The Roots - Game Theory
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The Roots - Game Theory
(Wednesday September 6, 2006 3:44 PM
)
Released on 29/08/06
Label: Def Jam
The Roots have enjoyed and endured a problematic relationship with their genre. Treated with suspicion when they emerged in the 1990s because any hip hop group using live instruments was assumed to be selling out the music to court an alternative rock audience, all they ever wanted - or merited - is to be taken seriously on their own terms. Their new alliance with Def Jam is of pivotal importance: here is a band obsessed almost to a point of neurosis with doing the right thing by the genre they love, hitching themselves to a label once famed as the repository of the music's cutting edge and now searching for a new purpose. Reassuringly, there has been no attempt made to dilute The Roots' hip hop worldview (they are both fundamentalists, stressing the importance of skills, beats and wordplay, and pluralists, intuitively understanding hip hop's ancestry in every other music around). Instead, "Game Theory" is Roots 2.0 - the original, improved upon with technological advances and big budget sheen. Compare and contrast something as simple as the different drum sounds used on "In The Music" (like the Schooly D stutter brought fizzing up to date) and the breathtaking cyberpunkhiphop of "Here I Come" (where ?uestlove sounds like he's playing Zigaboo Modeliste's kit with John Bonham's sticks): nothing is left wanting, the spaces left in the mix subtly underlining the care and attention lavished on this magnificent record. Black Thought's raps - dense, thoughtful, provocative, expressionistic, still nourishing and refreshing - no longer sit atop the tracks but are an intrinsic part of the whole. Strings and funky flanged guitar layer "Long Time" into beguiling magnificence; a clavinet, signifying Stevie and realness and soul, but sounding like it just had to be there, is deployed almost subliminally at the heart of "Don't Feel Right". This is not merely a good album, but a truly great one: the sort of LP that Def Jam used to specialise in when the label was still driven more by what was important and vital about the music, rather than...
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