“Burning both sides of the rope / Just pullin’ and tuggin’ / In between Islam and straight thuggin’ / Laying around the way everyday and doin’ nothing,” raps Black Thought on Phrenology‘s opus “Water,” a song that serves as much as a public intervention for his partner-in-rhyme Malik B. as it does a haunting polyrhythmic symphony. Yes folks, the Roots are back, and this time they are older, wiser and more reflective.
Beginning their career as what was seen as hip-hop’s tryst with live jazz instrumentation and marketable bohemian images, the Roots embodied a maelstrom of ideas that would be as applicable to suburban cultural purists as they were to the band’s urban, chewstick-sporting, dreadlocked, rap-nerd counterparts.
A loose collective based around team captains rapper Black Thought and drummer ?uestlove, the Roots employed beatboxers Rahzel and Scratch, Roc-A-Fella big dog Beanie Sigel, spoken-word griot Ursula Rucker, soulstress Erykah Badu and a slew of other artists at one time or another to work the group’s undefined fanbase. They were popular in Japan and Germany before the mid-Atlantic really caught on. Somewhere along the way, everybody who heard them found a favorite Roots jam.
With Phrenology, the band’s fifth studio album, a seamless flow of music finds cacophony concurrent with commercial appeal. The strong, iconoclastic personalities that make up the band somehow came together to create a dexterous record that certainly colors outside the lines in the hip-hop coloring book.
Where Do You Want More?!? was b-boy boasting, Phrenology yields deserved confidence. Where Illadelph Halflife was back-to-basics hip-hop with a collection of jams independent of one another, Phrenology is a holistic listening experience. Where Things Fall Apart was the culmination of street-savvy hip-hop and finely-tuned live performances to create an undeniable hip-hop masterpiece, Phrenology is the bastard son of experimentation whose strokes of brilliance and minor misses creep around every corner.
Simply said, the Philly boys have re-invented themselves once again, and Phrenology proves to be their most diverse album to date.
Clearly armed with his Bad Brains and Minor Threat influences, guitarist Ben Kinney joined the band permanently on the last tour, and quick lessons in ’80s D.C. punk are seen on the album.
In addition, cameos by Canadian song bird Nelly Furtado on “Sacrifice,” Philly crooner Musiq on “Break You Off” (a song about infidelity that serves as the antithesis to the loyalty of Things Fall Apart‘s “You Got Me”), Grammy-winning fellow Philadelphian Jill Scott on “Complexity” and neo-rocker Cody Chesnutt on “The Seed” (who provides a yet-to-make-an-appearance rock influence on a Roots album), add an appreciable amount of melody to the band’s sound.
However, with the contributions by the aforementioned colorful musicians, there is also the ever-present poetry of Ursula Rucker paying tribute to the “architects who designed this culture,” showing that the Roots have not strayed too far from their hip-hop “roots.”
Bitches Brew this is not, but more a communal album, represented in the cover art. Reflecting images that have most likely characterized the group members’ lives, the 19 startling pictures (premature death, drug use, the KKK, a microphone, turntables, Malcolm X, the Philadelphia Liberty Bell, cash, an empty outline of a father, etc.) are of utter importance to the larger picture painted by the album.
With all the ambition of the new sounds and influences, Black Thought still remains as the stable rhyme basis, working with his Okayplayer.com brethren Talib Kweli and Dice Raw on “Rolling With Heat” and just Kweli on the requisite hidden Roots track “Rhymes and Ammo.”
In addition, Phrenology finds Thought probably at his best on the chaotic, bongo-heavy, Kool G. Rap-influenced “Thought @ Work” and with the tale of urban living and determination on “Quills” (“I hit the studio with a pen and a vendetta / Sippin’ an ice-cold Becks, puffin’ the tenth later / Driftin,’ shots lickin’ while the plot thickens / Sand’s in the hour glass thinnin’ / The last inning).
Serving as the Roots’ most political effort to date, the critical “Pussy Galore” addresses America’s obsession with flesh as a marketing tool, and New Jersey’s controversial poet laureate Amiri Baraka stops by for a recital. For a band that somehow got the “conscious” and “revolutionary” tags previously in its career, the few ideological songs on this album far outweigh the relative apathy of their earlier efforts.
The over 10 minutes of “Water” finds Black Thought, ?uestlove and the rest of the crew orchestrating the three parts of their relationship with reported drug abuser/former bandmate Malik B. in what proves to be the most thoughtful, if not frightening, composition of the group’s career.
With the second half of the song reportedly acting as an interpretation of the stirring “Taj Mahal” drug-den scene in Spike Lee’s 1991 film “Jungle Fever,” the point is clearly made. Created over a period of time, “Water” perhaps also reflects the maturity of the album. As the lyrics read, “They say a record is nothing if it is not touching / Grippin’, draw you in closer / Make you wanna listen to it.”
Enough said.
Grade: A
