The Last Poets Africanism

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 honoring, because we did not honor 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 favorable comparison with their seminal works of the past, whilst showcasing their undimmed passion andlyrical 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 ' n*s ' 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.'