Cracker Jacks

I'm pretty sure if I walked into a Last Poets concert all the music would stop and everyone would stare at me a'la the scene in "Animal House" when the gang unknowingly take their dates to a "negro" bar.  I wouldn't belong, and I don't imagine I would be too welcome. 

"Hey, fellas, howsitgoin?  You fellas playin some music?  Aww, good gravy, I love me a good hootenanny!"

Thinking about it makes me want to slap MYSELF upside the head and tell myself to go back where I came from.  You know, at home watching "Hee Haw" reruns.  Pretty much as far away from the origins of The Last Poets - formed in Harlem in 1968 on Malcolm X's birthday - as one can get.

The Last Poets, circa 1970.  Bongo blasters and prophets of doom.

It's a strange phenomenon to enjoy art that is antagonistic towards whatever group of people you belong to.  I can't really relate to the daily life situations described in the music of The Last Poets (black people "drowning in a puddle of the white man's piss"), and their liberal use of racial epithets means I have to be careful not to start singing their songs in line at the post office, but I find the music entirely funky, compelling, and enjoyable.

From the rawness of the first album (1970's "The Last Poets") - basically the sound of a group of dudes in a room with a tape recorder running, hammering out hypnotic bongo rhythms and spitting righteous fury over the various states of the black experience - to the smooth, almost acid-jazz sounds of the later work, there's something greater than mere politics, rap, or poetry going on.  The fusion creates an incideniary sort of art. 

I spend probably way too much time wondering WHY certain things appeal to me - trying to pick apart the motives behind a set of tastes that are undefinable.  I always come back to the catchphrase from the Apple Jacks cereal commercials I grew up watching - "we eat what we like!"  I'm not so much a product of environment - a white boy who grew up on a fruit farm in the buckle of the bible belt and who spent nary a day without seeing cows everywhere he looked - so much as I am just a dude who likes what he likes. 

And if I derive a perverse thrill from blasting Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," or The Last Poets' "Niggers are Scared of Revolution" in the drive through of the Cassville, MO, McDonald's, so be it.  It's no joke.  I don't change it to Trace Adkins when I pull over to eat my nuggets.  Somewhere inside that cacophony of racial fury is something for me.  Somewhere in there is something universal.  I may never be admitted to a Last Poets concert, but no matter.  I take the concert with me everywhere I go.