THE ROOTS
Executive Producer: Richard Nichols
Released May 19, 2014
THE ROOTS:
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson: Drums
Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter: Vocals
Kirk "Captain Kirk" Douglas: Guitar
Kamal Gray: Keyboards
James Poyser: Keyboards
Frank "Frankie Knuckles" Walker: Percussion
Damon "Tuba Gooding Jr." Bryson: Sousaphone
Mark Kelley: Bass Guitar
"I'm more or less interested now, at this point in my life, with making art records, with making actual statements."
-Questlove
And so you have, Questlove. And so you have...
First things first, "...and then you shoot your cousin," the eleventh album from The Roots, is far and away one of the best albums of 2014. Even with the highest of praise from me, an endorsement as emphatic as I can deliver, I do feel compelled to warn those of you out there who just may be expecting an album release that extends the high styled party atmosphere as seen during The Roots' nightly gig as Jimmy Fallon's house band on the new and revamped "The Tonight Show."
"...and then you shoot your cousin" is indeed a dark, challenging, claustrophobic and despairing affair that despite its brief 34 minute running time, quite possibly the shortest album in The Roots' entire discography, the album is an audaciously presented conceptual piece that not only demands the fullest of your attention, I also do not believe can be fully digested within one or even a few listenings. Conceptually and thematically, this new album extends itself from last year's outstanding collaboration with Elvis Costello entitled "Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs (released September 17, 2013) and most specifically from The Roots' game changing "undun" (released December 2, 2011), an album that, to my ears, re-wrote the rules for exactly what hip-hop could achieve if hip-hop artists only allowed themselves to delve that deeply and push boundaries that far.
Thankfully, The Roots, who do find themselves in a most unique position as being a band nearly 30 years in existence (eons in hip-hop years), and who have struck lucrative gold through their prominent presence on late night television, have decidedly and defiantly embraced this stage as an opportunity to make artistic statements regardless of trends and popularity and also by refusing to fall back on the tried and true formats within the hip-hop genre, the very formats that have left the art form within a sad and precarious state of arrested development and creative stagnation. By supreme contrast, what The Roots have achieved so brilliantly and disturbingly with "...and then you shoot your cousin," is to create and reveal what is unquestionably a powerful, sobering work of art.
"..and then you shoot your cousin" is an album that Questlove has referred to as The Roots' first opera, a description that seems more than fitting when you consider the expansive landscape and musically adventurous presentation. With "undun," Black Thought, The Roots' chief rapper/lyricist, worked with a collective of Roots collaborators (including the frequent voice of Dice Raw) to reveal the variety of emotions, thoughts and actions of one fictional character, in this case drug dealer Redford Stevens, whose tragic story is detailed in reverse from his death through the final day of his life. With "...and then you shoot your cousin," The Roots, with ample assistance from their collaborators, widen their focus to give voice to the people, neighborhoods and communities that life has seemingly forgotten in our so-called "post-racial" America, where hope has been all but extinguished and nothing has changed but the day.
The opening moments of "...and then you shoot your cousin" features a segment from Nina Simone's "Theme From Middle Of The Night," a selection that essentially serves as somewhat of an overture for the album's cast of characters, albeit it is the most somber overture you are likely to hear. "Only the lonely love/Only the sad of soul/Wake and begin their day in the middle of the night," Simone sings. "To breakfast on their ride/Where joys and tears just dried/To breakfast with the moon/In the middle of the night." And then, in the crippling solitude, our ears our stricken with the sound of two funereal hits to Questlove's snare drum, possibly gunshots in the distance but close enough to pierce your soul.
"Never," the album's second track is possibly one of the most striking selections in The Roots' entire catalog. It is a creepy, supremely haunting song that opens with ghostly choir voices, strings plucked in dissonance, mournful piano chords and Questlove's funereal drums keeping time, all creating a sonic landscape that, to my ears, suggested...well...let's say a metaphysical space where souls arrive and depart and just maybe, in the case of this song, we are hearing the voice of a soul either arriving or departing a physical place where a person's life is doomed even before birth.
The eerie, echoed vocals of Patty Crash descend upon the scene like a specter, creating a palpable sense of unease, and possibly suggesting the full "undun" departure of Redford Stevens' spirit from life. "Street dreams, close your eyes/Say goodbye to my memory/Street dreams, this is the moment/The moment that feels like forever/They say time flies/Down from the sky and says never/I look down...all I see is never...And all I know is all I know..."
The inimitable Black Thought then makes his first appearance on the album unleashing a world weary, soul crushing yet furiously paced flurry of poetic lyrics describing the inner state of so many who are living on the fringes of society and sanity.
"I was born faceless in an oasis/Folks disappear here and leave no traces," he begins, perfectly illustrating an urban landscape of distant empathy and riddled with dire consequences and circumstances. Throughout "Never," Black Thought gives voice to a world of situations and emotions from the lack of educational opportunities ("Waitin' on Superman losing all patience") all the way to the inner state of existential desolation ("Life is a bitch and then you live/Until one day by death you're found."). And throughout the track, the drums keep marching forwards, the choir moans onward and Patty Crash's ethereal vocals disturbingly return to the scene. "Never" is precisely the kind of album opening grabber that firmly sets the album's overall tone, setting the stage for everything we will soon hear and the effect left me more than a little shaken.
As for the remainder of "...and then you shoot your cousin" and what the entirety of the album means lyrically and thematically (including the significance of the title), I have not fully grasped it all and frankly, how could I as the album is completely designed to be digested over many listenings, and over a considerable amount of time as well. This factor is exactly what makes art albums so treasured and ultimately meaningful, as they continuously reveal themselves to you as you grow with the music. Additionally, this very factor is one that would indeed make an album like this one so risky in these accelerated, instant gratification times as "...and then you shoot your cousin" really doesn't contain anything that could qualify as a "hit single" and in some respects, there aren't really that many songs on the album anyway. It feels like what The Roots have conceived and crated is a more symphonic piece, something to be listened to in its entirety, where the songs function more like movements.
What has struck me within these tales of the bruised, the broken, the disillusioned observers, the drug dealers, drug addicts, and even a self-described "sex-addicted introvert" (as featured within the song "When The People Cheer"), were all of the various lines that seemed to leap from the speakers. Lines that almost felt to be floating within mid air, lingering their sting and pain, echoing into the distance long after the words were uttered and heard.
When the album addresses the topic of inner city malnutrition in the selection "Black Rock" (which is built from the sample of Blackrock's "Yeah Yeah"), the lines "Hey whats for breakfast?/Same as yesterday/Oh that's right cheeseburger and a 40 ounce" hit like the proverbial ton of bricks. When the album focuses on the futility and frustrations with religion and spirituality, lines like "Everybody acts like God is all that/But I got the feelin' He ain't never coming back" from "When The People Cheer" and "People ask for God 'til the day He comes/See God's face-turn around and run" from the church organ driven track "Understand" are profoundly solemn.
Musically, The Roots' have created a work that stands as their most audacious, at least their most audacious since the terrifying 10 minute plus track "Water" from their epic album "Phrenology" (released November 26, 2002). As previously stated, the full running time of "...and then you shoot your cousin" is only roughly 34 minutes, but The Roots have achieved what so many musicians and songwriters from decades prior achieved on a regular basis. Basically, from album to album, The Roots have discovered how to do more with less.
In addition to the album's chilling interludes from outside sources (Mary Lou Williams' "The Devil" and "Dies Irae," the jarring musique concrete of composer Michel Chion), we can now hear the spaces between the notes as the album is indeed filled with a variety of pregnant pauses that only serve to increase the tensions and emotional states of the album's characters and themes. The Roots have also incorporated a wider musical canvas fully illustrating the artistic reaches that hip-hop can stretch towards like on the fantastic "The Coming," featuring the vocals of Mercedes Martinez, which contains severely distraught piano and string sections clashing violently. And on "The Dark (Trinity)", a track which may be a deconstruction of the hip-hop MC bravado, the strings become even more foreboding as they echo the final countdown to doom crescendo of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life."
Lyrically, Black Thought only continues to raise his game, making it such an inexcusable shame that he is so under-rated within the hip-hop community. Ever since the band's creatively rejuvenating album "Game Theory' (released August 29, 2006) and especially with the track "Dear God 2.0" from the outstanding "How I Got Over" (released June 22, 2010), Black Thought has grown tremendously with increasingly provocative lyrics that provoke and challenge while fitting so effortlessly within his boom-bap flow. Hi character sketches are wonderfully vivid, his satire savagely pointed, and then, he just strikes a newfound level of poetic grace time and again.
Please just read this particular couplet from "Understand":
"Love is like a harlequin's romance
Lost between sips of liquor, that empty bottle in my hands
It was a shot away, but I never got away
Dreamed a little dream of me, but that was an anomaly"
Or this one from "Never":
"I tried to keep both of my feet on the ground
But I know my head is surrounded by clouds
Spirallin' down, destined to drown
Forever is just a collection of nows
Off on my own, nowhere is my home
Approaching infinity's fork in the road"
Or even this masterful section from "The Unraveling," a track that delves into the inner world of the self-described "man with no future":
"What did the thief say onto the hanging man?
'Here come the hounds, lay your burdens down in advance'
Redemption in the slow grind of chance
My grandmother's hands, the pomp and circumstance
Free at last! Free at last! A different me at last
Scattered like an ash, or history that's past
Came from nowhere, disappear just as fast
A life out of balance, a touch out of grasp
A time traveler headed to a night catches us
The final stop on the line for all passengers..."
In hip-hop or otherwise, when was the last time you heard lyrics like these on the radio? Bow down to Black Thought I say, bow down!! And additionally with that, The Roots have found a bridge between art and commerce, but unlike so terribly many, they aligned themselves with the nurturing and conservation of the art, hoping that the commerce will follow.
The Roots' "..and then you shoot your cousin" is a quiet storm of grace and fury. An uncompromisingly grim musical vision that reflects upon the even more uncompromisingly grim realities that shamefully populate our cities in President Obama's America.
The Roots have not only thrown down the gauntlet socially and politically with this album, they have drawn the line in the sand artistically, especially between themselves and the remainder of the hip-hop community and current musical pop culture at large, a culture that has swung its pendulum back towards the hopelessly plastic and superficial completely in pursuit of all things commercially viable yet artistically vacant. In fact, this also makes "..and then you shoot your cousin" work as a musical companion piece to Questlove's exquisitely written and essential six-part essay series for the Vulture publication entitled "How Hip-Hop Failed Black America."
What The Roots have accomplished with this new album, despite its relentless bleakness, is truly uplifting as they have showcased a creativity, imagination, skill and tenacity that is sorely lacking and regardless of how their work is ultimately received critically and commercially, the band have ascended to a point in their career where they creatively have nothing to lose so why not just swing for those fences! And as an added point, the were even astute enough to release the album on Malcolm X's birthday!
As far as I am concerned, The Roots are truly one of the very best that we have, so please do celebrate, appreciate and take the time to fully immerse yourself in the experience of "...and then you shoot your cousin."
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