MO' META Blues Part 12

In early September of 2001, there was a Michael Jackson celebration at Madison Square Garden to commemorate his thirty years in show business. I wanted to go, just as a fan, as someone who loved his music and had been there for him as a record buyer since the beginning. But the Roots had been asked to serve as the musical director for a Levi's series. We were curating the show and backing up a number of the artists. My plan was to wrap it up by seven thirty and then get over to the Michael Jackson show. Easy.

But as the day went on, we got word that one of the artists, Mesh.e.l.l Ndegeocello, was running behind and that we'd have to delay her rehearsal. I was p.i.s.sed. I really wanted to see Michael Jackson. Her delay stretched from an hour to two, and then to three, and we just ran out of time. The day was over. We had missed the Michael Jackson show and we hadn't even successfully sound-checked Mesh.e.l.l. Defeated and exhausted, we trudged over to our hotel room at the SoHo Grand. There, because of miscommunication, mismanagement, or possibly fate, all fourteen rooms being held for the Roots were no longer available. That was the last time, I think, that I threw a bona fide, full-scale, top-of-my-lungs, rock-star fit. It doesn't happen very often, but it happened then. I was angry about missing the Michael Jackson performance. I was frustrated about rehearsals. And I was in disbelief that we had ended the day hotel-less. I lost it. I flipped. There I was, yelling in the middle of the lobby as the hotel staff tried to figure out how to deal with the large group of angry black people in their ritzy establishment.

Nervous fingers flew over reservation keyboards, and soon enough they had secured us s.p.a.ce at the Marriott right next to the World Trade Center. This was about one in the morning now, on September 11, 2001. But wait: one more twist. The computers were down. I got even madder, and the reservations staff got even more apologetic. They ended up dividing us up. Some of us had to draw straws and stay at a janky Howard Johnson's. Others went to the Sheraton up near 54th Street. Tariq and I were the lucky ones-we got placed in the Bryant Park Hotel. We got there, exhausted, demoralized, and went to bed.

My phone woke me up. My mom had called about nine times, which I ignored, naturally. But even with the vibrate function turned off, the light kept bothering me, and soon enough it was twelve missed calls, and then sixteen. I thought somebody had died, so I went to check my mom's messages. That's how I found out that the planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was as shocked as everyone else. It made no sense. The story was unfolding all around me but I couldn't understand; it was too enormous to process.

The second I found out that we were close to living in Armageddon, I knew exactly what I had to do. I ran to the front desk to make sure that I could stay there for the rest of the week. Then I ran outside. New York was as silent as Vanilla Sky's first ten minutes, but I managed to find a taxi. I gave the cabbie a hundred bucks and told him that I only needed to make a short drive over to the Virgin Megastore. He dropped me on the corner just before, and I told him that there was an extra fifty in it if he waited for me. I loaded up on music. I can't remember all the records I got, but one of them was The Blueprint by Jay-Z, which became the soundtrack of that event, of that period, for me.

To say that I had mixed feelings about Jay-Z at that point in my career was an understatement. To me he represented much of what was wrong with hip-hop, although I couldn't have really made sense of my own theories: something to do with commercial success, or a lack of self-awareness in the lyrics, or a kind of concession to a certain gangster pose that didn't elevate the race or the genre. But I had an aversion. When I listened to The Blueprint in the wake of 9/11, though, and listened to it with a trancelike intensity, I started to feel such a deep connection to it, and not just in the Stockholm syndrometype of way. I realized that Jay and I had plenty in common, including East Coast roots and a love for the music. We also had people in common, including the writer dream hampton, who was one of the pioneering female journalists for The Source and Vibe magazines and a central cultural figure in the lives of many rappers. I remember telling her that I really liked The Blueprint, and that it felt revolutionary for me to come down off my soapbox and admit it. That was a moment of distinct evolution, a kind of intelligent concession, like the moment in Purple Rain when Billy Sparks finally understands the Kid's music. As it turned out, dream pa.s.sed the news along to Jay, and then told me how pleased he was that I had liked it. That was a secondary revelation: I didn't know that my opinion meant anything to him.

That fall was the beginning of an important relations.h.i.+p between Jay-Z and the Roots. When he got the offer to do MTV Unplugged he wanted us to be his backing band. I'm ashamed to admit that I panicked. Even though I liked his record, even though I was developing a tremendous respect for him as an artist, I still felt that he was the antichrist to a certain kind of hip-hop fan. Admiring him was one thing-but collaborating with him? That seemed like it could be a real train-wreck of critical signifiers: his big-money, above-the-t.i.tle hip-hop, our legit indie reputation. It was like an aesthetic form of power clas.h.i.+ng. He kept calling to try to entice us to work with him, and I kept avoiding his phone calls. Again, I think it was a conversation with dream that set me straight. "Look," she said, "he's a music nerd like you. Just talk to the man."

So I did. We ended up backing him on the Unplugged special, and then a bit later I was his musical director for the Madison Square Garden show that was the centerpiece of the Fade to Black doc.u.mentary. And even later on, he ended up being our label president when we signed to Def Jam.20

The irony of ironies, of course, is that Jay ended up being one of the easiest people to work with I have ever encountered. Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of artists, and I have developed shortcuts, formulas, and psychological games to maximize motivation and minimize the strange ego collisions of collaboration. With some artists, you have to suggest the opposite of what they want, because they will come back contentiously and reverse your suggestion. With others, you have to plant the seeds of idea and let it flower in their own heads, where they can take credit for it. With Jay it was simple. He paid close attention to what everyone else in the room was saying, and when it was his turn he asked questions. He might say, "How would you make this better?" and when you told him, he'd take a little time to think about it, after which he'd either agree or tell you plainly why he wasn't comfortable with that approach.

I had spent most of my life working with like-minded people, people from the left side of the artist-businessman spectrum. They prided themselves on their dedication to self-expression. The result, though, was often a tug-of-war about whose ideas got to win that was divorced from the larger goal of making successful art. Who would have ever thought that the easiest artist I have ever worked with is the one who seemed so different, not to mention the one who had the right to be a complete p.r.i.c.k? Coming at the end of a year and a half of Soulquarian angst, this realization turned my head completely around. The people who were supposedly like me were the most mind-bogglingly frustrating people imaginable. The people who I thought were nothing like me were the smoothest sailing. People thwart your expectations every way you can imagine, and in many ways you can't.

When the Roots had taken their break after Things Fall Apart, while I was off touring with D'Angelo, Tariq had pursued a side career as an actor and started to ready what he thought would be his first solo alb.u.m, Masterpiece Theatre. That alb.u.m didn't come together the way he wanted it to, or maybe his vision for it kept s.h.i.+fting, and when he and I returned to the fold, it became clear that the schedule had moved out from under us. We were due for another group record, and it was going to have to absorb some of the material from Masterpiece Theatre. But what kind of Roots record was it going to be?

As usual, Tariq and I were the yin and the yang of the group, and since he was bringing in the lyrics and unfinished tracks, I started thinking, with Rich's help, about what the overall feel of the record should be. I was at Electric Lady Studios most days, working on Common's follow-up to Like Water for Chocolate, which was called Electric Circus, as well as the next alb.u.m for Erykah Badu, Mama's Gun. Though I didn't know it for sure, I was pretty certain that it was the twilight of the Soulquarians, the last gasp of that utopia that had started to take root a few years earlier.

Because of my touring with D'Angelo, the Roots hadn't had a chance to truly cash in on the neo-soul movement. We were Moses and the movement was the Promised Land: We had led people to it, helped organize it, ushered people through the first awkward phases, made sure that there was an audience that understood and appreciated the music. And yet we didn't really benefit from it. There were artists who made big money and got a big hike in their status as a result, but by the time we were ready to come back, everyone was neo-souled out. More importantly, the princ.i.p.als were already planning their next moves. I remember having a conversation with D'Angelo at Electric Lady, during the time we were all making Electric Circus.

"Yo," he said. "We can't do this no more. I'm going to learn to play guitar."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I'm going to go dirty. We should all go dirty." What he meant by "dirty" wasn't exactly clear, but it had something to do with pus.h.i.+ng the boundaries of what was considered soul music, as well as challenging himself. He was going to master Eddie Hazel's mind-melting solo from Maggot Brain.

When I asked Dilla what he thought of that, his answer went off in yet another direction. He told me he was going Kraftwerk: no more Rhodes piano, no more crispy snares.

Common joined the chorus. "Yeah," he said. "We have to blow up everything and start something new." Common was so insistent on change, in fact, that I started to smell a backstory. At the time, he was engaged to Erykah, who was the mother of Andre 3000's child, and Erykah and Andre were still actively involved in each other's lives, at least creatively. When I would go to her house, she would play me tapes of what Andre and Big Boi were working on in OutKast. Common was showing such an appet.i.te for experimentation that I wondered if he was hearing those work tapes and feeling like he needed to catch up. It was either that or the fact that he was falling under Erykah's spell. Raphael Saadiq and I had an affectionate joke about her: never look her in the eye for more than five seconds, because then your brain will be her brain. She'll take you over. Whatever the factors, the fact was that Common was pus.h.i.+ng hard for Electric Circus to be a kitchen-sink record. He was interested in experimentation in a way I had never heard before, from him or from anyone.

In the midst of all these self-styled rebels, I was feeling a little bit lost. With Things Fall Apart, I had finally gotten the love and adoration I had wanted for doing my thing. And before I had a chance to enjoy it or figure out if I could extend it creatively, everyone else was jumping s.h.i.+p. We had newly minted guitar heroes. We had Kraftwerk. Suddenly I was the cultural conservative. I was also, frankly, still processing my guilt over the sense that I was the one who had stopped the Roots' momentum after Things Fall Apart. We would have had a victory lap, a whole year to be the Grammy-winning, neo-soul-a-riffic Roots. Maybe Dilla and D'Angelo and Common were ready to metamorphose again, but I wanted to be sure that I had my ideas properly sorted out before I changed my skis.

And there was still another factor, which was the sense that even though the Roots had come into our own with Things Fall Apart, we had unfinished business as a recording unit. When Robert Christgau reviewed Things Fall Apart, he gave it a B+, and wrote that listeners would be relieved when we finally let ourselves go and rocked out. That was something I heard from fans all the time, that the energy and sheer volume of a Roots show had never been adequately captured on record.

We added up all these factors and came up with a battle plan for Phrenology, which was that we were going to make the world's first anti-Roots Roots alb.u.m. "We'll make every type of song that the Roots aren't supposed to do," someone said, and that became our template.21

When we started to collect material for the alb.u.m, some of it came from unfinished tracks from Tariq's solo alb.u.m, and for the rest, we relied on these extended jam sessions. Before we knew it we had a collection of songs that were as diverse and surprising as anything we had ever done. We had a cheesy R&B jam ("Break You Off"), a s.e.xy strip song ("p.u.s.s.y Galore"), a hardcore song ("!!!"), a twelve-minute antidrug screed ("Water"). We wanted to take the attention and goodwill we had generated with Things Fall Apart and present a catalog alb.u.m of everything we were able to do. We wanted to shatter people's myths, not only about what rap groups could do, but also about what black groups could do. And we wanted to show everyone that our main reason for being was to change. Do You Want More?!!!??! was acid jazz, Illadelph Halflife was a kind of Wu-Tanginfluenced hard hip-hop production, and Things Fall Apart was definitive neo soul. We were going into the coc.o.o.n again. I wasn't worried about our audience. They would follow us or they wouldn't-I was used to losing about half our audience each time and picking up new fans-but I was determined to extend our artistic winning streak.

We put down lots of different-sounding songs, and from fairly early on it sounded like the record I wanted to be making. But the song that most people know from Phrenology-certainly the one that got us the most crossover juice-came to us strangely and indirectly. When we were getting started, I was in Detroit for a show, probably the Smokin' Grooves tour, and I was driving with dream hampton, going to shop for records at a place called Melodies and Medleys in Grosse Pointe. On the way, she played me a CD that she had gotten from Ishmael Butler, a.k.a. b.u.t.terfly from Digable Planets, who had an off-again, on-again relations.h.i.+p with her. It was a demo with songs by a new artist that Ish was excited about, and he had sworn her to secrecy not to reveal who it was.

I liked the record, especially a song called "b.i.t.c.h I'm Broke" and another one called "Boylife in America." I thought they were funny, with these unexpectedly blunt lyrics and DIY feel. When dream stopped to get gas, I snuck a look at the CD case and saw that the artist was a guy named Cody ChesnuTT. Twitter hadn't arrived yet, so I went on the online community I had created, OkayPlayer, and asked, "Does anyone know about this guy? It's one of the best demos I've heard since Jill Scott or Slum Village."

A few days later, I was at MCA, and I guy I knew there told me that one of his interns had seen the post. "You liked that record?" he said. "I didn't quite dig it myself." He went into the discard bin, all the way to the bottom like he was bobbing for apples, and he came up with two copies of the full Cody ChesnuTT alb.u.m. I gave one to Rich thinking maybe this guy and I could work on a song together. Despite the Soulquarian backlash, I was still in the frame of mind of this communal utopia. As we went, someone had the idea that we should remake one of Cody's songs, and it became apparent fairly quickly that "The Seed" was the prime candidate. It had a good groove and plenty of room to grow into a hip-hop version. Tariq liked it, too, though every time he brought us lyrics they were a little short of focused. Then at one point, he took it away, sat with it, and came back fully finished. We set up a session with Cody.

The day we recorded that track was one of the strangest, most hectic, and most productive days in Roots recording history. Normally, I did my real recording at night, going from around 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Cody was scheduled to land in New York at 5 in the afternoon, and he was going to come right over. I figured we'd go all night. Rich had other ideas, though. He wanted me to get it done in the early evening, which was fine, except for the fact that I had a direct conflict. I had a date.

"Come on," I said. "This was the only time she could see a movie. I have to be out of the studio by seven forty-five, eight at the latest. Can't you wait until I'm back?"

"Fine," Rich said. "Maybe we'll just do it without you." This was one of his Jedi mind tricks. He knew I wouldn't let someone else do it.

Cody's flight landed a little late, and he got there at about 7:25. We did pounds: Mos was there, saying h.e.l.lo, and I think Ish came down, too. At around 7:40 I tried to apply the pressure, but by the time we finally sat down to play it was 7:50 and I was panicking. Next came formatting: we had to figure out whether or not we'd go through the melody straight, and where we'd start Tariq's rhyme. He was generally a twenty-four-bar person, as are many rappers, but this was clearly a pop song, which meant that it made sense to shorten him up to sixteen bars. Formatting was done at 7:52 or 7:53. Time was tight.

I was sitting behind the drums with my big-a.s.s winter coat already on and my bag packed and ready to go on the floor next to me. Ben Kenney, who was playing guitar with us before he decamped for Incubus, was there with me, and Cody played guitar and sang in the control room. Tape started rolling at 7:54 or so. We got the song down once and then, because I lost count in my head, we had to stop and rewind the tape. As we started again, the breeze from the air conditioning unit blew my map to the floor. "Keep it rolling," I said. "Don't stop the tape." That's still on there. Now it was 7:57, and I figured that I could still make it to the Angelika Film Center a few blocks away by 8:15, which would have meant an angry girlfriend but not an ex-girlfriend. We went through the song again, straight, no pause, and on the last line of vocals, where Cody sings "I will name it rock and roll," I was drumming with one hand. The last three beats were done one-handed, my other hand on my bag, and then I left before Rich could stop me. The cymbal was still vibrating as I went out the door.22

As quick as it was, as hectic as it was, there was something about it. It had feel. I wasn't the only one who thought so. "The Seed (2.0)" was a hit and a big part of our crossover success. It was also Don Was's favorite record of that year. When he was making "A Bigger Bang" with the Rolling Stones, he played it for the band. "That's the kind of sound we want," he said. "This is what you need to be sounding like." About a year after that, he was producing the Italian rock star Zucchero, and he had me in to drum on five songs. At the beginning of the session, Don was hinting around, tiptoeing. I could tell that he was basically asking for "The Seed (2.0)" again. "Don," I said. "I know the game here. You don't have to sugarcoat it. If you just want five 'Seeds,' that's cool, just say so, man. You want that or not?"

He ducked his head a bit and came back up smiling. "Yeah," he said. "I love that energy."

If "The Seed (2.0)" was spontaneous and fun, the other single from that record was the exact opposite. That was "Break You Off," our greasy R&B song. We had a great hook, and we wanted Musiq Soulchild to sing it, but he was signed to Def Jam and as such unavailable. We went to Alicia Keys next. She and I had become friends a few years earlier, and we got word that she'd be up for it. I went to the studio, waited, and then around two in the morning I felt someone shaking my shoulder. "Ahmir, Ahmir. Wake up."

"Did she come?"

"No. She didn't make it."

That happened again the second night. On the third night someone said she was called to Los Angeles for another project.

I started to the get the sense that Alicia wasn't going to do it, and so we moved on through what seemed like an endless series of artists: Jill, Bilal, nonsingers, people who wanted to give it a try. One of them opted in and then opted out and then opted in and then opted out, all on the same day. One of them tried, gamely, but couldn't manage to sound anywhere close to acceptable. One of them had their own record-company difficulties. The process of trying to secure a vocalist to sing the hook on "Break You Off" is almost too long and too tortured to be believed. I wrote about it in the Home Grown! series, in the liner notes, and even there it sounds like a comic novella, something out of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. In the end, as you'd expect from a comic saga, we ended up back right where we started, with Musiq singing the hook, and the song became the other hit off the record.

Powered in part by "Break You Off" and in part by "The Seed (2.0)," Phrenology was a big success. Critics loved it; Rolling Stone said that we were continuing the winning streak we started with Things Fall Apart, but with an even stronger sense of our versatility. Robert Christgau, who hadn't been totally convinced by Things Fall Apart, thought that we were making strides in pop songcraft; I think he called it "tune and structure." And record buyers responded, too: the alb.u.m stayed on the charts for almost a year. The plan, which was to demonstrate our diversity, worked like a charm.23

Even then, there were reminders about the limits of our achievement. Celebrity is like a ladder whose top you can't see. One afternoon after the alb.u.m came out, I did a panel discussion as part of a symposium in Philadelphia on the role of hip-hop in culture. We took questions at the end of the conversation, and one little hand went up in the back of the room. I called on the boy. "Do you know any famous people?" he demanded. Kids are so brutally honest. They don't mince words or even thoughts about what's happening in their world. As a result, part of me has always felt like kids are telling me the truth and that adults are bulls.h.i.+tting me. That moment was like a corrective for everything else: the two consecutive near-platinum records, the tide of critical acclaim, the videos, the television appearances, the famous friends. I don't remember how I answered the question, but I remember what I was thinking, which was that I feel like my cultural value comes from my role as a bridge. My job is to connect brilliant have-nots to the land of haves.

That mission continues to this day. I recently heard about a new Australian group called Kaiyote, an unsigned act with a really incredible debut song. I tweeted about it and within a few days that little ripple went outward in a way that was hard for me to imagine. Journalists started calling. Agents showed interest. I'm thrilled to be a connector like that. But at the same time, the bridge is spanning two different landma.s.ses: one of them is called "Oh, it's so amazing to meet you-what an honor" and the other one is "You ain't s.h.i.+t." I never know for sure which one is my home and which one I am just visiting. Is that a tortured metaphor, or is it a metaphor about being tortured?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

How do things get their names?

It's a strange process. My parents gave me my name, and then I replaced it with a question mark, partly because the labeling of a person with a few words didn't quite make sense to me. That question mark became a second name that today defines me even more than the first one did. The band started out as Radio Activity, then went Black to the Future, then Square Roots, each time pushed forward by our own internal creativity, by the certainty that something new and exciting would happen if we only kept trying. And yet the final s.h.i.+ft to the Roots, the one that brought us into those new and exciting things, was motivated by something else entirely, by pressure from outside. Things are what you call them, but they're also not what you don't call them. I've learned that lesson over and over again.

One of the best examples is our alb.u.m t.i.tles. Almost since the beginning, every Roots alb.u.m had two t.i.tles during the period where it was a work in progress, and eventually one came to the fore. Do You Want More?!!!??! was also Homegrown. For Things Fall Apart, there was briefly talk of calling it The Center Will Not Hold, though our final choice referenced both the Yeats poem and also the Chinua Achebe novel. For Phrenology, it was either that or Masterpiece Theatre, the t.i.tle of the solo record that Tariq had to sc.r.a.p. For The Tipping Point, though, I think that we had the t.i.tle fairly early in the process, and we didn't let it go. Rich had read Malcolm Gladwell's book and given it to me to read. He thought it would make a great t.i.tle.

With most of the records, we wanted the t.i.tles to work on three levels: as a reflection of our own career, as a reflection of the hip-hop scene, and as a reflection of the world at large. Though I loved The Tipping Point as a t.i.tle, I did have some concerns that it wouldn't resonate equally on all three levels. I didn't want people to think that we were talking only about our own music, that we were somehow hoping out loud that this would be a watershed moment for our success. In fact, we were coming off of two alb.u.ms that had established us commercially: Things Fall Apart had "You Got Me" and sold almost a million copies. Phrenology had "The Seed 2.0" and sold eight hundred thousand. That put us in the stratosphere, as far as I was concerned. Five years earlier, there was no way you would have convinced me that we would sell a million records. A brainy hip-hop band that didn't really know how to make pop hits? What were our commercial prospects, really? We never had a "Who Let the Dogs Out?" or a "Gin and Juice." We had to make it as alb.u.m artists. And suddenly, here we were, making it that way.

In fact, The Tipping Point appealed to us for broader political reasons. At the time, we were about a year into the second Iraq war, and there was both a weariness and a wariness regarding the way our leaders.h.i.+p had behaved. I really didn't think that George W. Bush was going to win a second term, and I thought that a John Kerry presidency was going to mark the beginning of a new era where we were more careful about foreign entanglements, less aggressive on the international stage, more sensitive to the cost of those engagements for domestic health. I really thought that. I was certain. Most of my friends were certain. That's one of many reasons why it's probably good that I'm a musician rather than a political scientist.

And yet there was some truth to the t.i.tle, at least from a business standpoint. The dominolike collapse of record labels had continued: we had gone from DGC to Geffen to MCA, and then, just as Phrenology was about to come out, we got word they were dissolving the label. Rich got right to it and managed to secure a promise that the record would come out about five weeks before the label disappeared for good, and that the staff would put full muscle behind it: that they would be in touch with radio the way they were supposed to, that they would work "The Seed (2.0)" properly. That happened, but just barely. To give you an idea of how rapidly it all unraveled, Common's Electric Circus, which came out only five weeks after ours, was essentially stillborn. Even though it was critically acclaimed, it arrived with no one to oversee it, promote it, or make sure that it reached its public.

Suddenly, we were on Interscope, which was a different kind of label than anything we had ever experienced. They had, at the time, a roster stuffed with hugely successful artists: multiplatinum acts like Sting, No Doubt, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. When MCA ceased to be, all its artists on the label fell to the floor like baseball cards, and Interscope shuffled through the cards to decide which ones they were going to pick up. They took Mary J. Blige without a second thought. She was more or less at the level of the major stars they were already working with at Interscope. One or two other acts got s.n.a.t.c.hed up hungrily. But then there were the midlevel names, the singers and groups that had a strong following but weren't moving fast-food-franchise numbers of units. At that point, Dr. Dre intervened and told Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope, which acts he thought were cool and should be kept on. He pointed the fickle finger of fate at Talib Kweli, at Mos Def, at Common, and at us.

Call me naive, or lucky, but I had made it through more than a decade of being a major-label recording artist without encountering true corporate culture. We had a winning streak going where the art was paramount and the business concerns, though they were there in the background, didn't encroach to any great degree. Our tenure with Geffen/Interscope was the end of that winning streak. The second the Roots moved over to the label, we had to adjust the way we did business. For one thing, Jimmy was in Los Angeles, so we had no personal relations.h.i.+p with him. Rich usually flew out there to meet with him. There was some goodwill in the bank, though: Scott Storch, who was an early part of the Roots' success, had gone on to coproduce "Still D.R.E.," which, as the lead single for Dr. Dre's 2001, was a ma.s.sive hit for Interscope in 1999, and had also worked with Christina Aguilera. Scott found favor with Jimmy and some of that rubbed off on us.

Even so, it wasn't easy. The thing that struck us as troublesome, right off the bat, was Jimmy's reaction to Phrenology. He listened to "The Seed (2.0)," shrugged, and said, "Eh, sounds old." The song had been out maybe a year, at most, and it had been one of our biggest hits. How did it sound old, exactly? We felt like he didn't get what we were about as a band and wasn't really interested in learning.