The Last Poets were the first Hip-Hop group.   However, this is not Hip-Hop that we today would immediately recognize. They began as ‘three poets and a drummer’, and quickly grew to include seven young Black and Hispanic artists: David Nelson, Gylan Kain, Abiodun Oyewole, Felipe Luciano, Umar Bin Hassan, Jalal Nurridin, and Suliamn El Hadi. As stated earlier, their name originates from a South African revolutionary poet’s work:

“When the moment hatches in time’s womb, there will be no art talk. The only poem you will hear will be the spear point pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain…. Therefore we are the Last Poets of the world.”

“Our goal,” Abiodun Oyewole says of the Last Poets, “was to give a poetic voice to Malcolm [X's] call for self-determination and black nationalism.” He adds that like many black activists at the time, “we were just sick and tired of things like [Martin Luther] King’s call for integration, which seemed to work against liberating the black community.”

During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Last Poets connected   with aggressive factions of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) , and the Black Panther Party (BPP).   The group released their first album in 1970, self-titled, The Last Poets. The album used a ‘spoken word’ style, and its tracks were listed as follows: “Run, Nigger”, “On the Subway”, “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution”, “Black Thighs” , “Gashman”, “Wake Up, Niggers” , “New York, New York” , “Jones Comin’ Down”, “Just Because” , “Black Wish” , “When the Revolution Comes” , “Two Little Boys”, “Surprises”. The album peaked at #29 on the 1970 US Pop Albums Chart, #11 on the US Jazz Albums Chart, and #3 on the Black Albums Chart.

Following their first success, the Last Poets released a second album in 1971, This is Madness, with the following tracks: “True Blues”, “Related to What”, “Black Is”, “Time”, “ “Mean Machine”, “White Man’s Got a God Complex”, “Opposites”, “Black People What Y’all Gon’ Do”, “O.D.”, “This Is Madness”.

Along with further commercial success (both albums sold over a million copies, with little or no formal corporate promotion and/or marketing), this album brought the Last Poets to the attention and under the direct surveillance and action of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program.

In 1979, the Sugar Hill Gang released the now classic, “Rapper’s Delight”, the first hit ‘modern rap’ single, reaching #36 on the US pop charts, #4 on the US R & B charts, and #3 on the UK singles chart. This marked a significant shift in Hip-Hop, in that while the Last Poets saw themselves as providing a ‘soundtrack to the Black revolution’, the Sugar Hill Gang simply wished to provide the soundtrack to Black house parties, BBQ’s, and dance clubs. This historical shift from the original Hip-Hop to popular rap music and style, occurred between 1970 and 1979, in less than a decade. This marks a substantial shift in Black popular culture.

Popular rap music would return to delivering more powerful messages, e. g., Grandmaster Flash/Melle Mel and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982) and “White Lines” (1983).   Popular rap music would even return to its roots in the Last Poets, particularly in Public Enemy’s seminally influential work:  Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987); It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988); Fear of a Black Planet (1990); Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991). Tupac Shakur also represented this Last Poets tradition of Hip-Hop, including through his familial connections with the Black Panther Party, but filtered through Death Row Records style West Coast hardcore.

However, since 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight”, popular rap music has and does primarily remain party music, particularly for young people. This is a substantial shift from the original understanding of the Last Poet’s work, which was also very popular in its heyday. The end of the Black Panther Party and the other radical egalitarian politics of the 1960’s and 1970’s, coincided with the transformation of Hip-Hop from the ‘soundtrack for the revolution’, to a soundtrack for a nightclub, BBQ, or house party, as it more or less remains today, with notable exceptions.

Today, Hip-Hop has more or less been wholly absorbed into mainstream Anglo-American political economy, and is arguably primarily driven by   the internal logic of this complicated system, against which it originally defined itself. The last historical stage of Hip-Hop is characterized by a series of mass media driven courtships between the crowned ‘Princes’ and ‘Princesses’ of Hip-Hop, real or fictitious, designed to maximize crossover sales potential, through ‘guest spots’ on Hip-Hop and R & B fusion tracks.   Some have called this the “commercialization” or “commodification” of Hip-Hop. I prefer the term, the Puff-Daddification of Hip-Hop.

In some comical sense, one could call Puff Daddy the “Hegel of Hip-Hop”, because his work as a whole represents Hip-Hop’s historical completion,        in the way Hegel’s philosophy represents the completion of the western tradition of metaphysics. Moreover, Puff Daddy literally deconstructs Hip-Hop, and then subsequently reconstructs Hip-Hop, rewritten into the language and grammar of mainstream Anglo-American political economy.

Today, in 2008, I propose that we have in principle reached the end of Hip-Hop’s history as an autonomous creative cultural force. It has and will continue to fuse with other musical and cultural forms, which may reenergizeit for a time. However, the possibility of Hip-Hop ever regaining its own autonomous creative energies to propel it forward, to continue its progress, seems less and less likely to me, and also to many renowned Hip-Hop artists.