Spoken-word proto-rap artist Gil Scott-Heron's new album, "I'm New Here," opens and closes with an unexpected sample: Kanye West's "Flashing Lights." The juxtaposition of one of America's most notorious polemecists speaking over such an unabashedly commercial pop track is amusing at first, but as Heron and his voice-of-God baritone gets deeper into  tales of broken homes and how the guidance of women makes men who they are, it becomes a bit more striking. The takeaway is this -- we're still dealing with many of the same things Heron lamented back in the heyday of American urban decay.

But the gravity of Scott-Heron's presence isn't enough necessarily to pleasurably sustain a whole LP on its own today, especially in light of rap's recent wholesale transformation into another strain of disco. The striking element of "New," Heron's first record in a decade and half, is the very savvy production helmed by XL Records founder Richard Russell. The music is an odd melange of buzzing, dubsteppy bass, ramshackle drum loops and a sort of world-weary bluesiness that by and large does Scott-Heron's ruminations on love, loss and identity justice. But it's a brooding thing to take in one sitting -- at a listening session Wednesday at Silver Lake's El Tres Inn, instructions from Scott-Heron politely insisted on such -- and the moments of levity were welcome.

“For those of you who believed I wouldn’t be here,” Gil Scott-Heron told the El Rey crowd with an amiable smile Sunday night, “you lose.”  It was the 60-year-old poet, musician, spoken-word sage and hip-hop harbinger’s first show in L.A. in several years. After decades of parsing media mirages in song, it was as if Scott-Heron’s mere appearance onstage were his latest political provocation. He said nothing about the drug- and health-related predicaments that had kept him from performing in the U.S., except to suggest that the rumors on the Internet had been, to borrow the words of another humorous and acutely race-conscious American raconteur, Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.  The message was simply this: Gil Scott-Heron is still here.

Seated behind a keyboard, Scott-Heron introduced himself to the audience with a freewheeling and amusing monologue that took in the ludicrousness of CNN-commissioned “experts,” the trick of finding your own “-ology” and the problems with February as Black History Month and calendars in general. He announced a new record (his first in more than a decade and a half) to be released next year, "I’m New Here," which he joked would surprise listeners as much as “the old ones you have not bought,” and a book, "The Last Holiday," chronicling Scott-Heron and Stevie Wonder’s 1980s campaign to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.