Off the Charts: The Roots

Hip hop's past and future

By Newt Briggs

At the close of the last millennium, members of the Roots--including Black Thought and drummer extraordinaire Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson--performed Prince's magenta opus 1999 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with industry all-stars such as Joan Osborne, Prince Be of PM Dawn and Living Colour's Vernon Reid. At first glance, it was an odd project for the Roots, whose distinctive live sound owes more to the organic throb of Stetsasonic than the weak, synth-pop pulse of the artist currently known as Prince.

Then again, the Roots have never been inclined toward stylistic conformity. Formed at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts in 1987, the Roots may well be hip hop's closest approximation of a jam band--a bohemian co-op that plays its own instruments and largely reject the artificial output of DJs, drum machines or samplers. In fact, the Roots continue to rely on Scratch, the human beatbox, to make most of the thumps, chirps, scratches and horn blasts necessary for the songs. As ?uestlove explained to MTV News in 2002, the result is neither "Fresh Prince of Bel Air hip hop" nor "Straight Outta Compton hip hop"; it's just music from the roots of the African-American experience.

LITERARY ROOTS: Lest anyone suggest that hip hop is deaf to the literary muse, the title of the Roots' fourth studio album, Things Fall Apart, was lifted from Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's novel of the same name (which borrowed the phrase from Irish poet laureate W.B. Yeats' renowned poem "The Second Coming"). The Roots' sixth record--due out in June--is slated to be called The Tipping Point, after Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling study of trends and conformity in society.

MUSICAL ROOTS: The Roots may be hip-hop purists, but their rigid aesthetic sensibilities have not kept them from a slew of crossover collaborations with pop stars of lesser conviction. In recent years, ?uestlove has teamed with Christina Aguilera, Erykah Badu and Earth, Wind and Fire; and Roots concerts have been known to feature covers of everything from Leadbelly's "Black Betty" to Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It" to Eminem's "Lose Yourself."

ROOT VEGETABLES: In 2002, four-fifths of the Roots appeared in a pro-vegetarian print ad for PETA. The ad--which displayed the band in front of a brick wall spray-painted with the words, ""Stop the Violence: Go Veg"--ran in URB and Russell Simmons' One World magazine. Said guitarist Ben Kenney, "How can we hope for peace on Earth if we have violence staring us in the face every time we sit down to eat?" ?uestlove, the missing Root, cited "an addiction to chicken" as the reason he did not participate in the campaign.

UPROOTED: On "Water," an eight-minute psychedelic freak-out on 2002's Phrenology, Black Thought eulogizes former Roots MC Malik B., who was dismissed from the band after battling drug addiction: "I want ya all to understand I come from South Philly,/ and when I walk the streets it's like a pharmacy/ They got all type-a shit anybody can get/ It go from H to X to loosie cigarettes." Translator's note: A "loosie" cigarette is a cigarette sold one by one--often for a quarter apiece--on the street.

ALEX HALEY'S ROOTS: Although the Roots' songs do not include any references to the tragic saga of Kunta Kinte, Seattle Weekly writer Joe Schloss has linked the band's music to the West African myth of sankofa. Literally, sankofa is a time-traveling bird able to to fly forward into its future with its head and eyes focused on the past, but Schloss adapts the concept to describe the Roots' ability to fold past hip-hop trends into modern rap music. In the same article, he describes a Roots show in which the band took the stage "after winding through the crowd playing cowbells, an entrance that dates back to the earliest days of African America."