THE LAST POETS
How hip-hop’s shock troops battled Nixon, crack and the KKK to preach black revolution. Now they have Rita Ora to contend with.
For Abiodun oyewole The lAsT PoeTs were conceived in death. it was spring 1968, and this tall, 19-yearold Queens-raised “middle-class negro” was working for a new york anti-poverty programme with a young man named david nelson. nelson had been talking about a poetry collective to promote unification within the black community, but Abiodun, raised on jazz, soul, and gospel, schooled in hemingway, and writing French love poetry for his girlfriends, wasn’t too keen. Then on April 4, 1968, everything changed. “when they killed dr [Martin luther] King i lost my mind,” he says. “i took it as a personal insult. he was on a non-violent platform. how can you blow the man away? i’m not a turn-the-other-cheek person, but i thought he was righteous. i called david and said, we got to get this group together because if not i’m going to get a gun and do something stupid.” Augmented by poet and playwright Gylan Kain, whom nelson had met at Columbia university, the group decided to perform at Malcolm X’s birthday memorial at harlem’s Mount Morris Park on May 19. due to his gospel upbringing, oyewole could sing and orate but nelson’s voice was weak “and Kain couldn’t hold a note if you handed it to him”, so they decided they’d chant together instead. backed by an on-stage drummer, each armed with incendiary new poems they’d written, the trio opened their performance with a chant oyewole had heard on the news, as black students at howard university in washington dC demanded the resignation of their president. “They were singing, ‘Are you ready niggers? you got to be ready.’ i was blown away. so i said, let’s go out singing that. Pretty soon, everybody in the park was chanting it.” Christened by david nelson after a poem by south African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile (odd Future rapper earl sweatshirt’s dad), who believed he was writing in the final era of poetry before uprising, The last Poets were born.
November 2016, and abiodun oyewole is backstage at ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club with fellow Last Poet umar bin Hassan, and on-off drummer for the past 30 years, baba donn babatunde. in the 48 years since mount morris Park, the group’s fortunes have heaved and pitched, along with their reputation. While their spare, drum-led chants, dextrous rhymes and incendiary lyrics are cited as the blueprint of hip-hop, hip-hop has weakened their message. Their pejorative use of the word “niggers” in early numbers like Wake up, niggers, and niggers are Scared of revolution, was designed to stir a dormant black nation to action. and while they’re still sampled and saluted by nas, Common and dead Prez, their most famous line, from oyewole’s 1970 call-to-arms, When The revolution Comes, is currently “party and bullshit”, sampled ironically on biggie Smalls’ 1993 single of the same name, and currently floating free of meaning on rita ora’s How We do (Party), currently standing at 49 million YouTube views. “i’m suing a bunch of people as we speak,” says oyewole, with a wry, booming authority. “When biggie sampled it, i let it go. not any more. Hearing rita ora is like someone throwing knives in my chest.” Times have changed, as have The Last Poets. Live, the group are warm, funny, wise and inspiring, especially when umar bin Hassan stops proceedings to address the uS President elect. “everyone asking how it feels to have a racist president,” he says. “ain’t nothing new. black people have had 400 years of racist presidents.” umar bin Hassan first encountered The Last Poets at a black arts Festival at ohio’s antioch College in 1968. a night-shift worker at Firestone Tire and rubber in akron, raised in the elizabeth Park projects, he had fought in Cleveland’s Hough race riots of 1966, and watched the Tv news in excitement as black Panthers occupied California’s State Capitol building in may ’67. Part-time heavy for ahmed evans’s black nationalists of new Libya, umar was working as the festival’s head of security – “Head down, frisking everyone” when “i heard this boom: ‘i’m abiodun! i’m with The Last Poets. i don’t have to check in.’ i showed him my .38 and i said, You checkin’ in or checkin’ out. on-stage, abiodun shouted, ‘Who’s that crazy motherfucker on the door? He’s going to kill all of us before the white people do!’ but when i saw what they did with the drum and their voices… man. it was like seeing The Temptations.” after the show umar told abiodun, “i’m coming to new York, i’m going to be a poet. dun said, ‘We’ve got a loft called east Wind on 125th Street. Come visit.’” Funded by Jason benning’s new breed clothing company, who’d popularised the dashiki as a symbol of black cultural identity, east Wind was home to fashion shows, Last Poets recitals, Panther benefits and jazz performances from albert ayler and Sun ra. However, by the time of umar bin Hassan’s arrival in 1969, Last Poets mk 1 was already over. “david left at the end of 1968,” says abiodun. “Kain went back to the east village. i was literally ‘the last poet’. but umar had a captivating style so, OK he’s in the group.” To keep the trinity abiodun also enlisted “This guy Jalal [mansur nuriddin] that Kain called ‘that nursery-rhyming bitch’. Jalal never did anything that didn’t rhyme. Kain thought it was corny. i thought he was a genius.”
THE LAST POETS’ NEW LINE-UP grabbed The Attention of jazz producer alan douglas, who saw them on Tv, drove to Harlem to see the trio perform, and booked them into impact Sound Studios that very day. “We just recorded our live set,” says oyewole, with understatement. “but i asked alan douglas to put the words on the inside cover, because i didn’t think people would understand us. Lyrics on a gatefold became protocol. We never get credit for that. it was a teaching tool. it works.”