“Legendary pioneers of rap”
"A word hasn’t been coined to fit what we’re talking about!” The Last Poets told Rolling Stone Magazine in 1970. Today, more than 35 years later, The Last Poets are rightfully hailed as the Godfathers of The Worldwide Hip-Hop Nation. Activist lyricists born of the US civil rights uprisings of the 1960s, The Last Poets have rightfully earnt their reputation; the hard way.
At the time when James Brown was releasing his groundbreaking ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black & I’m Proud’, The Last Poets produced an early arsenal of work including the classic LPs ‘The Last Poets’ (1970) that also preceded & consequently inspired a slew of politically coherent but also more mainstream r&b projects, such Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On?’, Funkadelic’s ‘America Eats Its’ Young’, and, Curtis Mayfield’s ‘There’s No Place Like America Today’.
The Last Poets have enjoyed a huge grass-roots resurgence in popularity since the early 1990s, leading to a cameo-role in John Singleton’s film ‘Poetic Justice’ alongside Janet Jackson & Tupac Shakur, and then participated in the 1994 Lollapalooza tour of the US alongside Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkims, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Cave and George Clinton. This was followed by the ‘Holy Terror‘ LP (1995), and a published mini-autobiography, ‘On A Mission: Selected Poems and A History of The Last Poets’ (1996), which is an affecting combination of memoir and verse, as the Last Poets tell us their own story in print for the first time.