Last Poets, The

Impact on the world

Formed on Malcolm X's birthday in 1968, the collective's politically charged spoken-word performances over percussion—on pieces such as 'When the Revolution Comes' from the albums 'The Last Poets' (1970) and 'This Is Madness' (1971)—are credited by critics and historians with almost single-handedly laying the groundwork for hip-hop. Described as 'the village elders of the rap world' and 'the godfathers of hip-hop,' and hailed by poet Amiri Baraka as 'the prototype rappers,' they influenced Public Enemy, Common, A Tribe Called Quest, and Kendrick Lamar; their radicalism placed a 1971 album on the Nixon administration's surveillance lists, and they later collaborated with Common on the Kanye West-produced 'The Corner' (2005).

Life & background

The Last Poets formed on May 19, 1968—Malcolm X's birthday—at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem, taking their name from a poem by South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was writing in the last age of poetry before the gun. The founding trio of David Nelson, Gylan Kain, and Abiodun Oyewole performed poetry backed by conga drummer Nilaja Obabi, and the group's rotating membership—which across two offshoot lineups came to include Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Umar Bin Hassan, and Suliaman El-Hadi—fused Black Nationalist and civil-rights-era themes with African percussion in a style they later called 'jazzoetry.' Their confrontational early albums became sought-after touchstones as rap emerged in the 1980s, cementing their reputation as forefathers of the form, and members have continued to record and collaborate with hip-hop artists into the twenty-first century.

Sources

1. Britannica (The Last Poets); NPR; BlackPast.org; Hiphop Archive & Research Institute (Harvard University)