Lightnin' Rod - Hustlers Convention (1973)

1. Sport - Kool & the Gang, Lightnin' Rod
2. Spoon
3. Café Black Rose
4. Brother Hominy Grit
5. Coppin' Some Fronts for the Sets
6. Hamhock's Hall Was Big (And There Was a Whole Lot to Dig!)
7. Bones Fly from Spoon's Hand
8. Break Was So Loud, It Hushed the Crowd
9. Four Bitches Is What I Got
10. Grit's Den
11. Shit Hits the Fan Again
12. Sentenced to the Chair


Great Review From An Anonymous Customer From Amazon.com
"It was a full moon, in the middle of June, in the summer of '59/ I was young and cool, and shot a bad game of pool, and hustled all the chumps I could find/ Now see they called me Sport, 'cause I pushed the bar short, and loved all the women to death/ I partied hard, and packed a mean rod, and could knock you out with a right or a left/ I had learned to shoot pool, playin' hooky from school, at the tender age of nine/ And by the time I was eleven, I could pad-roll seven, and down your whole quart of wine."

Thus begins the blueprint of hip-hop, Hustler's Convention. Released in 1973, a side project of the black nationalist spoken-word group The Last Poets, and featuring a musical score by none other than Kool & the Gang ..., this album is so hip, it comes with a leg attached.

It tells the story of two slick hustlers, Sport and Spoon (his "ace-boon-poon"), preparing for a huge gathering of every underworld character fathomable: "Now you could feel all the tension building up at the convention, as the hustlers began to arrive/ Musta been 9000 or more that came through the door, the time was 11:55." They pit their skills and street-savvy against the best dice, pool, and card sharks you could ever hope to meet, culminating in a car chase and shoot-out with the cops (complete with great sound-effects). It ends with Sport's jailhouse musings on the structure of society, and how "it had cost me twelve years of my time to see what a nickel and dime hustler I had really been..."

This was a favorite record of the cats we now look back on as the pioneers of rap music. It's been sampled by the Beastie Boys, Steady B., a Tribe Called Quest, Main Source, and the Jungle Brothers, and its atmosphere is what Tarantino wishes he could evoke. I've known sections of it by heart, like my hip-hop forebears, since I was thirteen years old, and it's exciting that this incredible musical treasure is once again available, after being out of print for years. Anyone one who thinks they know anything about hip-hop, but is unaware of this, is delusional, and, as Sport says, "if you ain't down, you best not hang around, 'cause you sure as hell will get beat."