It’s a year of big anniversaries for The Roots. Their Things Fall Apart came out twenty-five years ago, it’s been twenty since The Tipping Point, and a decade since their (as of now) final studio album, …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. Given that they’ve spent the last few years mainly being TV stars, go-to backing band, and live performers, the remarkable records that the Roots released between 1993 and 2014 have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle, a strange but perhaps expected fate for a group whose symbolic presence and live reputation always seemed at risk of overwhelming their recorded work. So I thought I’d revisit those recordings and pick out a few favorites from across the catalog of a band I love.
They’ve been often pegged as traditionalists – a reputation they certainly nurtured, starting with their name, for better and worse over the years. Speaking of worse, they’ve also been heralded as some sort of “real musician” counterpoint to hip-hop’s supposed “fake-ness.” (That is, of course, bullshit no matter who’s saying it.) And it’s true that they sometimes fall too easily into familiar throwback gestures and cultural handwringing. But I’ve always found them most compelling when they eschew those (partially self-created) expectations in favor of music that either remixes the traditions or seems to ignore them completely. Especially when they’re in that mode, the Roots made some of the best and most interesting albums in any genre of popular music for awhile. Revisiting them now hasn’t dulled my sense of their strange magic at all. In fact, I find them even richer and more mysterious in hindsight.
So, here are 16 of my favorite Roots tracks. (Why 16? Why not?) This is certainly not meant as a definitive list of their best or a comprehensive overview of their career, nor does it mean that there aren’t many other tracks that I could’ve included. (Let me know which ones you love in the comments – I probably love them too!) Oh, and one other note: I already wrote bout “Common Dust,” from their debut Organix, last year during our 1993 Week. I’ve made room for others here, so check out what I said about “Common Dust” last year.
And now get ready, because here they come…
1. “Datskat” (from Do You Want More?, 1995)
The Roots’ connection to jazz stretched back to their earliest Philly days, and their first albums foregrounded it within deft sonic and lyrical free-flow. Of course, they weren’t the only one doing this: artists from Digable Planets to Us3 centered jazz roots to wide and welcoming audiences. But the band’s facility with the traditions became an early calling card; “Datskat,” from their major-label debut, is my favorite example, in part because it doesn’t sound like it’s trying to make the point. Black Thought’s giddy hook bounces over spare Questlove drumming and punches of horns, and both Thought and Malik B embrace the song’s vocalization in light, flexible verses. Then, maybe best of all, the track breaks down into an extended outro where the horns dance with each other in harmony. For a group that, even at their best, could trend towards ponderousness in how they honored musical legacies, “Datskat” is a welcome breath of fresh air. (Except, that is, for the “f”-word slur that Malik B drops in his verse, an unwelcome presence even - or especially - in these playful surroundings.)
2. “What They Do” (feat. Raphael Saadiq) from Illadelph Halflife, 1996)
From the first moment that the gliding, Sade-recalling groove washes in, “What They Do” is a near-perfect encapsulation of the mixture of warm sounds and cautionary tales that characterized the Roots’ reputation and that of the larger “neo-soul” movement of which they became engines and symbols. There’s a little bit of what made that movement annoying here, especially when some lyrics are laced with the scoldy paternalism that became too common (and too Common) in the sub-genre. But there’s also a lot of what made neo-soul compelling, especially the graceful, analog-meets-digital bounce of the arrangement and the chorus’ whispered admonition from fellow traveler Raphael Saadiq. They may be warning us about what not to do, but the real value is in the Roots showing us what they do so well.
3. “Without A Doubt” (feat. Lady B) (from Things Fall Apart, 1999)
The expansive, explosive Things Fall Apart represented the pinnacle of the Roots’ first era as funky-fresh exemplars of a concurrent counter-tradition. Though they stretch out in ways both luxurious and ruminative, the album works best when they figuratively and literally break it down. For example, there’s “Without a Doubt,” a relentless skitter assisted by Lady B. There’s not really much more to this brief blast than Black Thought’s playful boasting over the band’s spare arrangement, punctuated by a stinging, oddly ominous hook. But it doesn’t matter: When they tell us “we’re about to give you what you need, y’all,” it’s hard not to believe that they always would. Without a doubt.
4. “Don’t See Us” (live) (from The Roots Come Alive, 1999)
The Roots’ live reputation elevated them into that rarefied air of “their records are good, but the real shit is the live show” territory that has characterized (and sometimes misrepresented) artists from the Grateful Dead to P-Funk. The Roots Come Alive documents the first phase of this run, a free-flowing collection knitting together performances from several shows into a seamless 80 minutes. (I almost cheated here and made this a three-song sequence of “Don’t See Us,” “100% Dundee,” and “Adrenaline,” taken from two different shows but mixed so well that they feel like one continuous jam.) The Zurich-recorded “Don’t See Us” opens with a showcase for turntablist Scratch before Black Thought enters with a breathless set of rope-a-dope rhymes. Kamal’s organ hums away, Questlove hangs behind the beat just long enough to make you miss him, and Black Thought can’t stop, won’t stop until he delivers the knockout punch. And on and on.
5. “Water” (from Phrenology, 2002)
If Things Fall Apart represented the apex of the Roots’ first phase, their second arrived with Phrenology, a crackling collection that greeted the twenty-first century with an unsettledness that proved all too prophetic. The smoking rock-history rewrite “The Seed 2.0” got the most attention, but I’m more taken by this meditation from Black Thought on drug addiction, specifically the ongoing issues faced by Malik B who’d recently departed the group. “Water” would work if it only consisted of Thought’s loving encouragements to his longtime friend as he recounts their journey out of the underground. But he takes it further, weaving in a critical assessment of the local and global drug trade (including tobacco) as he returns to the diasporic gospel-impulse plea to his friend, and others, to find a way “over the water.” When Black Thought is at his best, he delivers layered messages with such ear-grabbing skill that the depth only fully sinks in after listening several times. “Water’s” bubbling extended arrangement makes it easy to do just that, especially when it then jumps to five minutes of noise that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch film. A bitter suite.
6. “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” (feat. Devin the Dude, Jean Grae, and Mack Dub) (from The Tipping Point, 2004)
The most obvious reference to Sly and the Family Stone on The Tipping Point is “Star,” which casts dark magic around Sly’s affirming classic. But the whole brooding affair is awash in the group’s influence, most effectively with the late-Sly vibes on the creeping “Somebody’s Gotta Do It.” With a muted hook that recalls “Runnin’ Away,” provided by Houston’s inestimable Devin the Dude, “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” – with guest verse from the mighty Jean Grae, and a haunted piano hook nagging away in the background – is low-level paranoia masked as a statement of perseverant purpose. A familiar feeling in 2004, or any time in the troubled 2000s, and thus one of the Roots’ richest sonic and thematic veins.
7. “In Love with the Mic” (feat. Dave Chappelle, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Skillz, and Truck North) (from The Tipping Point, 2004)
The Tipping Point is a stormy listen, but it contains one of the purest parties they ever laid down. Featuring a goofy appearance by Dave Chappelle (back when his presence was far more welcome), “In Love with the Mic” is a hard-driving stomp with Black Thought and guests Skillz and Truck North throwing around jokes and extended metaphors. The lyrics are sometimes a little too close to laugh-it-up sexism, but the track’s loose-limbed, noisy stomp makes it easier to take. (Especially when our dear departed Ol’ Dirty Bastard climbs aboard on the chorus.) On one of the group’s most tightly wound albums, this tossed-off gem near the end brings a rare moment of joy and a welcome reminder of the crew’s house-rocking skills.
8. “Long Time” (feat. Bunny Sigler and Peedi Peedi) (from Game Theory, 2006)
The shuddering, eerie Game Theory isn’t just my favorite Roots album by some distance – it’s one of my favorites of this century by anyone. It’s a no-skips masterpiece, and few albums better capture the impending doom and swirling uncertainties in the depths of Bushworld. This turbulence is amplified by the group’s mourning of J. Dilla, their friend and collaborator whose sounds and spirit animate the album. With Questlove’s drums cracking like echoed gunshots, Black Thought and guest Peedi Peedi revisit the Philadelphia of their past, with Philly soul legend Bunny Sigler proclaiming like a prodigal son on the soaring chorus. “Long Time” is a whirling recognition of the past that doesn’t get lost or find comfort in nostalgia. Instead, it encourages listeners (and maybe the Roots themselves) to “let it spin” as history bleeds into an uncertain future.
9. “Bread and Butter” (feat. Truck North) (bonus track from Game Theory, 2006)
Back in the last days of the golden era of bonus tracks, this astonishing cut showed up on digital versions of Game Theory and somehow made a flawless album even better. Handclaps, blues moans, and finger-picked guitar root the Roots closer to the country-rap innovations of the Dirty South, before Truck North and Black Thought lay bare the harsh realities of the intersection between poverty, the drug trade, and a police force as ready to “massacre” as protect. It’s pure blues testimony, boldfaced by the urgent chorus and lyrical nods to “Mannish Boy” and “Motherless Child.” And then, at the end, there’s a reference to levees breaking, which reminds us of the previous year’s great human-made catastrophe that lined the gutters with bodies and exposed the ongoing massacre at the heart of the American project.
10. “You Got Me” (feat. Erykah Badu and Jill Scott) (live) (from Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, 2006)
“You Got Me” has a complicated history. Its softly hypnotizing swirl made its original release, from Things Fall Apart, the group’s biggest chart hit, signaling both their crossover to some version of the mainstream and the expansion of said mainstream to include the neo-soul communities they anchored. But that crossover included the fact that Roots collaborator and Philly homegirl Jill Scott’s original vocal on “You Got Me” was re-recorded by Erykah Badu at the record company’s request. Badu’s version (from 1999’s Things Fall Apart) and Scott’s original (later released on a rarities compilation) are both great – each singer’s voice finds distinct patterns in the song’s circling hook. But I have a particular fondness for this live version, from the Brooklyn concert staged by Dave Chappelle (that guy again) and filmed by Michel Gondry for a wonderful 2006 documentary. It unites Badu and Scott, with their voices weaving around each other in interlocking call-and-response. And it builds from a spare, Hendrix-Hazel guitar squall from “Captain” Kirk Douglas, over which Scott moves mountains around Black Thought’s increasingly elaborate rhymes. It’s like “You Got Me” is being deconstructed and reconstructed in real time, which makes Badu’s eventual entrance – doubling and counterpointing Scott – feel like a welcome denouement even as the two singers send the song spiraling further upwards. A trip, in more ways than one.
11. “Masters of War” (live) (2007)
In 2007, a trio version of the Roots performed this astonishing mash-up at a Bob Dylan tribute at Lincoln Center, linking the words of one of Dylan’s most potent protests to the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Both, of course, had their original melodies lifted from English songs.) Leon Russell had done this trick before, in the depths of the Nixon years. Now with the Bush, Jr. era dragging on, the Roots brought it back as both tribute and intervention. Their version sounds simultaneously invigorated and exhausted; “Captain” Kirk Douglas scales the national anthem’s famously difficult melody and punches through each lyric so that no one loses the new message. The early juxtaposition only lasts one verse, before the band crashes back into “Masters of War’s” familiar melody in the second verse and beyond. But the reinvention’s far from over: Questlove’s martial drums, Douglas’ piercing guitar, and the honking bottom provided by Tuba Gooding, Jr. break into thrashing instrumental breaks before returning to the next, increasingly disheveled verse. As great as all these sections are, though, it’s mere prelude to the crashing collapse of the final few minutes, when a Questlove drum solo brings the band down into a final act of wreckage. Because that wreckage was, and is, our national reality.
12. “Rising Up” (feat. Wale and Chrisette Michele) (from Rising Down, 2008)
As evidenced by its post-minstrel cover image and chaotic energy (this is probably the only Roots album that sounds fully pissed off), 2008’s Rising Down is a state of the hip-hop nation that finds little safe harbor as it careens around shadowy corners over layers of keyboards and Questlove’s intrusive-thought drum stabs. Near the end, though, the fog lifts with “Rising Up.” The mournful chorus, delivered with the help of Chrisette Michele, suggests yet another hip-hop-is-dead eulogy. But the song’s flip of the album’s title gives it away – this is about resuscitations and resurrections. The verses are revivals: Black Thought struts atop the boom-bap with a playfulness found nowhere else on Rising Down, but the track’s real star is a young Wale, who brings it all back home to his native D.C. over a bouncing go-go beat. Each time the hook comes back, more instruments surround the singers, turning the mournful cry into a marching anthem with glasses raised and mics passed. But not passed away.
13. “How I Got Over” (feat. Dice Raw) (from How I Got Over, 2009)
It was a welcome twist. As the Roots saddled up with Jimmy Fallon and became late-night-TV stars, their albums got increasingly and wonderfully strange. How I Got Over brought in friends from indie-pop/rock and simmered through a collection of somber, often spaced-out meditations. Its highlight is the title track. Strutting with a ‘70s-inspired hook that would’ve sounded perfectly at home in the era’s wave of Black cinema, “How I Got Over” frames this central gospel call around a daily struggle for survival. Black Thought’s rhymes remain as crisp as ever. But, as so often with the group, it’s the propulsive hook – driven here by Dice Raw’s sung vocal – that propels the track as it surveys the cloudy landscape of a hard-knock life.
14. “Real Woman” - Betty Wright and the Roots (feat. Snoop Dogg) (from Betty Wright: The Movie, 2011)
Even before the Tonight Show, the Roots became everyone’s house band. Inaugurated by Jay-Z’s revelatory 2001 Unplugged album, the group served with artists both expected (John Legend) and farther afield (they helped Elvis Costello sound as alive as he had in some time.). My favorite may be the album they made with the great soul woman Betty Wright, who revived the spark and spirit of her late-70s hits and imbued them with a new level of wisdom. Here, bouncing around a theme and arrangement not far from her legendary “Clean Up Woman,” Wright advises young men to put away childish things in favor of grown-folks pleasures and responsibilities. It avoids preachiness, feeling more like a welcome conversation with a knowing elder. Everyone – including Snoop Dogg, who shows up near the end for a fittingly laid-back verse – ends up swaying along in Wright’s warm embrace.
15. “Make My” (feat. Big K.R.I.T. and Dice Raw) (from Undun, 2011)
Undun is a concept album, told in reverse, about the short life and death by suicide of a fictional character named Redford Stevens. With guest appearances from Dice Raw and the emerging Big K.R.I.T., “Make My” is a painful goodbye from Redford, with funereal organ and hushed background vocals walking alongside as Redford cries and confesses. Because of the flipped chronology, this endgame portrait of Undun’s “unwritten and unraveled” protagonist comes near the album’s beginning, an effect that only heightens the impact of this gorgeous, tragic self-eulogy.
16. “Tomorrow” (feat. Raheem DeVaughn) (from …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, 2014)
The Roots’ final album (as of now) is a fractured, mournful piece that extends the conceptual thinking of Undun into what the group described as a multi-character satire of hip-hop stereotypes and their larger role in a racist U.S. culture. The satire is there, but it’s a deep-blue sardonicism that underlays but doesn’t overwhelm the ache of tracks like “The Unraveling” or the new-hope sunrise of “Tomorrow,” the song that follows it and closes the album. Black Thought steps aside, leaving soul singer Raheem DeVaughn in full control of this reminder of our need for each other. But, just as with “Stand By Me,” “Lean on Me,” or others, there’s desperation just underneath the surface, and “Tomorrow” doesn’t leave listeners with an easy happy ending. On his last reiteration of the line “Everybody wants tomorrow right now,” DeVaughn sinks into a newly-troubled instrumental outro, as James Poyser’s piano (the album’s MVP) guides a dissonant jumble that complicates but doesn’t contradict the song’s central message. In one way, it’s a strange conclusion to the Roots’ recording career. But, given that their best work always explored such unresolved textures, maybe it also makes perfect sense.
It’s not necessarily surprising, given their day job, that they haven’t made a record since 2014. They’ve kept touring, of course, including various recent “Hip-Hop 50” projects that allowed them to further demonstrate their versatility and expertise. Questlove won on Oscar, wrote bestsellers, and built his justified reputation as one of our premiere record-nerd scholars. Black Thought keeps coming out swinging, renewing his Top 5 credentials on a steady stream of fiery solo albums. I hope they’re doing the work they want to do and are happy doing it. And I cherish their catalog more as time goes on and we all get older. But I’ll admit, selfishly, that I still hope that they’ll return with new recordings at some point. I’ll be happy with anything, but I’m particularly interested in continuations of their longer trajectory from the most capable keepers of the flame that they started as to the experimentalist adventurers they became. Because I still need them to give me what I need. Somebody’s gotta do it. Without a doubt. - CH
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