Oh, The Roots. Why doesn’t the world seem to understand what they have in you?
You can’t nail The Roots down in any way. Stylistically, artistically, content-wise. Led by the remarkable ?uestlove, they are always changing, always growing, always experimenting. Their newest album, How I Got Over, is no exception.
Whether they are sampling/collaborating with Monsters of Folk (Dear God 2.0), or at once making fun of auto-tune while also using it to its fullest potential by using the much maligned (and rightly so) effect to create the melody for a beat out of a baby crying (Hustla), The Roots are up to their old tricks again.
Lyrically, spearheaded by the amazing skill of their emcee Black Thought, their work always cuts to the heart of the cultural milieu, or, to use Black Thought’s own words, they / talk sharp like a razor blade under the tongue /
Black Thought always seems to see the world as it actually is, and pulls no punches in commenting on it, whether the subject is something huge like racism, something commonplace like romantic relationships, or something potentially touchy, like calling out their counterparts in world of Hip Hop.
It is more of the same on How I Got Over. However, there does seem to be a major difference this time around. The album is enormously hopeful. Not that their music was hopeless before, far from it, but this time it’s the primary theme I come away with after listening to the CD.
The album lives up to its name, it really feels like a document of how to get over whatever is in your way. The title track, featuring Dice Raw, chronicles how desire can survive inner-city life, where everything truly is against you. Everything seems to / teach us not to give a fuck / Yet, somehow these guys survived, and it seems like holding fast to hope is what did it.
Like U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which were both creative ways of saying ‘Love,’ for me this CD uses the same titular device to say ‘Hope.’
How they got over, was ‘Hope.’
Not just the evangelical, pop-mart, bullshit sort of hope. Real hope. Hope in the face of hopelessness is how we get over. Hope against reason. Foolish, irrational hope. And in the context of this CD, hope rooted in honest and uncertain faith. It’s hope by a group of men who continue to see the world as it is, who are still struggling to understand why we suffer so much, and why the world can be so ugly if it was created in God’s image.
Talent wasn’t enough to get The Roots over (although they have it in spades). It was enough to get them out of the setting described in the title track, but as the antics of 50Cent and Lil Wayne make clear, you can get out of the economic hardship and smothering systemic injustice created by poverty and racism and still not truly ‘get over.’
The Roots really did get over, never leaving behind the context they grew up in, but offering something beautiful out of it.
Personally, I tend toward cynicism and pessimism. I have trouble believing the world can get better. It’s painful to hope, to desire a better world, and pessimism is easier, safer. With this CD, The Roots have offered me a reminder that, / that type of thinking can’t get you nowhere / someone has to care /
