Politically charged spoken-word performers the Last Poets, who make a stop in Pittsburgh Saturday courtesy of the Kente Arts Alliance, certainly weren't the originators of rhyming over a beat.

That distinction belongs to ancient ancestors, probably in Africa, who millennia ago were already "using drums and voice as primal instruments to capture the imagination of the community," according to original Poets member Abiodun Oyewole. But if you talk to two generations of rappers, you'll get a general consensus that the New York City-based group, along with fellow incendiary Gil Scott-Heron, were a significant part of the inspiration for the billion-dollar hip-hop industry that came later.

For his part, though, Oyewole, who grew up partly in Queens and partly in the Bronx, began writing poetry not as a political statement, but as a road to high school romance. "I was trying to win the favor of women, and poetry seemed like it would be more enchanting," he reminisces. "It became something that I liked and could do easily, and I wound up going out with girls two or three years older than me."

Yet when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the cultural climate become much more militant. Oyewole had a good friend, David Nelson, who came up with the concept to form a group that performed poetry at the Malcolm X birthday commemoration in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in East Harlem. The Last Poets were born at that event when Oyewole (formerly known as Charles Davis Jr.) joined forces with Nelson and Gylan Kain, although they didn't have a name yet.

"I always give [Nelson] credit as being the architect of the group," he stresses. "I was a little more aggressive and wanted to be part of the Black Power movement. It was more curiosity than anything else -- I wanted to see what it was all about."

The Poets developed their craft at a Harlem artists' workshop called East Wind, a creative Afro-American nexus similar to the AACM in Chicago or the Watts Workshop in Los Angeles. "It was a living, breathing cultural entity with a serious political edge dealing with the times," he says.

Unlike today, when protestors get ignored by the media and herded into pens by authorities, ideas of freedom and justice captured the spirit of the wider youth culture at the turn of the '70s. So when Alan Douglas, a counter-cultural label mogul who had worked with Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary and Miles Davis, came calling with an album offer, the group jumped at the chance and recorded their famous, fiery self-titled debut filled with brimstone tracks such as "New York, New York" (probably a catalyst for Grandmaster Flash) and "When the Revolution Comes."

By then, the makeup of the group had also shifted -- two founders left, and Oyewole brought in Alafia Pudim (later known as Jalal Mansur Nuriddin) and Umar Bin Hassan. While Oyewole served a jail sentence, there was contention between the old and new lineups over the use of the name.

"They had some physical fights, and there was stuff out of order," Oyewole says, "but there were never two separate groups [called Last Poets], just some disgruntled members."

The Poets' debut and its follow-up, "This Is Madness," did quite well in the sales department, scaling Billboard's urban, jazz and pop charts all at once. How did music with such a radical, epithet-filled message reach the mainstream, many years before the anger of punk rock bands, or militant rappers such as Public Enemy and Dead Prez?

"We pulled the covers off everything and gave it straight up [in] unfiltered language," Oyewole explains. "It had nothing to do with any kind of reward, other than just getting the thoughts off our chests. People could identify with what we were saying, all over the world."

They also got some untoward attention from President Nixon, when he put the Poets on a government surveillance list. "We all had our own personal FBI agents," Oyewole jokes. "We weren't going unnoticed, and we became a sore spot [where] they were looking to see what else we might be thinking about doing. But unless they cut out our tongues, the weapons couldn't be stopped."

When the rap era took off in the mid-'80s, the Poets regained some of their previous notoriety and were considered by many to be the genre's elders. They toured with Lollapalooza, were sampled or covered by Public Enemy, Biggie Smalls and Tribe Called Quest ("I feel complimented if you want to take my stuff and sample it, but I have a son who's a lawyer, and he'll make sure I get paid"), and various Poets members made appearances on albums by Nas, Common and Kanye West. The Last Poets also became the patriarchs of the Def Poetry Jam.

Although they haven't recorded a new album since 2001's "Holy Terror" -- which included "Reign of Terror," a post-9/11 indictment of America's early support for many of the entities it later declared war on (Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, etc) -- the Poets do have a DVD available that also features fellow firebrand Amiri Baraka, and another DVD emerging to document their most recent European tour. A Last Poets tribute album, "When We Come Together," boasting an all-star lineup from Erykah Badu to Kanye West hasn't seen the light of day because of legal issues.

In the meantime, Oyewole, who considers his title to be "poet/educator," spends fruitful hours teaching creative writing workshops to young people. "I have a fellowship at Columbia, which allows me to be on their property and use their facilities. I have a wonderful relationship with many of the kids, and it's more important than the poetry itself just to see these flowers blossom."

He doesn't put much stock in the younger generation's fervor for Barack Obama, though, even expressing a bit of realistic pessimism about the candidate's chances. "It's a great show he does on TV. But the system's not going to change overnight if he's in there -- it's still set on a collision course with hell. We've got to find a way to survive, and those of us with experience in struggle might do better than those who haven't struggled. I don't have a nest egg to rely on, or stocks that have been snatched from me, so my life is simple. The world would love to see this [election of Obama] happen, and they like to see America take the lead, so it looks so delicious. But he's not the Messiah, and the racist element in this country is much more severe than people would like to admit. In the real world, we're going to have to go through a lot more madness before we see a clear day."

In their current touring incarnation as the duo of Oyewole and Bin Hassan joined by percussionist Don Babatunde Eaton, the Last Poets continue to illuminate a path toward that prospective future, managing to eke out a living while doing it. "People do give us respect. We've been traveling to Europe like we live over there, performing all over the place, and it's been very exciting. I'm impressed by the fact that we have a group of humanity that wants to hear something that's not the same B.S. that the media sells you, not something that's in the script of what you should be listening to. People all over the world are beautiful, but the governments are screwed up, and that creates bad energy amongst us sometimes."