The Roots |
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Fri. November 22.2002 5:08 PM EST |
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The Roots: Bold as LoveHip-Hop's great live band develops another new character on their latest disc. by C. Bottomley and Jim Macnie |
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The Roots (VH1.com) |
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Everybody wants to work with the Roots. Jay-Z hired them as his band for MTV Unplugged. Drummer and musical engineer ?uestlove has appeared on albums by Christina Aguilera, D’Angelo and Cassandra Wilson. Rapper Black Thought has rhymed with
The group – there’s also bassist Hub, keyboardist/guitarist Kamal, and “human turntable” Scratch - have always stood at hip-hop’s crossroads, unafraid to embrace its jazz, R&B and even spoken word ancestors. Their 1999 album Things Fall Apart made the nebulous “neo-soul” genre their own. If Things Fall Apart was the Roots’ breakthrough, however, the new Phrenology makes it sound like the calm before the storm. Here's where the Roots take their musical loves and blow them to the four winds. Sure, Phrenology has name guests like Nelly Furtado and Musiq, who turns the single “Break You Off,” into a honeyed red herring. The sometimes overwrought musicianship has been restrained in favor of a newfound yen for straightforward pop melody. Jill Scott returns to the Roots with the gorgeous “Complexity,” and “Quills” even cheekily samples the old Swing Out Sister hit “Breakout.” But Phrenology has as much innovation as it does craftsmanship. Just when you’re sitting easy, “!!!!!” comes along with a burst of thrash metal, and “The Seed 2.0” does the Harlem shuffle in the company of guitar wunderkind Cody ChestnuTT. Right at the center is the ten-minute rap/jazz/rock freak-out of “Water,” which ?uestlove describes as “a journey through hell.” Throughout, the bass tests just how much your speakers can take. In a season where most rhymers are playing it safe or getting into movies, Phrenology’s ambition is not only refreshing, but a reminder that hip-hop can still claim the same headphone space as Electric Ladyland or The Dark Side of the Moon. The scientists behind it all - ?uestlove and Black Thought – spoke to VH1 about who makes the cut, bucking convention, and where their music is headed. VH1: I was at one of your shows and there were so many rapper guest spots it seemed like the whole club was on stage. How often does someone come up to you backstage and say, “So-and-so’s gonna be in the audience tonight; do you want them to play with you?” ?uestlove: All the time. If it’s a high profile gig, I’ll take a sneak peek at the guest list. I remember right after doing Jay-Z’s Unplugged show, we worked in New Orleans during the Super Bowl. While I was playing, this guy was whispering into my ear every three seconds, like [whispers], “Patti Labelle wants to get up on stage with you guys. Is that cool?” Then he’d come back [whispers], “Puff Daddy wants to get up with you. Is that cool?” I was like, “I’m trying to drum here!” Sometimes we can accommodate it and sometimes we can’t. [Watch Video] VH1: Do you ever lay down any ground rules during a jam session to prevent yourselves from going off on a tangent you know you’ll never return from? ?uestlove: One of our ground rules used to be that we would only jam songs that were already written. Somewhere along the way that got tossed to the wind. People can’t wait for the jam session so they can do their whole new album. You just have to have talent; it has a Gong Show aspect to it! VH1: After the success of Things Fall Apart, it sounds like Phrenology is headed in a bolder direction. It’s like, “Okay, we satisfied the masses, now we’re going do what we want to do.” Is that the case? ?uestlove: Yes and no. Everyone wants to make their fantasy record. Usually people’s debuts are their fantasy records, where you have nine or ten years to build it. In high school, we would write in our history or English books things like, “On side two, we’re gonna start with this song.” We invented song titles, fake publishing companies, that type of stuff. But it’s real different once you get the record deal. You have to play the chess game. Every record we’ve done is what we wanted to do, but there was a game that we had to play to get the world’s attention! I always knew that once we got the world’s attention, we were really gonna give it to ‘em. Sometimes that record’s a pie in the face; sometimes that record’s capitalizing on what got you there in the first place. It depends on how you feel. This time I guess we felt that everyone expected us to do another neo-soul album simply because it’s taken the world by storm. [Watch Video] VH1: Was part of the master plan you devised in high school doing a total head-spinning trip like Phrenology? Black Thought: It wasn’t ever that far thought-out. We would come out with fictitious four-sided albums, quadruple CD box sets, whatever. Actually, where we first started recording isn’t that far off from where Phrenology is. In a way, this is as close as we could get to the beginning again. VH1: There’s a bigger emphasis on conventional verse-chorus song structures on tracks like “Break You Off” and “The Seed 2.0.” Has the hook become more important to you? ?uestlove: Every record is a maturing process, and the art of the pop song is something that we’ve never mastered. Black Thought: That’s all that a certain demographic of listeners can relate to. They’re alienated if the song is structured any other way. It’s cryptic. [We wanted] to make it more accessible without removing the music's strength. We always did choruses - it was just harder for you to know which part was the chorus! ?uestlove: Choruses used to be damn near a 16-track affair with us - things were thrown in like gumbo. One night I discovered that a lot of “neo-soul” is derived from ‘70s music. Listen to the influences: Prince and Stevie Wonder were pop masters. The songs that stick out in your head are very concise, very clear to the point. I listen to a lot of Sly & the Family Stone. “Hot Fun in the Summertime” is only two minutes and 29 seconds. That’s amazing. We have yet to make our point in under three minutes! VH1: There’s also a lot more rock on the new disc. “The Seed 2.0” has a very Stonesy riff on it and “!!!!!” sounds like Napalm Death. When Roots fans hear Phrenology will they be like, “Huh?” ?uestlove: A lot of people think they’ve got us figured out, but it’s important for us to establish that you can never take us for granted. Pretty much every Roots album has been a major departure. Organics was our boho beginnings record. To our local following, it was like, “It doesn’t get no better than this.” [Our second album] Do You Want More?, was regarded as the best record to get to know the Roots [by], but Organics heads saw it as a departure. They were like “It’s real hip-hop heavy ... we weren’t expecting this!” We’re not fools. This is also the most left[-field] album that we've ever done. The more to the right that we moved, we took it to farther extremes. We’ve never done an 11-minute free jazz song like “Water” before. The rock stuff, the punk interludes, the electronica experiments we did with [New Jersey poet laureate] Amiri Baraka - once we were into it we realized we’re gonna move more to the left and to the right - which is something rare for a middle ground group to do! VH1: Black Thought, as a lyricist, do you ever get impatient while ?uestlove is tooling around with the music? Black Thought: No. The older I’ve gotten and the deeper I’ve gotten into my career, the longer it takes me to write songs that I feel comfortable with. I can write a rhyme pretty easily; but that first rhyme usually isn’t what I feel most comfortable with representing where I am with my craft. So I write over and over again, sometimes in my head, sometimes on paper, until I’m comfortable. VH1: There’s a line on “Quills” where you say, “I hit the studio with a pen and a vendetta.” What’s a better source of lyrical inspiration, love or hate? Black Thought: Hate. It’s more extreme; it has more texture, different dimensions. Let me put it like this: There are far more different types of hate songs than love songs. There are only a couple types of love song that you can make, but music driven by the opposite emotion has a wider spectrum. When I say “with a pen and a vendetta” I’m not going into the studio mad. I’m just serious about what I’m doing. VH1: Of all the guests on the disc, who represents the old heroes you’ve always wanted to work with? ?uestlove: There’s only two people on the album that we didn’t have a personal relationship with: jazz guitarist James Blood Ulmer and Amiri Baraka. We have toured and done shows with every artist under the sun and it depends on the social mood. Nelly Furtado was someone that we were cool with right from the first day. The day after we met her we were having water fights. Then, after that, she was onstage singing with us. Or we’d be playing video games on this guy’s bus, or going record shopping with this person, or just sitting and talking and watching movies. That’s how everyone came into place. VH1: Jill Scott was an unknown until she co-wrote your hit “You Got Me.” Who on Phrenology is going to be the next Jill Scott? ?uestlove: Cody ChestnuTT. He’s crazy! He might take the scenic route. Jill’s story is the Cinderella story. He’s gonna take the Roots’ road to success! A lot of people are trying to put him on the next rock wave that’s coming in. He created this record The Headphone Masterpiece in his bedroom. It’s a mood piece. There’s so much on his record that it was almost impossible for me to believe that this was made on a four-track. Then I discovered Sgt. Pepper’s was also made on a four-track. I guess after you listen to “A Day in the Life,” it’s like okay, anything can happen! At the end of the day Cody's a great songwriter. He’s full of creative ideas, and absolutely in control of his career, his music, his publishing, his distribution. I think he’s gonna have a slow, successful build. VH1: What’s the last hip-hop record for you that’s had the impact of Public Enemy? ?uestlove: Probably the last great hip-hop record was Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Hip-hop’s great run was somewhere between 1987 and 1993. A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders and Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers both came out the same day, and that was the end of it. There have been great albums after that - Mobb Deep and Nas and Biggie’s records. But if hip-hop is a human, 1993 was the last of the carefree years, before puberty set in. Hip-hop’s a young adult right now, so it’s not as fun as it used to be. It’s even serious for us, and we’re hip-hop aficionados. It reflects on the time period. Right now hip-hop is a means of survival, even for us. It’s a business now. Our survival depends on this record. It’s not like you’re being carefree and throwing everything but the kitchen-sink in, even though it appears that way. We’re still very shrewd in how we deliver the music to the people. For hip-hop or whatever the next genre happens to be, the atmosphere has to be so socially and politically oppressive that artistic expression becomes more like a release than a means of survival. [Watch Video] VH1: Who would you say is one of hip-hop’s most overlooked innovators? ?uestlove: It’s not about being overlooked, because hip-hop’s such a disposable art form. It’s when they’re forgotten. I think it’s an absolute crime that De La Soul is without a record company right now. I’m utterly amazed. Black Thought: Not even hip-hop. Black music is disposable. You can have all the talent in the world and if it’s not marketable, then there’s no use for you. ?uestlove: Bob Dylan can record for Columbia Records for as long as he lives, but in hip-hop everyone gets their 15 minutes and that’s it. Hip-hop is always about yesterday’s news yesterday, and what’s tomorrow? |
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