The Last Poets: Progenitors of Rap

Perhaps it was the Vietnam War dragging on, nightly television footage of bombed villages, body bags and helicopters dropping flaming glue on Vietnamese farmers or the war at home with riots in the streets and cities burning, but the late ’60s seemed far more apocalyptic than the microprocessor anxieties of Y2K. To those of us who lived through it, it was the eschaton, the end of days. And fitting with those chiliastic times, our prophets were The Last Poets.