Mike Todd’s documentary re-examines a lost ancestral moment of black consciousness and black pop culture in the US. It is about the proto-rap album Hustlers Convention, released in 1973 by Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, otherwise known as Lightnin’ Rod: a recording which influenced hip-hop, funk and even the rarefied world of the concept album.
Todd lays out the world from which the album emerged: the 60s literary movement the Last Poets, which was passionately dedicated to the continuation of an oral tradition without which African Americans were being robbed of their community memories. The album drew something from the oral tradition of “toasting” and “jail toasting”, the urban rhyming tales which featured in the prison scenes in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full. It is a picaresque tale of no-good hustlers – the equivalent of white-mainstream dramas of pirates, gangsters and robbers. Todd shows preparations for performing the album in full, for the first time in 40 years, in London’s Jazz Cafe. An valuable slice of cultural history.
