Last Poets, Lost Prophets

For many Black Americans, it was a Where were you when you first heard the Last Poets moment… 

The Last Poets were the most militant sounding thing we had ever and never heard before. It was beyond our middle class Martin Luther King I had a dream dreams…

Abiodun Oyewole (The Last Poets)

They sounded scary! 

Our reaction was - they sounded like they wanted kill all the white people. They were talking about revolution. They were talking about bringing down the government...

And then they used the N word on record. They said it! We couldn't believe our ears! This was before Richard Pryor. We all used the word affectionately with each other in the streets. But you didn't use it around the general public. Especially you didn't spray it all over your record.

Don Babatunde (The Last Poets)

There they were, on the front of the album with their Dashikis and Afros looking fearless and dangerous. Not scared of nobody, the Government, the CIA. the police, the FBI…Yo Mama, The KKK, the president…

They would say anything on their records. And they were the first to put the lyrics on the inner sleeve. Which was weird to see. Nobody had done that before them. It was like they wanted to make sure you knew exactly what they were saying. 

Umar Bin Hussan (The Last Poets)

Hip Hop was to arrive 10 years later…

Eventually, rapping in an assertive, confident, irrepressibly aggressive manner would become the pervasive fashion. But they were there first. Their home-style recordings came out before anyone's. Gil Scott-Heron, The Watts Prophets... They stepped out first, from the corner of Harlem to your living room.

Don Babatunde, Umar Bin Hussan, Kunga Dred, Abiodun Oyewole

They were performing on the South Bank, and Kunga Dred brought them over to the Resonance studio so we could reason together…

https://soundcloud.com/resonance-fm/unknown-is-black-music-last

Art Terry, Don Babatunde, Umar Bin Hussan, Abiodun Oyewole

THE UNDERGROUND

                                       

Boy, the freaks are out tonight! 

Has it really been this long since I was in the underground? 

I forgot how freaky London can get. Maybe it's something about the heat.

But any city can get funky like that. From Madrid to New York. Here we have all kinds of folks.

When I first came to London, I was fascinated by "The Underground". The whole concept of an unseen esoteric thriving culture was so attractive to me. And to have a transport system with that same suggestive name just beckoned my imagination, when I read NME articles about all those Post-Punk bands.

So when I arrived in London from LA via NY (via Napoli, via Dusseldorf, via Paris, but that's a different blog) in 1983, I couldn't resist making The Underground my second home.

I was squatting on The Front Line in Brixton at the time, and The Underground seemed like space travel to me. We had nothing like it in LA. and it was free! In those days, none of the stations had barriers. You could just walk thru, cause they rarely checked your ticket.

Eventually I collaborated, and did sessions in London with many of the Post-Punkers whose stories and music had inspired me.

But still when I hear Iggy say "Things get too straight, I can't bear it",  I hear Russell Thompkins Jr whisper discreetly in my ear, "Go underground young man".

RICHIE HAVENS

Imagine 3 young black teenagers who are feeling restricted by conventions, sitting down in a theatre to watch this Woodstock film that we had heard of.  We expected to see a bunch of blonde hippy girls on the screen, and other people that looked nothing like us. And the first musicians we see are these totally funky brothers sitting, not standing but sitting down on the stage, blues funking some folky roots soul stuff. And seriously making it sweat! Not playing some loud guitar solo, but playing acoustically, like they are stuck inside a mobile freak-out located somewhere between Nassau and Harlem. 

If Woodstock was the landmark event of 60's culture, it was Richie Havens that announced and proclaimed the event, gave the initial spark, by being the festival's opening act. His dignity, and humility gave validity to the word 'hippy'. 

You hope when you die you go to the same place that he is.

http://m.soundcloud.com/resonance-fm/00-00-00-is-