THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This is the time that we who have benefited 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 30 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 revolutionary poetry that The Last Poets had introduced to the world outside of Harlem at the dawn of the ’70s.
In 2018 the two remaining Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan, embarked on a 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 the new setting of reggae. 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 of 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.”
The Last Poets. Courtesy Image
Several years later, the followup 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. 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 poems that first appeared on the group’s self-titled 1970 debut album. He’d written When The Revolution Comes aged 20, 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... 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. “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, but 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 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 musician father was jailed for armed robbery, he took to the streets, 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 for 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 50 years later. In Umar’s own words, “it became a prayer, a call to arms, a spiritual pond to bathe and cleanse in because n—s are not just vile and disgusting and shiftless. N—s 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 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 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 unleashed on the Poets’ second album This Is Madness! Abiodun had left for North Carolina by then, where he became enmeshed in revolutionary activities and spent almost four years in jail for armed robbery after attempting to seize funds related to the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, the 21-year-old Umar was squatting in Brooklyn and had developed 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 paints a feverish landscape peopled by prominent black leaders that descends into chaos. “All my dreams have been turned into psychedelic nightmares,” he wails over a groove now powered by Allen’s ferocious drumming.
Tony Allen. Courtesy Image
Those sessions lasted 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 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 3 of the project, and who better to fill out the rhythm tracks than two key musicians from Seun 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 U.K. jazz talents 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 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.”
