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…
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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…
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| Art Terry, Don Babatunde, Umar Bin Hussan, Abiodun Oyewole |
