“This is the time that we, who have benefitted from the Last Poets should
be able to say, ‘it’s the Last Poets. It’s them we should be honouring,
because we did not honour them for so many years_”
KRS One wasn’t just addressing the hip hop fraternity when he uttered
those words by way of introducing the video for Invocation – a poem
written thirty years ago, around the time of the Last Poets’ last significant
comeback. He was speaking to everyone who’s been affected by the
word, sound and power issuing from the most revolutionary poetry ever
witnessed, and that the Last Poets had introduced to the world outside of
Harlem at the dawn of the seventies.
In 2018 the two remaining Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin
Hassan, embarked on another memorable return with an album –
Understand What Black Is – that earned favourable comparison with their
seminal works of the past, whilst showcasing their undimmed passion and
lyrical brilliance in an entirely new setting – that of reggae music. Tracks
like Rain Of Terror (“America is a terrorist”) and How Many Bullets
demonstrated that they’d lost none of their fire or anger, and their
essential raison d’etre remained the same.
“The Last Poets’ mission was to pull the people out of the rubble o f their
lives,” wrote their biographer Kim Green. “They knew, deep down that
poetry could save the people – that if black people could see and hear
themselves and their struggles through the spoken word, they would be
moved to change.”
Several years later and the follow-up is now with us. The project started
when Tony Allen, the Nigerian master drummer whose unique
polyrhythms had driven much of Fela Kuti’s best work, dropped by Prince
Fatty’s Brighton studio and laid down a selection of drum patterns to die
for. That was back in 2019, but then the pandemic struck. Once it had
passed, the label booked a studio in Brooklyn, where the two Poets voiced
four tracks apiece and breathed fresh energy, fire and outrage into some
of the most enduring landmarks of their career. Abiodun, who was one of
the original Last Poets who’d gathered in East Harlem’s Mount Morris Park
to celebrate Malcolm X’s birthday in May 1968, chose four poems that
first appeared on the group’s 1970 debut album, called simply The Last
Poets. He’d written When The Revolution Comes aged twenty, whilst living
in Jamaica, Queens. “We were getting ready for a revolution,” he told
Green. “There wasn’t any question about whether there was going to be
one or not. The truth was many of us still saw ourselves as “niggers” and
slaves. This was a mindset that had to change if there was ever to be
Black Power.”
He and writer Amiri Baraka were deep in conversation one day when
Baraka became distracted by a pretty girl walking by. “You’re a gash
man,” Abiodun told him. The poem inspired by that incident, Gash Man, is
revisited on the new album, and exposes the heartless nature of sexual
acts shorn of intimacy or affection. “Instead of the vagina being the
entrance to heaven,” he says, “it too often becomes a gash, an injury, a
wound_”
Two Little Boys meanwhile, was inspired after seeing two young boys
aged around 11 or 12 “stuffing chicken and cornbread down their
tasteless mouths, trying to revive shrinking lungs and a wasted mind.”
They’d walked into Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem, ordered big
meals, then bolted them down and run out the door. No one chased after
them, knowing that they probably hadn’t eaten in days. Fifty years later
and children are still going hungry in major cities across America and
elsewhere. Abiodun’s poem hasn’t lost any relevance at all, and neither
has New York, New York, The Big Apple. “Although this was written in
1968, New York hasn’t changed a bit,” he admits, except “today, people
just mistake her sickness for fashion.”
Umar is originally from Akron, Ohio, but had arrived in Harlem in early
1969 after seeing Abiodun and the other Last Poets at a Black Arts
Festival in Cleveland. That’s where he first witnessed what Amiri Baraka
once called “the rhythmic animation of word, poem, image as word-
music” – a creative force that redefined the concept of performance
poetry and stripped it bare until it became a howl of rage, hurt and anger,
saved from destruction by mockery and love for humanity. When Umar’s
father, who was a musician, was jailed for armed robbery he took to the
streets from an early age where he shined shoes and raised whatever
money he could to help feed his eight brothers and sisters. By the time he
saw the Last Poets he’d joined the Black United Front and was ready to
join the struggle.
Once in Harlem, Abiodun asked him what he’d learnt in the few weeks
since he’d got there. “Niggers are scared of revolution,” Umar replied.
“Write it down” urged Abiodun. That poem still gives off searing heat
more than fifty years later. In Umar’s own words, “it became a prayer, a
call to arms, a spiritual pond to bathe and cleanse in because niggers are
not just vile and disgusting and shiftless. Niggers are human beings lost
in someone else’s system of values and morals.”
And there you have it. It’s not just race or religion that hold us back, but
an economic system that keeps millions in poverty and living in fear – a
system born from political choice and that’s now become so entrenched,
so bloated on its own success that it’s put mankind in mortal danger. It
was many black people’s acceptance of the status quo that inspired Just
Because, which like Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution, was included on
that seminal first album. Along with their revolutionary rhetoric, it was the
Last Poets’ use of the “n word” that proved so shocking, but it would be
wrong to suggest that they reclaimed it, since it never belonged to black
people in the first place. There’s never any hiding place when it comes to
the Last Poets. They use words like weapons, and that force all who listen
to decide who they are and where they stand.
Umar’s two remaining tracks find him revisiting poems first unleashed on
the Poets’ second album This Is Madness! Abiodun had left for North
Carolina by then where he became more deeply enmeshed in
revolutionary activities and spent almost four years in jail for armed
robbery after attempting to seize funds related to the Klu Klux Klan.
Meanwhile, the 21 year old Umar was squatting in Brooklyn and had
developed close ties with the Dar-ul Islam Movement. A longing for purity
and time-honoured spiritual values underpins Related to What, whilst This
Is Madness is a call for freedom “by any means necessary,” and that
paints a feverish landscape peopled by prominent black leaders but that
quickly descends into chaos. “All my dreams have been turned into
psychedelic nightmares,” he wails, over a groove now powered by Tony
Allen’s ferocious drumming.
Those sessions lasted just two days, and we can only imagine the
atmosphere in that room as the hip hop godfathers exchanged the conga
drums of Harlem for the explosive sounds of authentic Afrobeat. Once
they’d finished, the recordings and momentum returned to Prince Fatty’s
studio, since relocated from Brighton to SE London. This was stage three
of the project, and who better to fill out the rhythm tracks than two key
musicians from Seun Anikulapo Kuti’s band Egypt 80? Enter guitarist
Akinola Adio Oyebola and bassist Kunle Justice, who upon hearing Allen’s
trademark grooves exclaimed, “oh, the Father_ we are home!” Such joy
and enthusiasm resulted in the perfect fusion of Nigerian Afrobeat and
revolutionary poetry, but the vision for the album wasn’t yet complete. He
wanted to create a new kind of soundscape – one that reunited the Poets
with the progressive jazz movement they’d once shared with musicians
like Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. It was at that point they recruited
exciting jazz talents based in the UK like Joe Armon Jones from Mercury
Prize winners Ezra Collective, also widely acclaimed producer/remixer and
keyboard player Kaidi Tatham, who’s been likened to Herbie Hancock, and
British jazz legend Courtney Pine, whose genius on the saxophone and
influence on the UK’s now vibrant jazz scene is beyond question.
The instrumental tracks on Africanism are in many ways as revelatory and
exciting as the Last Poets’ own. It’s important to remember that the
kaleidoscope of styles and influences we’re presented with here aren’t the
result of sampling but were played “live” by musicians responding to
sounds made by other musicians. That’s where the magic comes from,
aided by Prince Fatty’s peerless mixing which allows us to hear everything
with such clarity. Music fans today have grown accustomed to listening to
all kinds of different genres. Their tastes have never been so broad or all-
encompassing, and so the music on this new Last Poets’ album is as
groundbreaking as their lyrics, and perfectly suited to the era that we’re
now living in.
John Masouri
