Vibe.com, April 5th, 2004
Before hip hop and Def Poetry Jam there was The Last Poets. Their chapter would fall somewhere between Amiri Baraka and Africa Bambatta in the chronicle of the spoken word. The legendary lyricists shocked young Black America into social consciousness during the civil rights era with classic poems like "Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution" and "This is Madness".
Motivated by a different political climate, Abiodunodun Oyewole and Umar Hasaan, two of the original group members, persist with their original mission. Silver manes and experienced gazes may mask their youthful spirits, but their boundless creative energy is apparent as they continue their thirty-six-year crusade to 'write' society's wrongs.
Abiodun: People might want to say if you're over 50, you're old. They can forget that because we still have youth in our spirit. We have never given up what we stood for years ago and we've gotten better. We are still fertile. In our zeal as writers we've written brand new stuff. We wanted to captivate the minds of the young people. This is something that has been entrusted in us and we are not shying away from the responsibility of what our pens can do. We're walking around with dangerous weapons in our minds and in our mouths. When this CD drops it's going to be a drop and a half. The work is authentic and it's rich. I'm proud of the fact that a lot of these young hip hop artists have decided that they had to be here. Chuck called me up and said, 'This is not an honor, brother, it's an obligation.'
Umar: Here we are going on another venture. We're taking the young kids-the real, main hip hoppers who love what they do and are serious about it and we've formed an album together. As long as I'm living this is what I'm going to do-I'm going to find a way to take it to another level.
Abiodun: The impetus of our beginning was always poetry. We always had the poetry bug in us. Poetry's in the toilet for the most part now and this whole tribute album is to try to resurrect it. Umar and I have stayed true to what poetry is supposed to be. It's supposed to lead you to a place where you'll be conscious. Most folks are sheep looking for a shepherd. Once the shepherd is no longer there, the sheep will go wherever they can get fed. TV feeds them. It got to the point where the cause was dead. People got strung out on the entertainment and the movement waned.
Umar: Before the last poets you had Amiri Baraka trying to bring out poetry-make it live, but we took it completely off the page. We gave it a market, we gave it an album. When we came out with that first album it captured the imagination of the people and it was over. It sold 400,000 copies in the first three months by word of mouth. We had no street team, no A&R;, no magazines. We gave it a platform because nobody knew you could sell poetry in America like that. Kool Herk Afrika Bambatta, KRS and all these guys were sitting around listening to us and took that influence.
Abiodun: Kool Herk told me that the only thing that they that they could listen to up in the Bronx when they came here from Jamaica was The Last Poets because we were the only ones that were saying anything that enchanted them.
The duo was fervent when the discussion turned to the state of hip hop today.
Abiodun: If you've got it, we're going to give you respect but for the most part the industry is deliberately promoting garbage. I had my students bring in some of 50 Cent's stuff and challenged them to pick out one line where he's saying something that can empower us-that can take us to another level. He says nothing.
Umar: If you're just reflecting reality in your work and don't try to make those values change and make corrections, you're just wallowing in shit and telling everybody to be comfortable. It ain't comfortable sitting in a pile of shit.
Abiodun: We're listening to the media. The media is controlling things. The puppetmaster is back at work. We put him out of a job for a while because we were listening to ourselves.
They had plenty to say about Hip Hop spilling into the mainstream.
Umar: That thing with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake-it was the white slave master snatching off the black woman's clothes on the auction bock. It was all an act of culture. The MTV white boy controls it. They're so slick; they're so cool-they know how to talk to the sisters but they hate black people. They got this white boy on MTV that's judging us on how we move. We are allowing them to take over our culture.
Abiodun: When we were younger we were creating a dance just about every other week. If we created the mashed potatoes and we'd see it on American Bandstand, the next week we had another dance. When Chubby Checker came, he was probably the biggest sellout of them all because he invented a dance that white folks could do because you didn't have to have any rhythm. All they do is twist. If you don't have anything, you'll steal everything. The white man has been consistently doing that but our culture is just like Ebonics-it changes all the time. But I know one thing: what The Last Poets do they still can't do.
Listen to The Last Poets' "Panther"
To listen to this track, you need a media player that supports .pls format, such as Winamp, iTunes, AOL Media Player, Real Player, or Musicmatch Jukebox. Windows Media Player does not support the format associated with this file type.
