The Roots - Phrenology
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I'm supposed to love The Roots, but I've never really warmed to any of their records. I love the idea of them, a polymath collective of great musicians forming a hip-hop band, anchored by the world's best drummer, beloved head Soulquarian ?uestlove. Their LPs are extremely ambitious, but there's something about them that's always put me off -- I just haven't ever been able to put my finger on it. And I've always assumed it was my fault: "Maybe next time ... If I just tried harder ..."
Well, Phrenology is the Roots' most absurdly ambitious yet, and I like it more than even Things Fall Apart. There's some stuff here that just can't be matched by anyone in the entire freakin' world, and they dig deeper than they ever have on a couple groundbreaking tracks. But this record also helped me to figure out what it is that I just don't like about The Roots: it's their frontman. Black Thought just isn't any fun at all.
I'm not saying that he's not an amazing and intelligent rapper, because he is. When Thought is on, he's well-nigh untouchable. When you hear him on the hard-edged "Rock You" or the smoothed-out "Break You Off," you just marvel at his control of language. He kicks it old-school on "Thought at Work" (to a "Funky Drummer" sample), he kicks it medium-school on "Quills" (to a Swing Out Sister sample), and comes off nicely on both. But he refuses to connect with his audience; his rapping is all about its own skill and has nothing to do with joy. I keep expecting "Pussy Galore," a song about the exploitation of male sexual idiocy, to catch fire, but Thought keeps us at a distance, and we end up feeling lectured, edified, enlightened, without ever having had fun. He just doesn't like his audience.
I think he knows this about himself. Early on, he admits that a lot of people think he's an asshole, but he doesn't feel the need to apologize about that. And then, on the album's centerpiece "Water," he opens by saying, "They say a record ain't nothin' / If it's not touchin' / Grippin', draw you in closer / Make you wanna listen to it / And if you real ill at makin' music / The listener feel like he livin' through it / That's how my nigga do it." The "nigga" he's referring to is ex-bandmate Malik B., and the song is about Thought's sadness and anger that Malik has fallen back into his drug habit. The fact that it took a tragedy like this to pull Black Thought out of his cerebrism is telling, but he rises to the occasion with a soulful, personal statement full of the fire and passion that I wish he'd let loose all the time. After Thought implores Malik to "master your high," the music slides into an insanely scary-beautiful supernova of psychedelic blues noise, with screaming dual guitars from James "Blood" Ulmer and Jeff Lee Johnson. Honestly, if this song were the whole record, Phrenology woulda been No. 1 with a bullet for me in 2002.
But it's not. No matter how many shout-outs to old-school hip-hop ("WAOK (AY) Rollcall") and collaborations with new-school r&b/rockers like Cody ChesnuTT (the great dirty Stones pastiche "The Seed 2.0") and long spoken-word pieces featuring Amiri Baraka ("Something in the Way of Things (In Town)") they throw onto this record, it still comes off like something to be appreciated rather than felt. That, ultimately, can be laid at the feet of Black Thought, whose Brechtian resolve to make his listeners think instead of participate is a risky strategy that only pays off when he lets...
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