May 4, 2008
Music
New Album, New Fears, Same Old Attitude
By NATE CHINEN

AHMIR Thompson was sitting in the back of a town car inching through Midtown when he received a vexing call from management, not entirely unlike the one that opens “Rising Down” (Def Jam), the new album by the Roots. One month before its release there were problems with a hidden track, and Mr. Thompson, better known as ?uestlove, the Roots’ drummer and bandleader, made no attempt to hide his frustration, raising his voice in protest.

As a tenaciously independent-minded hip-hop group, the Roots are accustomed to tension in the face of major-label pressure. But as ?uestlove observed moments after the call, the climate has felt especially urgent lately. “I’m not ashamed to say that this is probably the first we’ve ever been afraid: afraid of not being relevant, or afraid of not actually having a record deal after this album, or afraid of failure.” Long pause. “But I think that’s a good thing.”

Conflict and counterintuition have been motivating factors for the Roots ever since Mr. Thompson and Tariq Trotter, a k a the rapper Black Thought, joined forces to form the Square Roots in Philadelphia in the late 1980s, when they were in high school. They went against the grain from the start, using live instruments at a time when sampling was king. These days, in the era of the ring-tone hook, their ranks include a sousaphone player and a psychedelic rock guitarist.

So it’s easy to understand why the group might be afraid. Jay-Z, who helped bring the band to Def Jam, stepped down as the label’s president late last year, and the industry climate is grim. Given that hip-hop sales were down about 30 percent last year, it can’t be comforting to be a boutique band on a label that traffics in platinum stars like Kanye West, Rihanna and Young Jeezy. Def Jam did not return calls for comment; Billboard on Monday ran an article with the headline “Cult hip-hop band the Roots struggle at new label.”

The Roots see themselves as keepers of the flame, upholding the defiant but earnest spirit of hip-hop as it existed roughly 20 years ago. (In the words of Black Thought, on the new album: “I’ll show you where my rare essence is at/The adolescence of rap/The real muscle in the message of that.”) And while they identify with the hip-hop underground, they’re hardly strangers to the mainstream, having backed the likes of Jay-Z and Nas. When ?uestlove received that intrusive phone call, he was en route to the airport; he had a gig in Las Vegas, spinning records at a joint birthday party for Quentin Tarantino and Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.

“We’ve been on a major label for 15 years,” said Richard Nichols, the executive producer of the new album and the Roots’ manager since 1991. “There’s a science to being a left-of-center group and maintaining the calculus between your critical appeal and your actual sales base.”

The Roots have cultivated a loyal following over the years, partly thanks to the collegiate jam-band circuit. Commercially the group has rarely had a smash: the closest thing was “Things Fall Apart” (MCA) in 1999, which peaked at No. 4 and sold more than 500,000 copies within its first few months, playing a substantial role in the millennial neo-soul boom. That album’s biggest single, “You Got Me,” earned a Grammy Award for the Roots and for Erykah Badu, who sang the chorus. (They are touring together this month and next.) The Roots’ last album, “Game Theory” (2006), was their Def Jam debut after a string of releases on Geffen and MCA. According to Nielsen SoundScan, “Game Theory” has sold slightly more than 200,000 copies since its release two years ago.

As a group that thrives on touring, the Roots might seem somewhat insulated from sales concerns. But that’s not entirely the case. “There’s a winner-take-all kind of thing that kicks in with black culture, and definitely with hip-hop,” Mr. Nichols said. “If you’re doing contemporary white music, you can be a Deerhoof or Panda Bear or Grizzly Bear” — critically favored but noncommercial indie-rock acts — “and you’re not really judged on your sales impact.”

However it is to be judged, “Rising Down” earns ?uestlove’s depiction as a “meat-and-potatoes hip-hop record.” Spiked with dire intensity and stocked with head-spinning rhymes by Black Thought and nearly a dozen guest rappers, including Common and Talib Kweli, it’s the most potent Roots release since the one-two punch of “Things Fall Apart” and its predecessor, “Illadelph Halflife” (Geffen). And despite its punishing starkness, the album still reflects the crisp musicianship for which the Roots, and ?uestlove in particular, have long been admired.

Characteristically for the Roots, “Rising Down” grapples with tough issues: its title is an allusion to “Rising Up and Rising Down,” William T. Vollmann’s seven-volume treatise on the nature of violence. “I think this Roots album has a very mirror-reflective image of what the state of America is right now,” said Dice Raw, a Philadelphia rapper who has been loosely affiliated with the group for 15 years. “The war is an issue, but it’s also the environment, it’s also unemployment rates in the black community; it’s a lot of things we’re going through right now.”

One track, “Singing Man,” adopts the chilling first-person voice of a figure like the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre. (The Roots had been booked to play on that campus the week of the shooting.) Elsewhere there are sharp indictments of drug laws and government surveillance. On “Lost Desire” Black Thought tackles Philadelphia’s murder rate, among the nation’s highest, with harrowing poetry:

We in the city where they definitely lost it

You open your eyelids and get capped in the ribs

Your funeral, they have your 12th-grade portrait

Pretty corpse and casket, pale shade orchids

Other rappers on “Rising Down” make strong impressions; an up-and-comer named Porn delivers one wickedly clever verse in the voice of a cough-syrup addict, and there are equally gripping turns by Mos Def and Saigon. Dice Raw, who wrote most of the album’s choruses, also contributes some of its pithiest lines (e.g., “I’m kind of like W .E. B. Du Bois/Meets Heavy D & the Boyz”).

But there’s no mistaking the album’s intention as a showcase for Black Thought, still an underdog after all these years. “For me it’s important that we establish and contextualize Tariq’s position in the hip-hop infrastructure,” ?uestlove said. Despite all the guest rappers, or because of them, Black Thought comes across as nimble, resourceful and intensely lucid.

He has two big virtuoso turns: “@15,” an improvised freestyle taped when he was 15, and “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” featuring an intricately structured tirade that spills across (you guessed it) 75 bars without a moment’s pause. The imperiled hidden track, which ended up getting dropped, was one more exhibit for the jury: a lengthy freestyle by Black Thought and Malik B., a former member of the Roots, from a 1994 radio appearance.

Black Thought often raps with the hard articulation and thrust of a battle rapper, but in conversation he can be soft-spoken, his cadence reflective rather than aggressive. “We’re very much amoebic,” he said thoughtfully, leaning forward in an ergonomic chair, “in that we absorb what’s going on in the outside world.”

He was in the engineer’s booth of a recording studio near Times Square. The rest of the group was visible through the glass, warming up without him. They were rehearsing for their six-week tour with Ms. Badu while in the presence of multiple film crews and photographers. Flashbulbs strobed the room as ?uestlove led his band mates — on guitar, keyboards, bass and, yes, sousaphone — through a slinky yet ominous groove.

Black Thought watched quietly from the booth for a while before sauntering out to deliver the day’s first rousing chorus: “It’s for all of my peoples who understand and truly recognize/Some won’t get it, and for that, I won’t apologize.”

That couplet might seem to summarize the position of the Roots with regard to the public. But the defiant stance doesn’t mean the group is ignoring the commercial realities. “Maybe that was just a better way of saying that we’re proud of who we are,” ?uestlove said. And he voiced a common opinion among the members of the group: that the Roots somehow need the platform of a major label.

Black Thought echoed that. “Without that foot in the door, without that major-label certification, you’re on a different list,” he said, “and it’s harder to get things done, accomplish your agenda.” But, he hastened to add, the challenge was also a creative spur.

As it turned out, the hidden track wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make the cut on “Rising Down.” Another was “Birthday Girl,” a four-minute pop song featuring Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy. Trotted out this spring as a first single, it provoked much puzzlement and derision. So after first tacking it to the tail end of the album, the Roots cut it loose. (It’s available on iTunes and at myspace.com/theroots.)

Mr. Nichols confirmed what many observers have surmised about “Birthday Girl”: that Jay-Z heard “Rising Down” and requested a stronger single. “It was something we could use to shut the record company up,” Mr. Nichols said of the song, “and it was so clearly outside the rest of the album that people would know we were going for a single.” Without it, the album’s best shot at a hit is “Rising Up,” a neo-soul exhortation with the rapper Wale and a hook sung by the Def Jam artist Chrisette Michele. They played it Monday on “Late Show With David Letterman.”

The conversation that opens “Rising Down” also closes it, bracketing the album in argument. “There are some abrasive times,” Black Thought acknowledged, “where you reach a certain point and there might be a screaming match.”

Did it all feel a bit Darwinian? “Yeah,” he said. But he added: “I don’t regret that things are the way they are. I’m appreciative of it because I think it shows in the final product. That’s what sets it apart.”