My friend Jonder had hooked me up with some Prince Fatty / Nostalgia 77 Dub that I've been jamming heavy. Listening to Understand What Dub Is today, I decided to do the ole JA thing & pair up some original vocal tracks with their versions.
The OG 8 posts will have to wait.
"In 1970 the Last Poets released their first album and dropped a bomb on black Amerikkka's turntables. Muthafuckas ran f'cover." - Darius James from That's Blaxploitation!, St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.
The Last Poets are a group of poets & musicians who rose up from the late 1960s African American civil rights movement.
Jalal Nuriddin (Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin aka Alafia Pudim aka Lightnin' Rod [July 24, 1944 – June 4, 2018]), an Army paratrooper who chose jail instead of going to fight in the Vietnam War, founded the core group in prison after converting to Islam & perfecting his performances of "spoken word" poetry set to a rhythmic beat. Nuriddin was released from prison along with Umar Bin Hassan & Abiodun Oyewole: they settled in Harlem where they joined the East Wind workshop. They began performing their poetry, backed with music, on the streets of New York.
The name the Last Poets came from a South African writer named K. William 'Little Willie Copaseely' Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before violence would become the voice of man. "When the moment hatches in time's womb there will be no art talk," he wrote. "The only poem you will hear will be the spear point pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain....Therefore we are the last poets of the world."
On May 19, 1968, the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park) in Harlem & uttered their first poems. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Just two months had passed since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr had been assassinated.
"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 & 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. Now half a century later, the slaughter continues daily, in the form of assaults, school shootings, & 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, Understand What Black Is, in which he & Umar Bin Hassan trade poems over reggae orchestration, horns, drums, & flute. It's their first album in 20 years.
Praise be to Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole, Baba Donn Babatunde, & many many others too numerous to list here...
The Last Poets - Black & Dub Tastes, NØ Comps, 2019.
*Rain of Terror
+Rain of Terror Dub
*What I Want to See
+What I Want to See Dub
*The Music
+The Music Dub
*Understand What Black Is
+Understand What Black Is Dub
*North, East, West, South
+North, East, West, South Dub
* - Original tracks from The Last Poets - Understand What Black Is, Studio Rockers STUDRLP009, 2018.
+ - Dubs provided by Nostalgia 77 & Prince Fatty production from The Last Poets - Understand What Dub Is,
Studio Rockers STUDRCD010, 2019.
Nobody's ready yet,
NØ
