The Last Poets — Holy Terror

Album number ten for The Last Poets, a group of musicians and poets formed in the late sixties. This effort is performed entirely by the Umar Bin Hassan group, consisting of Abiodun Oyewole on microphone, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, Bootsy Collins on guitar and bass, Bill Laswell on bass and production, and Aiyb Dieng on conga, bells, tambourine, gong and percussion. To help Oyewole deliver some songs, there's also Grandmaster Melle Mel ("Homesick", "Men-tality", "Funk", "Homesick [Black and Strong]", cut not present in this edition with the featuring of Don Babatunde and that of George Clinton).

Dark intro, then second track of over eight minutes, cheap boom bap, tight drum, spoken skit, synth g-funk and decent slow delivery, while the chorus is replaced by a spoken-word skit. This is followed by cheap rhythms coupled with whimsical hooks, with a terrible peak in "Pelourinho", which features a very weak tribal beat with a simple chorus sung out of tune. I don't know what Laswell worked with, but even the rhythm for the next choice is frighteningly poor and cheap, no one can save these tracks. "Funk" anticipates one of the worst songs here, "Illusion of Self", long talk skit over cheap beat with meager g-funk synths, over eight minutes, grueling choice. Laswell makes one of the worst productions of the year in the field of hip-hop, confirming himself in the last track, before leaving the outro without rhythm, rightly, he would have made yet another disaster even at the end.

Except for intro and outro, all tunes easily exceed five minutes of listening and this makes it a bloated, grueling album of nearly fifty minutes despite only seven tracks. Lyrically, they want to imitate X Clan and Public Enemy together, producing a very mediocre and very weak result. Among the peculiarities of the disc, it was released in 1993 for the Japanese market only, being distributed again in 1995, in the USA, through Rykodisc, a label affiliated with Warner. Fortunately, the album is virtually ignored by audiences and critics alike.

Rating: 3/10.