MO' META Blues Part 13

I didn't want to underestimate Jimmy. I had great respect for him as a music-industry veteran. Still, I wasn't convinced that he was really putting his head into our music. He seemed like he was listening for a few seconds, deciding that it didn't move him like the most recent pop hits, and then making an executive decision that we needed to move in another direction. That didn't sit well with me. Phrenology was our most critically acclaimed record, a record we had designed to showcase all the facets of the band, and we wanted to build on it.

That was the tension: artistic expression on the one hand and serving a new corporate master on the other. And we served. That was the first time and the last time in our history as recording artists that we crafted something explicitly to suit the tastes of our label president. In a way, it was heartbreaking. Rich traveled across the country to explain the nature of the group: that we were an alb.u.m-based enterprise and the result of momentum that had been painstakingly built over the years. Funding the movement-which is how we referred to those communal jam sessions in Philly or New York-was a central part of our story and our success. Jimmy didn't have much patience for that. He wanted us to come back with fresher material. And so Rich put us in with Scott for a weeklong crash course in everything Jimmy. We tried to absorb all the music that Scott had worked on with Interscope, all the music that was coming out of that scene. We marinated ourselves in 50 Cent, in Eminem, in Dr. Dre.

Then we went back to the Roots way of doing things, but with a twist. This time, Rich had the ingenious idea of turning our Philadelphia studio into a strip club. We took our advance money and got a stripper pole. We had free food, invited a bunch of musicians, ate, traded stories, played, and then at around one in the morning the strippers showed up. We responded to their energy, to the flashy, dark vibe. When I played on St. Albans Street, we were carried forward by the boho set, by Jill Scott and India.Arie. Now, it was Kamika and Heather and whoever else.24

From the beginning, it was a strange match. Some of the band members had wives or serious girlfriends, and they were devoted enough to their domestic lives that they felt they couldn't partake in the strip-club sessions. Even for those of us who stayed, there was a little bit of a disconnect. That kind of thing wasn't completely in character for the band. Because of my personality I have been relatively subdued on that front for most of my career-that's just the way it's been and the way it will always be. I'm beyond feeling strange about it, though part of me regrets that I'll never have a Led Zeppelin shark story. But facts are facts: we were a band of working musicians who were more concerned with the music we were making than with the extracurricular benefits of the rock-and-roll lifestyle. We had groupies who waited for us outside the dressing room, but the sad fact was that they tended to be twentysomething guys who wanted to know if I really used a Royer ribbon mic on that song, and if it was true that I tinkered with the tube to get that special effect on the outro.

And so, as we set off on that record, it was with a slight sense of distance. We didn't have misgivings, exactly. We knew that we were catering to what we thought Interscope would like and especially to what was. .h.i.tting in the commercial marketplace at the time, and while we didn't want to dumb our music down, we also didn't want to delude ourselves into thinking that we were doing anything other than attempting to locate the lowest common denominator. We still wanted our personalities to s.h.i.+ne through but we knew that there was a commercial frame around the entire enterprise. Ironically, it was probably the last Roots alb.u.m where it was important to us that black people like our music.

There in the studio/strip club we played a bunch of endless jams, as we had for Illadelph Halflife almost a decade before, and then we tried to mine songs out of the results. We would jam, then jam some more, then come back and listen and see if anything had sonic stickiness. If it did, we would isolate it and build it into a full-fledged song. But we were building with Jimmy's precepts in mind. He wanted us to dial back the a.n.a.lytical intelligence at the heart of the record, which was all I knew. I didn't know how to make pop music. I only knew how to make smart music. But our charter changed for a little while. We were trying to make sense of Jimmy's theory of the five-second read: if a song doesn't grab you within that short span, it's not going to grab you at all.

That's how the alb.u.m came together, and it suffered accordingly. It wasn't disastrous by any means. I think "Star" is one of our best moments as a band. "Stay Cool" is on there, a song I love with a great Al Hirt sample. I love "Web" and "Boom." And I like the two covers that we added at the end: "Melting Pot," which was a Booker T. cover, and "Din Da Da," which was a cover of George Kranz's "Trommeltanz." And Dave Chappelle came by to contribute to "In Love with the Mic," which was a hidden track near the end of the record.

One of the commercial concessions we made is that we would be receptive to working with outside producers, and at some point in the session we went down to Virginia to do some work with the Neptunes. In Jimmy's eyes, it was a kind of Hail Mary pa.s.s: pair this band without a strong commercial sound, and maybe without a strong commercial sense, with the hot producers of the moment. They had sent us a demo of the song they wanted to do with us, with the understanding that we would replay it live in the studio. On the bus on the way down, we listened to it to prepare, and we didn't really like it. Or rather, Rich didn't really like it-the way he put it, he wasn't getting goose b.u.mps. And if Rich didn't like it, no one else really liked it either. He had a very unusual, domineering way of setting everyone's mood. If he's not sold, no one is sold.

He wasn't wrong, though. As a DJ, I knew what kind of Pharrell song I liked to spin, and the one they had sent wasn't that kind. Their work was frequently brilliant, but it was. .h.i.t or miss, and what I was hearing wasn't the kind of hit that I thought we needed. The drums needed to be crispy. The whole thing needed to have energy leaping out of it.

By the time we arrived in Virginia, I had been nominated as amba.s.sador to talk to Pharrell and communicate our uncertainty with the track we had been sent. He listened and nodded and went for another song, a track that turned out to be "Green Light" on Beyonce's B-Day record, although it was more primitive at that time. That one didn't quite work for us either.

The rest of the band was down and a little impatient, but I was feeling a surge of Pollyanna optimism. We had four hours left and I had faith. "Look," I told the rest of the guys. "You're killing his vibe. Let me do this. You stay out in the van and I'll work with him. I'll get us a song."

I had an idea in my head; I wanted something that I could blend into N.O.R.E.'s "Nothin'," which was the definitive Pharrell beat of that year. I needed something to match that, a blast of exotic, minimalist rimshot funk, like what he had given Jay-Z on the "Excuse Me Miss" remix. All that had to happen was that my idea had to become reality. How hard was that? I remember going into the bathroom at the studio, staring at myself in the mirror, and talking to my own reflection. "You came here for something," I said. "You're going to get it. You're going to get a song that's ninety-six beats per minute that lets you play rimshot on the snare. You're going to match 'Nothin'' and then you're going to surpa.s.s it. You can do it. You are going to do it. You are going to do it now."

I came out of the bathroom and went into the studio and Pharrell was ready for me, already sitting at the piano. He played a chord. "Yeah," I said encouragingly, "that's it." I was still in this inspirational frame of mind. I knew that I had to motivational-speak the song out of him. I started drumming along with him, and soon enough we were making a whole song, more beat from me, more chords from him. Then he started singing, just a little bit at first, and at one point about four minutes into the track, he let out his patented "Whoo!" That's when I locked in even tighter. The piano was behind me, so he couldn't see the look on my face, but the engineer, who could see me, was probably freaked out, wondering what the h.e.l.l was wrong with me. "This is what I'm talking about," he said. "This is it."

On we went. I played the beat like it was my own heartbeat, like my very life depended on it. We went like that for twenty minutes. My wrists were killing me. There were splinters on the floor from discarded drumsticks. I kept riding it hard, though, because it felt like a very special kind of connection, and you never know when you're going to get back to one of those moments.

Finally, he stopped playing and stepped away from the piano. He came over to me and gave a deep bow. "Yeah, man," he said. "We got magic there."

"We did," I said.

"This was a dream come true," he said.

"Likewise," I said. My brain was still tingling. I had done it. I had visualized what I wanted and then come out of the bathroom and created it. And now I could walk back to the van, triumphant, and tell the rest of the band that we had a top-drawer Neptunes track for our alb.u.m. "I got my dream. We got our track."

Pharrell pulled up short. "What?" he said. He looked around, confused, a little deflated. "Oh," he said. "No. I can't give that to you. That's a song we already gave to Snoop Dogg."

Cut to us on the bus, headed back up to Philly with a song no one was thrilled about.

That was symptomatic of the Tipping Point experience. Overall, it's not a record I was happy with, exactly. It was the second time in the group's history that I was asked to take a backseat in the creative process. I was coming off Phrenology, an alb.u.m where I felt like I was the central figure, and that had been immensely rewarding for me. The Tipping Point, for whatever reason, was a record dominated by Tariq. Maybe the way we were working opened up s.p.a.ce for him. Maybe he was especially inspired. Band dynamics are hard to understand at the time, let alone recreate almost a decade later. But the further into the record we got, the more I felt it slipping away from me. It's a cliche, maybe, but one that turns out to be true: when you start making stuff for other people, that's when you lose yourself.

The lead single for the record was "Don't Say Nuthin'," which was risky for us in the sense that it was no risk at all: it closely resembled what was on the radio, albeit with a little bit of a twist, which meant that it deviated from our pattern of always changing our stripes. Our die-hard fans were used to being disappointed, in a sense. They were used to stepping up to the plate for each new alb.u.m and being tossed a curve ball. "Don't Say Nuthin' " was a fastball right over the middle of the plate, and while it did okay for us-it stalled near the lower end of the Top 100-it didn't feel like a step forward or even an interesting step backward. It was a form of treading water, or responding to trends rather than doing anything new or interesting or even particularly real. Maybe I am exaggerating a bit. As I said, I love many of the songs on that alb.u.m, and we put as much of ourselves into those sessions as we could, but at the time it felt retrograde and disappointing. And because it didn't sell as well as either Phrenology or Things Fall Apart, we felt like we had been deceived. Here we were, selling our souls for greater commercial success, except that it wasn't greater at all.25

The way we were treated by the critics, our unkindest reception yet, was also a tip-off that we were witnessing a sea change in the music-press establishment. We were now officially in the era of online critical sites, especially Pitchfork. Rich and I obsessively read every review of the alb.u.m, and saw that many of the publications were using the same language as Nick Sylvester's review for the site. For the first time, alternative weeklies around the country didn't seem to be listening to the record themselves. They were mimicking Pitchfork's appraisal, which wasn't very positive at all. We had gone from high 8s and 9s for ratings for Things Fall Apart and Phrenology to a 5.4 for The Tipping Point. And other publications just went right along with that appraisal. There was consensus that the new record was a big shrug. I would rather have been absolutely destroyed by critics because they weren't on board with our concept for the record, but in fact what happened was much more sodden and tiring than that. They just didn't seem to care all that much about us anymore. The effect of all of that, of Jimmy's influence, of the feel of the sessions, of the response to the record, was devastating. That year, 2004, was probably the most disappointing year of my life, the first time I can remember actively feeling like a failure.

Added to that was the sense that we were slipping again in the hip-hop hierarchy. Jay-Z had established himself as an icon by this point. And then there was Kanye West. After he released his first alb.u.m, he grabbed Mos, Talib, and Common, and brought them into his...o...b..t. Suddenly, they were satellites of Kanye's planet rather than ours.

I knew of Kanye's production work for Jay-Z's Blueprint, of course, and also the records he had made with Alicia Keys and Ludacris, and when his first solo record, The College Dropout, came out in 2004, I was elated. I loved it. He played the common man so well and had a real production aesthetic. There was no denying the charm of his record. When I heard "All Falls Down," I thought to myself that there was very little chance that it wouldn't be a hit. "d.a.m.n," I thought to myself. "I should have made that song." It was the first time I had thought that since OutKast's "SpottieOttieDopaliscious," from Aquemini, the first time that I had been blindsided by a production trick or technique.

And yet, I knew that Kanye's ascendancy was potentially a problem for us. "Are we old news?" I asked Rich. "Are we dead and I don't know it?"

In my mind, it was all about the mental s.p.a.ce that different kinds of artists occupied, and he was moving into the s.p.a.ce for the left-of-center messiah, which had been occupied by OutKast and by the Fugees before them. What was especially ironic about it was that his persona-the unashamedly materialistic artist, the trailblazer who was also happy to be a slave to fas.h.i.+on-was something that the Roots had toyed with a few years earlier. In 2001, Tariq cut his dreadlocks. "d.a.m.n," I said to Rich. "That's the end of the brand." We had both grown our hair out together, almost a decade before, and that's the image we presented to the world: the dreadlocked guy and the afro guy. But Tariq was fighting the band's boho side, hating the fact that our groupies were those five guys who wanted to smoke a blunt and talk about recording equipment. That creative tension worked brilliantly for the band, but it didn't always work well for Tariq, and I remember him basically doing everything he could to resist. Around the time he cut his hair, he did something else to s.h.i.+ft his image: he started shopping at Barneys, for one. All of a sudden, he was spending thousands of dollars on a suit or $1,000 on shoes. He had a coat that was $5,000. I'm not knocking him-the way I was with records, that's how he was with fas.h.i.+on. And he looked sharp. He looked good. But it seemed a little like an affectation to me and to Rich, and in that sense it made us uncomfortable. Our audience had certain ideas about us. They counted on us to put ideas first, to resist materialism. This ran counter to all of that.

That's the thing that killed me about Kanye. He flaunted the very qualities that sometimes made me uncomfortable about Tariq. Right off the bat, Kanye came out and said, "I like Louis Vuitton and I'm a shopaholic, and also I'm underground." Tariq had done his best to distance himself from his boho side, even though it was just as authentic and legitimate as what Kanye was doing. And while Tariq hadn't really embraced interviews, Kanye seemed to live for them. He was never more himself than he was when explaining himself or contradicting himself, expounding or expanding. That's one of the central things about him, and the hip-hop world that he came to dominate, and it contrasts starkly with the world that Tariq and I had entered a decade before.

Kanye's rise also taught me something about our own band, about how Tariq fit into the broader hip-hop landscape-and how that broad landscape maybe wasn't so broad anymore. When Tariq started out, his virtuosity as an MC was his calling card: people loved the fact that he was brilliant and agile and seemingly able to rap about anything. His verbal dexterity was unquestioned and unmatched. What he wasn't, though, was a character.26 Early on in hip-hop, characters were more comic: they were put-ons, whether it was the first incarnation of the Beastie Boys as snotty white teenagers, or Flavor Flav with his clock, or the way that Gregory Jacobs turned into Humpty Hump in Digital Underground. Oftentime the rappers were doing great work, but they adopted their character as a kind of costume. And there were plenty of rappers who weren't exactly characters, or who fought against that kind of thing: KRS-One had a kind of gangster pose, but he also fas.h.i.+oned himself as a teacher. Did Rakim have a character, really? But over the decade of hip-hop's evolution (or was it devolution?), characters became more and more central: not just personas, but actual characters that seemed sprung from the pages of comic books. Eminem was the apotheosis of that. He had the Slim Shady character and spent the better part of the first phase of his career reconstructing and deconstructing it. And Kanye was almost like a beat poet: he was a real-time character, completely immersed in his own development and entirely self-aware in ways that hip-hop had never seen. Look at the way he planned his alb.u.m t.i.tles as a linked series of concepts, or the way that his songs dealt directly and overtly with spiritual crisis and conspicuous consumption. Nearly everything he did seemed like a cry for attention and at the same time a rejection of traditional forms of publicity. He worked his art tirelessly, and just as D'Angelo had been in position to be a certain kind of savior in 2000, Kanye was in position to be a savior in 2005. Every micro-era pa.s.ses the microphone to a different icon.

As hip-hop changed, it changed around us, around the Roots, without really changing the Roots. That isn't to say that we didn't change. We evolved with every alb.u.m. We had more left turns than the Daytona 500. But we didn't seek to capitalize on the zeitgeist in quite the same way as other artists. Part of it had to do with the specific evolution of the MC. Tariq's brilliance and virtuosity, which had been one of our main propellers at first, started to feel out of step with the other forces bearing down upon us. And Tariq isn't the kind of person to create a character and submit himself to it. He was too intellectually restless in some ways, too proud of what we had accomplished in others. What he resisted, what he found possibly objectionable-that was exactly what Kanye capitalized on, and in a way that hip-hop had never seen. In some ways we were in awe of Kanye's pose. We had spent a decade seeing hip-hop as a division between the haves and have-nots, between artists who didn't play games with cars and fas.h.i.+on and acts that played games with cars and fas.h.i.+on but didn't aspire to making art. Kanye was an artist who took the audacious stance that he could do both, that there was no conflict between them, and audiences just went right along with him.

If there was a darkness closing in, there were at least some flashes of comedy. One night on tour, the band ran into Tracy Morgan at a hotel in Denver. He was out in town performing stand-up and we were booked for a show at the Fillmore. Late that night, after both of us had finished our shows and were back at the hotel, we went over to check out his room. I had heard through mutual friends that he liked to create Fellini-type situations, and this didn't disappoint: it was full of women and alcohol and strange props and a sense that anything could happen, and that when it did, it might happen fast.

"Hey," Tracy said. "The Roots. Come in." Not ten steps inside the room, I turned to talk to someone in the band and saw that Tracy had whipped off his s.h.i.+rt. When Tracy's s.h.i.+rt went, it was a signal for every s.h.i.+rt to go, at which point I knew I had to get out quick. I had a girlfriend at the time and I thought it would be in my best interest to act in a respectful manner toward our relations.h.i.+p.27

I didn't get out quick enough. There were a bunch of wide-eyed Roots watching a bunch of girls in the process of going wild, and one Buddha-bellied lunatic ringmastering the whole situation while looking for Bobby Brown's "Tenderoni" on his iPod.

I waited a minute there in the Satyricon, and then another minute. A mental picture of my girlfriend hovered in my head. "Man," I said. "I am taking off. See you later."

Back in my room, I was protected by a wall, but it was only one wall. I heard sounds, music among them, though what a motley set of music it was: "Billie Jean," "Night Fever," "Sister Christian." If there's a karaoke h.e.l.l, it's located in Denver. I eventually dozed off to sleep, probably to the Thompson Twins or something.

The next day, in the van heading to the airport, I asked the other cats in the band what went on in Casa de Morgan. I got looks of shame and a conspiracy of silence. "Come on," I said. "Tell me what happened." I forget who spilled the first bean, but after that the details started to come fast and furious.

"Yeah, it was so weird cause he started yelling at us: 'Okay, Roots, we're going to have a toe-licking contest. Y'all better not have fungus on your feet. I know you b.i.t.c.hes play it natural. I know you walk in the wilderness.' "

"Really?" I said. "Who was sucking the toes?"

Someone else interrupted. "Then he pointed at the girls in his room and told us that we could have them. 'I like my white girls like Ball Park franks, plump 'em when you cook 'em. It's a waste for a white girl to be that skinny unless she's in junior high. I suck underarms and inner elbows.' "

"That's lots of sucking," I said.

Tracy kept his rant rolling. It was hilarious. "I want to leave my legacy in Colorado! Your fathers and great-great-granddads would roll in their grave if they saw this scenario. I wanna impregnate four of you girls, minimum. Oh, and will someone play 'Billie Jean'?"

The next four days were nothing but Tracy Morgan impressions. We worked his one-liners into stage patter. We called each other and asked about Ball Park franks. As road stories go, he was crazier than any rock band we had ever encountered.

For a while, I a.s.sumed that we had caught him on a particularly altered day, but it turns out that he's like that all the time. Whenever I get hungry in the middle of the night and head out to an all-night food spot, Tracy is always there, and always in Trace mode.

Comedy may have saved me that year in more ways than one. About a year before, I met Dave Chappelle, who was in the process of starting his sketch-comedy show on Comedy Central. He had run into Talib Kweli and his manager at a restaurant down the street from where we were recording, and they had invited him to come hang out. Almost from the start, I was drawn to him. He was one of the rare celebrities who didn't just jump on the bandwagon and tell you that his favorite hip-hop act was whoever was popular at the moment. And when he dropped by to watch us record, he would entertain us and then some. One of the first times he came by, he gave Q-Tip a script. It was the first draft of Half Baked, and he wanted Tip to play the role that Snoop eventually got. Compared to the finished movie, that first draft was a masterpiece. To this day, it remains one of the funniest things I have ever read; one of my dreams is that it will get made the way Dave intended. I started visiting comedy clubs when he played, and along the way he introduced me to Neal Brennan, his cowriter and coproducer on Chappelle's Show. One day, Neal called me up and told me that they were about to start work on season two of the show. "Want to be the musical director?" he asked.

I couldn't say yes fast enough. I was there for all the magic of season two, all the skits that have since become cla.s.sics. That fall night in 2003 that I was onstage with Jay-Z at Madison Square Garden, Dave was shooting the legendary Rick James skit across the street. Working for Chappelle was just fantastic. I'd be in the studio awaiting instructions and the phone would ring. "Yeah?" I'd say. "What do you need?"

Sometimes they needed regular music. Sometimes it was something intentionally cheesy, like for a fake sitcom. Sometimes it was something very specific, like a Thriller soundalike for a skit about a "Beat It"style knife fight between Vincent Price and Michael Jackson. Watching Rich's wife trying to sing the theme from "The n.i.g.g.ar Family," an intentionally old-fas.h.i.+oned faux sitcom about a white family named n.i.g.g.ar, was one of the best things ever. That experience, mixing music and entertainment, using all my acc.u.mulated knowledge to execute these precise little orders, was the best preparation imaginable for my Fallon job, though I didn't know it yet.

Chappelle was also instrumental in one of the most moving musical chapters in our history. A few months after The Tipping Point came out, Dave met the director Michel Gondry and started to bring him around. He had an idea for a kind of city party, something similar to Wattstax, and he wanted Dave to be the MC the way that Richard Pryor had been. He was starting to a.s.semble musical talent: Kanye had agreed to partic.i.p.ate, and Erykah, and the Roots jumped right on.

The movie, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, was shot in September of 2004, at the corner of Quincy and Downing in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. It was just a few short weeks before the election that I was sure would sweep George W. Bush out of office. I remember one moment so clearly that it's like it happened yesterday-more than that, it's like it's happening right now, and will continue to happen. We were shooting a performance of "Jesus Walks," and Kanye wanted to come in with a marching band. I remember a welter of political and artistic thoughts crowding my mind. I thought about how presidential he looked and how the black kids were responding to him, something I had never really focused on in our own audience. I remember having a kind of out-of-body experience and investigation of the thought of my own artistic death. "Am I dead already?" I wondered.

It was a metaphor, but it wasn't just a metaphor. A few years earlier, my mother had been driving on a mountain road in Pennsylvania when she lost control of the car. She rolled over six times, and for whatever reason-fate, G.o.d, luck-her body went out the window, perfectly, like a letter being delivered, just before the car crashed down into the woods. It was one of those near-death experiences when death was way too near. She told me that as she went down the embankment, her only thought was, "Oh, this is how it's going to end." She wasn't panicked. She wasn't even sad. It was more a mix of resignation and realistic observation. I remember experiencing that same feeling the day of "Jesus Walks," of thinking to myself, "Oh, I see. This is where I get off." I saw the rest of the plot stretched out before me. Kanye was going to be the new leader, and I was fine with that. I was acting like I knew it was my last day. I took lots of photographs. I said lots of good-byes. I told myself, "You're not going to get all these people together again," at the same time that I concealed from myself the fact that I hadn't even gotten them all together that time. It took Michel Gondry making calls and Dave Chappelle putting up capital to get them together. That kind of experience, with everyone all around me and music in the air, was nostalgia at short range, a perfect snapshot of life as I had known it from 1996 to 2001. We had been doing it for years but we just hadn't been filming it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

What's the right way to react when your failure becomes a success?

Even though The Tipping Point was a frustrating alb.u.m to make, even though it exposed some fault lines in the band and made me question some of my most basic a.s.sumptions about what we were doing, it still got nominated for a number of Grammy Awards. The Grammys were a blast, as usual. My girlfriend at the time went with me to all the shows, many of which were shows by friends of ours. On the Monday after the awards, Jill Scott was playing, and Raphael Saadiq opened for her. His set was great, as usual, and her set was, too. Halfway through Jill's set, I got a text from Prince's a.s.sistant. That's how things go in the Prince universe: you get a pre-message saying that a phone message is coming later. But this time, the message said something different. It said that there was going to be a roller-skating party that night, for Valentine's Day, and that I should bring some cool people.