For the first time in 35 years, Billboard’s Hot 100 chart does not include a rap song among its top 40 hit records. Anyone who’s been listening to the music for at least that long can list myriad reasons why that’s now the case: all the beats sound the same, all the artists are industry plants, all the lyrics are barely intelligible etc. For hip-hop forefather Abiodun Oyewole, though, it boils down to this: “We embraced ‘party and bullshit’, my brother.”
Fifty-seven years ago, on what would have been Malcolm X’s 43rd birthday, Oyewole cliqued up with two young poets at a writers’ workshop in East Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) to form what would become the Last Poets, a collective of bard revolutionaries. They outfitted themselves in African prints, performed over the beat of a congo drum and advocated for populism in their verses. The group has had many configurations over the years, but Oyewole, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan abide as the standout members. The trio is all over the band’s self-titled first album – which was released in 1970 and peaked at No 29 on the Billboard 200. Their follow-up album, This Is Madness, made them ripe targets for J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro campaign against the emerging figures the then-FBI director deemed politically subversive. Notably, Oyewole could not contribute to that album because he had been incarcerated for an attempted robbery of a Ku Klux Klan headquarters, serving two and a half years of a three-year sentence. (He was trying to raise bail for activists who had been arrested for striking back at the Klan.)
Though dubbed “jazz poetry” at the time, the Last Poets’ tight rhythms, insurgent message and prevailing emphasis on Black consciousness would lay the foundation (along with fellow beatniks Gary Byrd and Gil Scott-Heron) for hip-hop music. Everyone from Melle Mel to KRS One to Common has paid some kind of homage to the Last Poets in their work. Oyewole’s “party and bullshit” line, which came from the song When the Revolution Comes on the Last Poets’ first album, would become the title and hook for the Notorious BIG’s debut single. Black comedians pay tribute to the Last Poets too with every one of their spoken word slam parodies.
Late last year, the Last Poets released an 11th studio album, Africanism, without Nuriddin (who died from cancer in 2018) that takes the some of group’s most resonant poems and sets them to the Afrobeat stylings of the late, great Tony Allen – the genre pioneer who came to prominence directing Fela Kuti’s band. “I’m blown away by the fact that Umar and I both said things that are extremely relevant today,” Oyewole says. “It’s so weird that these problems continue to exist.”
At age 77, Oyewole remains as attuned to the big issues as ever. With Bin Hassan, also 77, looking on (his speech has been somewhat limited after he suffered a pair of strokes in the last few years), Oyewole let his opinions fly over the course of our hourlong interview.
On Zohran Mamdani, a former wannabe emcee turned Democratic socialist, sweeping to victory in New York City’s mayoral election, Oyewole says: “This is all in divine order.”
On the escalation of political violence in Nigeria, a thorny issue Nicki Minaj clumsily waded into during a surprise recent appearance at the UN, Oyewole says: “We need to recognize that we are one and the same people, Africa and the diaspora, and make that union a lot tighter.”
Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole. Photograph: Last Poets
On the fall of Kanye West, who is featured with Oyewole on the Common song The Corner: “Kanye got hooked on the bitches brew. He got stuck, strung out. I don’t know if you’ve seen Sinners, but Kanye West has been bitten.”
After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Oyewole says, “I wanted to become a serial killer.” In fact, some of those bitter feelings bubble back to the surface when Oyewole segues to the topic of Charlie Kirk’s death and rightwing efforts to recast Kirk as a civil rights martyr. “It’s embarrassing to have all the flags flying half mast in honor of a racist,” he says, “of someone who insulted every Black woman when he said Maxine Waters, Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson weren’t smart. It’s embarrassing that Black people would say: ‘Well, I feel sorry for him.’ There’s nothing to feel sorry for.”
Oyewole credits Last Poets co-founder David Nelson for challenging him to express that rage in couplets instead. Earlier this month, while performing on the Soul Train cruise with a lineup that also included the Isley Brothers, Oyewole told guitarist Ernie Isley that their hit song It’s Your Thing inspired the first poem he ever wrote, What’s Your Thing, Brother? – a greeting that Oyewole heard often in the 1960s among activist-minded Black New Yorkers trying to suss out one another’s political bents. You better get a thing before you lose everything, the poem goes.
Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan. Photograph: Johnny Nunez/Getty Images
The Last Poets’ grounding in Black pride and political purpose became heirlooms that were carried forward in the hip-hop movement – that critical last word intended as much to rally listeners to the dancefloor as join them in common cause against political oppression. It’s a conjoining of ideals that began in earnest with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s breakout The Message, which sets the story of the Bronx’s 1980s-era crime and dereliction to synth rhythms and breakbeats. Over the decades, rap’s practitioners have dutifully upheld the Black American oral tradition of fighting the power and passing down knowledge of self while also serving up plenty of dancefloor hits. Even Biggie followed up Party & Bullshit on his debut album with Things Done Changed, a reflection on the harsh realities of his Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn community.
But Oyewole doesn’t hear that same range of awareness or sense of urgency in hip-hop that is being pushed by the music industry today. “Our music has always been a reflection of our living,” he says, “but we’re dying spiritually.” To underscore his point, he references to an early poem of Bin Hassan’s that was revived for Africanism called Niggers Are Scared of Revolution – a flash of recognition that perked up his bandmate. “I was a shoeshine boy, going to bars and everything,” Bin Hassan says, “listening to people talk about who they are, from gang members to masters of the world. I had to take the language.”
The poem was meant to be a criticism on the N-word’s repurposing into a term of endearment – but that message backfired as hip-hop effectively sold its soul to secure its prime position in pop culture. “They even changed the feature character from cat to dog,” Oyewole says. “Back in the day when I was growing up, it was: ‘Man, that cat can play the piano’ or ‘That’s a cool cat.’ But now it’s: ‘Yo dog, that’s my dawg … ’
“No, I am not your dog.”
Hip-hop’s outsized role in making the language of Black disparagement more palatable, Oyewole further argues, has only made it easier for Donald Trump (whom he calls “the Taco Man”) and his white supremacist acolytes in government to deny Black excellence in their policy-driven attacks against critical race theory and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Nevertheless, Oyewole is confident and remains hopeful that those efforts will backfire too, and that the Last Poets’ mission of returning the power to the people will ultimately win out.
“In times of great chaos, there’s opportunity,” he says. “The Taco Man and his efforts to ban books and erase our history? All he’s really doing, in a weird way, is promoting us. But he doesn’t realize that because he’s not smart.”