The Roots: Things Fall Apart : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

You've heard about the revolution, haven't you? The hip-hop vanguard that's ignoring trends -- musical, lyrical, sartorial -- and experimenting, forging ahead, creating new directions. It's working in the tradition of Gang Starr and De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Roy Ayers. It's combining kinetic street energy with fresh, artful musical ideas. It's transporting you not to the world of, say, Tony "Scarface" Montana but to the much more dangerous world of a man who is being himself. It's giving more to hip-hop than it's taking.

That vanguard is OutKast, Goodie Mob, Black Star, Common and the Roots, a band that is often as sublime as they come. The seven-piece Philadelphia group, led by Black Thought (one of the best -- and best-named -- MCs in hip-hop) and the iconically Afro'd drummer ?uestlove, struggled up from playing on South Street in Philly. Now the Roots make albums of rawly recorded, finely textured sound on which you can hear the drumsticks click the kick and the rasp of the upright-bass strings and the fingers stroking the guitar. Their 1995 major-label debut, Do You Want More?!!!??!, and '96 follow-up, Illadelph Halflife, blazed with the energy of live instrumentation and the rhymes of Black Thought. Thought is a lyricist's lyricist with a hard, earnest voice that doesn't flow like water but bobs and weaves with less-predictable rhythms. He's backed by the Number One human drum and sound-effects machine in hip-hop, Rahzel "the Godfather of Noyze," a man who can keep the beat going with his throat as he makes scratches and sound effects with his mouth. ?uestlove anchors the band with his minimalist drum funk.

If you don't know the Roots, it's probably because there's no celebrity in the group, no engaging personality who makes them leap off the screen and no effort to cultivate an image, but then that's part of their charm. The septet has soaked up the calm, slow pace of the hometown of nice guys Will Smith and Bill Cosby, the City of Brotherly Love. The Roots lack the pretense of New York MCs, who spend so much time telling us how dope they are. The group is less self-absorbed and more self-aware.

The Roots' new, fifteen-song record, Things Fall Apart, could be the first hip-hop album named after a novel (the Chinua Achebe masterwork). It's also a top-flight record. They rock over Philly bro Schoolly D's classic beat for "Saturday Night" on "Without a Doubt." They call in Black Star's Mos Def for the hot mike rocker "Double Trouble." They slide through the cool-grooving "Act Too (The Love of My Life)," co-starring Common, a love song about hip-hop on which Black Thought rhymes, "I remember I'z a little snot nose/Rockin' Cazal goggles and Izod clothes/ Learnin' the ropes of ghetto survival/Peepin' out the situation/I had to slide through. . . . /Sometimes I wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for you." They show more melodies and less bluster than their peers, less detail about what they drive and who they wear, and more musical chances. They're intellectual hip-hoppas who can rock a party.

And then there's the album's zenith, "You Got Me," featuring Erykah Badu, her melancholy-drenched voice singing the refrain, promising loyalty and devotion: "Bay-bay . . . don't worry . . . you know that . . . you got me-eee." Black Thought tells of meeting "this Ethiopian queen from Philly . . . she said she loved my show in Paris/At Elysee Montmartre/And that I stepped off the stage/And took a piece of her heart." The relationship grows as a sweet guitar plinks behind, but "sometimes relationships get ill" and things fall apart. He doesn't conclude the story but fades out as ?uestlove slides in, drumming a stunning disjointed, jungle-ish beat, possibly symbolizing the fracturing of the relationship, possibly finding a beautiful and unexpected ending for the song. It could be the greatest love song in hip-hop history. The revolution is in full effect. Go get a late pass.