Poetry's Bad Rap

By: Hua Hsu

It's no secret that hip-hop is home to many, many contradictions. Here is one of them: I love rap, but I don't like poetry.

This isn't completely true: I have a soft spot for William Carlos Williams' scathing and dark In the American Grain, which accuses things about national character that straight language can't. But generally speaking, people don't have much patience for poetry nowadays. For all the canon-invading arguments about Rakim or Tupac representing our most eloquent "street poets," one would be hard-pressed to find too many folks who would prefer to hear them sans beats. People are suspicious of the word when it is spoken and unadorned. They find it pretentious, opaque and indirect. They avoid it, even if it speaks the same truths — or plays with the same, coy deceptions — as the music they love. And, most of it all, they find it inert and self-indulgent. The latest disc from comedian Chris Rock features a skit wherein a federal agent tries to break the spirit of a would-be terrorist bomber. No manner of interrogation works — until the agent subjects his suspect to the excruciating torture of a starry-eyed spoken word poet serenading the sun, moon and stars.

Oddly enough, Rock's corny, straw-man poet sounded suspiciously like the Last Poets. But in the 1960s, this loose group of militant black New Yorkers was no joke — they were troublesome enough to make it onto President Richard Nixon's counter-intelligence watch lists. Jalal Mansur Nurridin, an Army paratrooper who chose prison over the Vietnam War, founded the group in the 1960s. While incarcerated, he converted to Islam and began writing and performing a brash, animated style of poetry that would eventually distinguish the group. In 1969, Nuriddin, joined by Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole, adopted the name the Last Poets. The trio had been inspired by the South African writer Little Willie Copaseely, who believed that they were, at that very moment, inhabiting the last period of poetry-as-protest — it would be the firearms next time.

Though they were only together for a few years, the group's vision and sound grew with each release. They cut their fierce and unapologetic debut in 1970, a rather primitive-sounding pairing of spare drumming and black-against-white (and even black-against-black) verse. The next year, with Nilajah replacing Oyewole, the Poets released This is Madness. The scope was a bit wider, with "Mean Machine" (later to be remade into a minor electro hit) foreshadowed the technological overdrive to come and the title cut pointed toward a deeper and more depressing nihilism. They tried to get more musical on their 1972 album Chastisement, ornamenting their nag-and-conga style with horns and the occasional chorus — the mission was most cogently presented on the classic "Jazzoetry." The group became more musically experimental as time drew on, and it wasn't until Delights in the Garden in 1977 that the Last Poets got it right. Teaming up with legendary drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, the album featured the group's increasingly cosmic poetry, but with funkier, tighter backing tracks — check out the scorching "It's a Trip" and the sublime title cut.

One of the Last Poets' great contemporaries was Gil Scott-Heron, a Bronx-by-way-of-Chicago poet who managed to smuggle his conscious verses into the 1970s R&B charts. Like the Last Poets, Scott-Heron's early work sacrifices a bit of musicality in order to insure the message is being heard loud and clear — you can't exactly hum along to his 1971 semi-hit, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." After slowly adapting his poems to conventional song structures over the course of his first three albums, he recorded the excellent Winter in America in 1973 with his longtime collaborator, Brian Jackson. Though it was released on the tiny Strata East label, it featured some of his most moving material yet, from the piano-led "Rivers of My Father" to his brilliant, disco-friendly treatise on alcoholism, "The Bottle." In 1975, Scott-Heron was the first artist signed to Clive Davis' then-new label, Arista. His albums from this period — First Minute of a New Day ("Ain't No Such Thing as Superman"), From South Africa to South Carolina (the surprise hit "Johannesburg") and the live masterpiece It's Yours World — are brilliant fusions of slick, funky soul and lyrical righteousness.

Interestingly, both the Last Poets and Scott-Heron can be heard on a couple of this year's biggest records: Chicago rapper Common's sleeper hit "The Corners" features a guest appearance from Last Poets Bin Hassan and Oyewole, while "My Way Home," a track on Kanye West's Late Registration, features a pitched-down sample of Scott-Heron's "Home is Where the Hatred Is." Poetry may not have the place in city life it once did, but it's heartening to see that the good stuff still captures the imagination of the young.