Hip-Hop's Forum

The Roots tackle 11th album.

By: Allan Patricio (Writer: Hip-Hop’s Forum)

Anyway you look at it, there has never been a group quite like The Roots.  By now you know (if you’re a hip-hop lover or if you happen to be awake at 12:35) that the hardest working band in hip-hop has taken their long allured stage show off the road and into your television sets on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

It’s been a year and four months since The Roots drove their tour bus to 30 Rock and never looked back.  Those who questioned that move have surely been proved wrong after seeing what they have brought to late night television.  They essentially, as they did Hip-Hop; reinvented what we perceive as a Late Night TV Show Band.  With show-stopping performances with artists ranging from Public Enemy to Paul Simon, not to mention the level of humor they bring through skits and on-stage bits; The Roots have taken a known quantity and turned it on its head.  Now for those of us who questioned whether their 9 to 5 was going to keep them from getting back into the studio, we again are proved wrong with this, their 11th studio album How I Got Over.

This album has been a year in the making and if you’ve been following the production of this album like I have you know that the sound has gone through many iterations since day one.  Just judging by the title track they debuted a year ago, you would assume this album would be a soul-and-gospel inspired album.

While there are still elements of that in How I Got Over, this album almost takes on an indie rock feel obviously coming from performing with different artists night in and night out on Jimmy Fallon. Acts like Monsters of Folk, The Dirty Projectors, and Joanna Newsom who are featured on this album give it that folk vibe but still manage to make it sound undeniably Hip-Hop.  The second single, “Dear God 2.0″,  samples the Monsters of Folk song of the same name and begins with Yim Yames singing the melancholy hook that gives way to Black Thought rhyming about the world’s ills.

This is the tone that is essentially held over throughout the first half of the album.  The next two tracks, “Radio Daze” and “Now or Never”, carry similar themes of a world and culture moving too fast for the people living in it.  The Roots have never been one to skimp on quality guest verse and here is no exception with up-and-coming westcoast rapper Blu on the former and Phonte of Little Brother on the latter.  This gives way to the title track which helps create a musical and thematic shift from the somber first half of the album to the more uplifting second half.

Songs like “The Day” and “Right On” play more to the title of the album than the earlier tracks.  Overcoming adversity is the blueprint for The Roots’ whole career.  It’s funny how it’s taken them eleven albums to tackle that issue as bluntly as they do here.

It’s been a long hard road for the group literally and figuratively.  Traveling 12 years non-stop is rough … period. So I’m sure being able to stay in one place while still maintaining a steady career is all the reward they need.  And while this may seem like a break for most people, it’s definitely not to them.  They are still the hardest working band in Hip-Hop…just on NBC from 12:35 AM to 1:35AM.