The history of the spoken word in Black
America began with the angst and first
 anguished
cries of the tortured slave when Africans were first dragged across the
Atlantic, kicking and screaming, to the shores of the New World Stage.
The first couple of this historic movement, I think most scholars would
agree, had to be Phyllis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Phyllis
Wheatley is heralded as being the first black person invited to the
white house. Dunbar spoke Ebonics, a black dialect of the English
language, before anybody new what Ebonics was. And I've noticed that on
the internet today Dunbar's style of expression is making a comeback;
people in the high speed technological world we live in today are using
words like "dis", "dat" and "dem" instead of "this", "that", and
"them" just to save a little time.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 30s and 40s
gave birth to "The New Negro", James Weldon Johnson, who coined what was
to become the Black National Anthem, "Life Every Voice and Sing", and
to a man who may be considered the Poet Laureatte of Black America,
Langston Hughes, and his signature piece, "I've Known Rivers". The Black
Power Movement of the sixties blessed us with the likes of Don L. Lee,
Sonia Sanchez and scores of others, including Nikki Giovanni, who became
such a household name she may have been our first rock-star-poet. Marvin
X is widely accredited with starting the modern Black Arts Movement in
the U.S. Teaming with such notables as Ishmael Reed, Ed Bullins, Ted
Joans and Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), who has been pertinent from
before the time he wrote one of the most important books in my life,
"Blues People", to the controversial, "Somebody Blew Up America" and
beyond; "If racism don't kill me, capitalism will". He and Bob Kaughman
were the key brothers behind the The Beat Movement in the Fifties that
gave rise to the likes of Beat Icons, Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg. But during the Sixties there emerged a new militant
revolutionary group called, The Last Poets. When I first heard these
guys I thought, "Oh my God! Can they say that in America!?!" "Blessed
are those who struggle to survive because oppression is worse than the
grave! Better to die for a worthy cause than to live and die a slave!"
I told Umar, from The Last Poets, personally, "You guys helped me come
into my manhood. If you guys could say what you said, so poetically, I
had to do better and step my game up!" However the apex and plateau of
the spoken word movement may indeed be Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have
A Dream" speech. He articulated what every enslaved and free black
person in the United States had been feeling and thinking and dreaming
for over 400 years!
Billie Holiday's, "Strange Fruit", has been
called the first protest song in America! It would be followed by such
anthems as, "Say It loud! I'm Black And I'm Proud!" by James Brown. Gil
Scott Heron's, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", Marvin Gaye's,
"What's Going On?" "The Message", by Grand Master Flash & the Furious
Five, Public Enemy's Fight the Power!" and now, "I Love Everything About
You, But You!" by yours truly, has been called amongst other things,
"The song of the century" and "The new international black anthem." .
Who knew when we all heard that first big
rap song by The Sugar Hill Gang, "Rapper's Delight", what would
follow. To today's first spoken word couple in Black America would
probably be, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. But today we have a new
spoken word art form called Slam! Def Poetry Jam's Cable TV show has
brought poetry to the mainstream media for the first time ever! Also out
of New York and carrying the torch from the Last Poets was a group
called The Nile River Gods; and from that group the number one selling
spoken word artist worldwide, Talaam Acey. There are a number of young
up and coming spoken words artist right here in Oakland starting to
receive national acclaim; including Wordslanger, a firebrand poetess,
Ise Lyfe, who said, "We done went from being freedom fighters to being
dumb fa free", and Nercity, "Marvin Gaye was the Tupac of your parents
generation." Indeed, Marvin Gaye may not only have created the first
seamless album with, "What's Going On?", where each track flowed
smoothly into the next without stopping; he may also be the Godfather of
Rap! Hip Hop is the lifestyle and culture started in the late 70s, early
80s and Rap (or flow-etry, spoken word poetry rhymed to Hip Hop beats) is
its highest art form. There's this one instrumental on the album
"Trouble Man" which predates any other Hip Hop beat that I can think of.
And the first Rap Song may indeed have been, "Funky Space
Reincarnation", on Marvin's, "Hear, My Dear", double album which slipped
under the radar of most black music enthusiasts, but in my opinion is
one uv his funkier albums! I want to take up where Marvin left off, with
a brand new sound! A kind of Holy Hip Hop or Talk Music, if you will,
that's so fresh and so clean that, although up until this time no spoken
word artist has yet to break the glass ceiling and hit the mainstream,
with your help...Paradise Freejahlove Supreme and JazzFunkHipHoPoetry
will usher in a new era of great music!
I hope u njoyed my freestyle!?!
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From my one man show:
"My
Dr. King Speech, 'I Still Have A Dream': What Dr. King Might Say
If He Were Alive Today Paradise Freejahlove Supreme
I have come to you today....to
answer....a question. A question that I know is on many of your
minds...and that is at one and the same time a cry of despair
and a plea fa hope. I have come to you today because I know that
your collective minds are in a quandary. Your spirits and morale
is sagging, and many of you are wondering if all our blood sweat
and tears, all our efforts to realize the American Dream have
been in vain.
I have come to you today because I
know that many of you are realizing perhaps for the first time -
that racism is not some little puppy that you can just pat on
the head and teach new tricks overnight. But it's more like an
enormous and stubborn ol' pit bull filled up with millenniums of
hate.
I have come to you today because I
know that many of the promises that were made to us have been
reneged upon. And much of what we've fought for and against in
recent years have been retracted, revised and reconstituted. And
although poverty and homelessness in many places all over the
country today is worse than it was 40 years ago in the old rural
south...the answer to your question is, yes: I STILL HAVE A
DREAM!
I still have a dream although it
seems that we have lost complete control over our young
people today, and some of our own children are poisoning and
terrorizing our neighborhoods with the kind of drugs and
violence that fulfill the purposes of white supremacy.
I still have a dream although
many of my own people have mistaken my dream of brotherhood
through integration, for assimilation and the loss of
self-identification; and have become like scattered little
black ants trying to avoid being trampled by the ubiquitous
feet of the oppressor.
I still have a dream because I
never have and I never will give up on my people. A people
upon whose broad and capable shoulders much of the destiny
of the entire world has been entrusted.
I still have a dream because
I've been to the mountain top...and mine eyes have seen the
bigger picture, its process of development, and the paragon
of glory that has only just begun to embrace us as a people.
I still have a dream but
today I come to you with a new hope! A dream not so much
for a nation, but for the wisdom, power and salvation
of self-realization! A self-realization in which we use
our books and religions as guides to remind us who we
are, and not as barriers we allow to come between us and
the Divinity we are all striving to become.
I have a dream that someday
we'll look upon the whole universe as our place of
worship, we'll make love the common denominator of all
our religions and try to worship the Supreme in
everybody and everything all of the time!
I have a dream that someday
soon we'll bring our faraway Gods and Heavens home, by
realizing them on the inside and actualizing them on the
outside!
I have come here today to assure you
that someday in the not too distant future freedom will ring all
over this great land! Freedom will ring from the great memorial
of the Twin Towers of New York to the Great Pyramids of Cairo,
Egypt! Freedom will ring from the foothills of East Oakland to
the sand hills of the Middle East! Freedom ring from the
abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit to the abandoned peoples of
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast! Freedom will ring on all the
southsides! South Philly, Southside Chicago, the South Bronx,
South Central L. A., all the way down to South Africa, let
freedom ring! And I am as sure of this as I know the sun is
rising somewhere out there even though you can't see it right
now! Freedom will ring until one day we'll all be able to sing
as they did in that ol' negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at
last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!
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Paradise Freejahlove
Supreme