“We must recapture our heritage and our identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves from the binds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to un-brainwash an entire people.”
Malcolm X
This is a call for all Black artists within the music industry to realize their potential and strength. This is a message to all the Black rappers, singers, and fans who must begin to hold each other accountable for the music that is produced for the Black world.
This article is dedicated to a courageous, talented, intelligent group of Africans who pioneered conscious lyrics within all of their music. These African Griots were called ‘The Last Poets.’ The Last Poets were the first modern-day rap group who grew out of the Black Power movement of the 60s. This powerful group took African culture and social and political awareness to higher levels of consciousness within the Black Nation. Brothers Gylan Kain, Absodum Oyewole, David Nelson, and conga player Niliya formed the group in New York during the year of 1968.
Right from the very start, their lyrics taught and advocated Black Power, Black self-determination, Umoja, and resistance and took listeners through African historical journeys. The Last Poets rapped about revolts, white supremacy, genocide, the symbolism of the dollar bill, politics, and countless other topics that our Black nation faced on a daily level. They would go on to teach us that “the musician’s role was to turn people on, to wake people up before Black folk found themselves drowning in a puddle of the white man’s spit.”
The Poets would proclaim that Black people feared revolutionary change and that we were very un-together people.
In the early ’90s, as my liberation ideologies began to take shape, I would wake up each morning to the lyrics of The Last Poets. “The white man got a God complex and Blessed are those who struggle, oppression is worse than the grave, it’s better to die for a noble cause than to live and die a slave.”
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