Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, "Grandfather of Rap", is Dead at 73

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  1. jpo

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    Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, ‘Grandfather of Rap,’ Is Dead at 73

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    By Giovanni Russonello

    June 13, 2018

    Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, who helped establish the foundation for hip-hop as a member of the Last Poets and in his own solo work, died on June 4 at a hospital in Atlanta. He was 73.

    The cause was lung cancer, said Umar Bin Hassan, a fellow member of the Last Poets.

    The Last Poets emerged in Harlem at the end of the 1960s, reciting rhythmic verses over conga drumming and speaking directly to the disenfranchised youth of New York City’s black community. The group’s poetry pushed revolution and self-determination, while admonishing listeners about survival in an environment defined by racialized poverty.

    With his high, declamatory voice and his way of milking words for their sonic potential as well as their meaning, Mr. Nuriddin (pronounced noo-ruh-DEEN) stood out. He delivered some of the group’s most urgent and incisive verses, and although the Last Poets’ lineup rotated over time, he performed with the group well into his later years.

    By then he had come to be widely known as the “grandfather of rap,” a laurel he proudly accepted.

    With the release of their debut album, “The Last Poets,” in 1970, the group became an underground sensation, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard album chart and staying on the chart for 30 weeks despite being rarely played on radio. Mr. Nuriddin was fond of saying that the record “sold over a million copies by word of mouth,” though he never had the documentation — or the income — to prove it.

    As the civil rights movement lost steam and gave way to the separatism of Black Power, the group spoke from a standpoint of disillusionment, although with vigorous attitude. In “On the Subway,” Mr. Nuriddin rapped:

    Me knowing me
    Black proud and determined to be free
    Could plainly see my enemy yes
    Yes, yes, I know him
    I once slaved for him body and soul
    And made him a pile of black gold
    Off the sweat of my labor he stole
    But his game his game is old
    We’ve broken the mental hold
    Things must change
    There’s no limit to our range

    Mr. Nuriddin may have made his greatest contribution to the future of popular music as a solo artist. In 1973, using the pseudonym Lightnin’ Rod, he released “Hustlers Convention,” an album that unified the black tradition of toasts — rhymed stories about the heroic exploits of renegades and rebels, and the battles between them — with the contemporary sound of streetwise funk.

    Rapping in a crackling growl, Mr. Nuriddin told an extended story of two young men surviving on the New York streets, with lush backbeats provided by Kool and the Gang and A-list session musicians.

    On “Sport,” the album’s opening track, he wove a boasting first-person narrative about street hustling, cool and deliberate but adamantly paced. Aside from the improvising horn and guitar lines that swept across the album, this represented almost the exact sonic and lyrical blueprint that rappers like Melle Mel and Eazy-E would pick up on a decade later, when they released some of the first major hip-hop singles, using D.J.s instead of live bands.

    “I wrote the album so people would sit up, take notice and not become one of the hustlers, card cheats, prostitutes, pimps and hijackers I rapped about,” he said in a 2015 documentary about “Hustlers Convention.”

    In the documentary, the rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy called the album a “verbal bible” for understanding the culture of the New York streets.

    Mr. Nuriddin was born Lawrence Padilla on July 24, 1944, in Brooklyn and grew up in a housing project in the Fort Greene neighborhood. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

    “I had this need to express myself,” Mr. Nuriddin said of his childhood. “Everything was bottled up — not just within myself, but in the African-American people in general. So I began to write poetry.”

    By his mid-20s, having briefly changed his name to Alafia Pudim, he was becoming known for his facility with words, and for speaking in spontaneous rhyme. (He began going by Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin in 1973.) He soon befriended members of the Last Poets, a group with a loose membership that had started in 1968 on Malcolm X’s birthday. He eventually became a core member.

    Mr. Douglas got wind of the Last Poets and released their first album on his label, Douglas Records. But radio and television avoided the group, partly because of its unflinching attacks on institutional racism, and partly because it often used one particular word.

    On pieces like Mr. Nuriddin’s feverish “Wake Up Niggers,” the Last Poets spoke directly to the street communities that they sought to help liberate, using an African-American lexicon that had rarely been caught on commercial recordings and alienating many listeners in the process. Record sellers often slapped cautionary stickers onto the “Last Poets” album (“Recommended for Mature Adults Only”) in yet another moment that presaged the conflicted relationship that hip-hop would have with the mainstream.

    Despite tensions with Abiodun Oyewole, an original member of the Last Poets, Mr. Nuriddin continued performing under the Last Poets name for many years, typically alongside Suliaman El-Hadi. Mr. Nuriddin is featured on Last Poets recordings including the influential “This Is Madness” (1971), the sonically experimental “Chastisement” (1973) and “Scatterap/Home” (1993).


    Correction: June 15, 2018

    An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary, using information from Getty Images, misidentified the member of the Last Poets shown with Mr. Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan. He is Nilaja Obabi, not Abiodun Oyewole.


    A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2018, on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, 73, the ‘Grandfather of Rap’.


    Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, ‘Grandfather of Rap,’ Is Dead at 73
     
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  2. Winston Smith

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    **Musically**, I enjoyed their most Islamic album the most, only because of the jazz structure of the songs and the guest appearance of Purdie:

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    Lyrically, I’ve found that I can’t enjoy a lot of their albums anymore (or even early PE for that matter) because of the hotep homophobia and misogyny; for example unnecessary disses of Bayard Rustin for being gay, or Diahann Carroll for dating white men (both of whom did more for black folk that merely putting out albums like the Last Poets).

    But I recommend listening for historical reasons. In the end, I still enjoy Gil Scott Heron more. He abandoned a lot of that Nixon era hotep stuff and became more humanistic, and now that I’m older, I find reflecting on his music has made me a better person with their life lessons. Like the Last Poets, he was more musical less rap as time went on.

     

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