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Arts > Music > Rap > USA > The Last Poets
Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan.
Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
The Last Poets: the hip-hop forefathers who gave black America its voice G Fri 18 May 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Fri 18 May 2018 16.19 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/18/
The Last Poets
You can trace the birth of hip-hop to the summer of 1973 when Kool Herc DJ’d the first extended breakbeat, much to the thrill of the dancers at a South Bronx block party.
You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier – 19 May 1968, 50 years ago this weekend – when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park – now Marcus Garvey park – in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public.
They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier.
Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King.
“Growing up, I was scheduled to be a nice little coloured guy. I was liked by everybody,” says the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole.
He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. “But when they killed Dr King, all bets were off.”
That day led to the Last Poets’ revelatory, self-titled 1970 debut of vitriolic black power poems spoken over the beat of a congo drum.
Half a century later, the slaughter continues daily, in the form of assaults, school shootings and excessive police force.
“America is a terrorist, killing the natives of the land / America is a terrorist, with a slave system in place,” Oyewole declares on the Last Poets’ new album, Understanding What Black Is, in which he and Umar Bin Hassan trade poems over reggae orchestration, horns, drums and flute.
It’s their first album in 20 years, reminding a new generation of hip-hop’s roots in protest poetry.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/18/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/18/
Jalal Mansur Nuriddin 1944-2018
born Lawrence Padilla
Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, who helped establish the foundation for hip-hop as a member of the Last Poets and in his own solo work
(...)
The Last Poets emerged in Harlem at the end of the 1960s, reciting rhythmic verses over conga drumming and speaking directly to the disenfranchised youth of New York City’s black community.
The group’s poetry pushed revolution and self-determination, while admonishing listeners about survival in an environment defined by racialized poverty.
With his high, declamatory voice and his way of milking words for their sonic potential as well as their meaning, Mr. Nuriddin (pronounced noo-ruh-DEEN) stood out.
He delivered some of the group’s most urgent and incisive verses, and although the Last Poets’ lineup rotated over time, he performed with the group well into his later years.
By then he had come to be widely known as the “grandfather of rap,” a laurel he proudly accepted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/
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