Making love out of my song

After seeing The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 with my father-in-law, we discussed his involvement with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I learned, amongst other things, that he had met Stokely Carmichael multiple times and had disposed of a lot of pot less than 24 hours before authorities busted down the door of the house he lived in with several others looking for any pretext to arrest "agitators".

And so it came as little surprise to me upon telling him that I bought the first album by The Last Poets that he was very familiar with them and, if memory serves, he had met them personally on the odd occasion back in the day.

The group started in Harlem in 1968 and, after reading about their history, it comes off as something of a late-80s Yes situation. There was a multitude of members and some of them apparently recorded as The Original Last Poets with the others going without the "Original". I'm not sure if the song at hand was recorded by the Yes faction or the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe one. The album cover reads "The Last Poets".

Their music is invariably described as being proto-rap or a precursor to hip-hop. With spoken words delivered over beats (think Gil Scott-Heron) and various rappers and hip-hip artists attesting to the group's influence, it's apt.

While most of the songs tread thematic territory such as societal change (e.g. - "When the Revolution Comes") and racial consciousness (e.g. - "Wake Up, Niggers") explicitly, there are a couple pieces here that pair these themes with matters salacious.

"Black Thighs" is one of those songs. With a bongo/conga drum beat underneath, Umar bin Hassan rhapsodizes:

Black thighs
Black thighs bumping, grinding
Black thighs
Black thighs making me forget all pain

As he does so, his bandmates Charles Davis and Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin bring the scene to life with some heavy breathing and various lewd vocalizations. Before his "climax in the sky", bin Hassan veers towards the political with "Black muscles making me forget all about white thighs, white love". (This is a repudiation of the moan "White thighs, ooh, white thighs" in the previous song.)

I cannot recommend this album enough. Hypnotic rhythms and stirring speech/vocalizations in which the poets grapple with contradictions and disappointments, look within and without, and observe all around them make for a powerful, genuine experience. Plus they get between black thighs occasionally too.