intimacy than we’ve heard from Gil Scott-Heron than ever before. Produced by XL Recordings head Richard Russell, I’m New Here is his first record in 16 years. It is a scant 28 minutes and doesn’t need to be a second longer. It’s unlike anything he’s previously recorded, though there is metaphoric precedence in his earliest, largely spoken-word, albums. Its production pushes forcefully at the margins and Scott-Heron embraces it without a hint of nostalgia.

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The music of 1968, the subject of our latest AllMusic Loves feature, captures the extreme conflict and rebelliousness — the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in the U.S. and Paris, the Prague Spring — in all its blazing beauty and abject horrors. In classical music, a number of important strides were made in terms of making avant-garde styles accessible to a large public it had never had before, which has to be addressed here rather than in our feature’s lists, as true CD re-releases do not exist for most of those albums. The big event in 1968 classical music was the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and its two corresponding soundtrack albums on the long-defunct MGM Records label. In addition to the big tune by Richard Strauss and the Viennese waltz music used in the film, the masses were introduced for the first time to then way-out-there composers like György Ligeti and Anton Webern. CBS Masterworks’ knock-off on 2001 featured Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of the Strauss — and yes, some Ligeti — but added a suite from Karl Birger-Blöhmdahl’s “space opera” Aniara.

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