Real Song

In the early 1970s, Baraka and members of the Congress of Afrikan People began increasingly to find that cultural nationalism had failed to effect the social changes they deemed necessary, and as they turned to study of Marxism, they rejected the insularity of their previous politics. These changes were again reflected in the modes of Baraka’s artistic production, even as his poetics continued in the path of projective, jazz-inflected aesthetics that were the major through line of his life’s work. His People’s War production unit, as was Jihad before it, was a vehicle through which Baraka released R&B singles and small publications, while continuing to publish and record in other venues.