MO' META Blues Part 15

I mention this because we're at the point in the book where Ahmir is dealing more with the recent past, and while that's not pitched quite as high as the future, it's not as low as the distant past either. There's less perspective and sometimes more of an almost physical discomfort. Losses are felt more painfully, failures still sting, confusion may not have cleared quite yet. Just thought you should know.

CHAPTER TWENTY

How do you plan a rebirth?

I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any longer, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light. Around the time we cut ties with Interscope, I was feeling as low as I had in years. My emotional life was in a shambles: I had lost Dilla and felt the chill of his absence on my music. Also, I had broken up with a girl I dated for three years. All my friends were getting married and starting families, and I was being left behind. Relations.h.i.+ps among the Roots were not what they had been early on, either; by that point, Tariq and I had started riding in separate tour buses. Mine was Gryffindor and his was Slytherin. It wasn't open hostility by any means, just a kind of exhaustion and uncertainty if any of us wanted to go on.

It was in that environment that Rich started to shop us around to new labels. One of the first ones he tried was Def Jam. It had always seemed like a natural fit, maybe even more so now, given that Jay-Z was running the label. When we went to talk to him, though, he was skeptical. He pledged to support us, but he also was candid about his reluctance to expect too much from us commercially. "Man," he said, "I don't want to look like the guy who killed the Roots." Instead, he sat us down and told us that he wanted us to follow our instincts. "Make an art record," he said. "Do an alb.u.m you'll be proud of. You're not going to get on Hot 97. Funkmaster Flex isn't going to drop twenty bombs when he plays your single. He's not even going to play your single."

Game Theory, the alb.u.m that grew out of that directive, out of the rubble of Katrina and the confusion of the band's middle age, was also a pained love letter to Philadelphia, which had become a virtual war zone, with twelve to fourteen murders per week. We were sick to see our home city this way, and hopeful that we could bring attention to the situation, even if we couldn't directly affect it. All of those factors made Game Theory a very determined record, a very serious record. We were looking back to early hip-hop masterpieces like Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation, both generally (the alb.u.m has a coherent feel and plays straight through like a manifesto) and specifically (our song "False Media," for example, references "Don't Believe the Hype"). In that sense, Game Theory reached back toward alb.u.ms that were, in their own way, blues records.

A quick lesson. When people think about blues, they think of personal music: a man reflecting on his hard luck with women or his disappointment at his own moral limits. They think of Skip James singing "Devil Got My Woman" or Robert Johnson worrying about the h.e.l.lhounds on his trail. But that's not all it is. With apologies to Brother West, blues looked outward, too. The t.i.tanic sank in 1912. Eighteen years later, Blind Willie Johnson wrote "G.o.d Moves on the Water" about the tragedy, and to him it was the deepest blues imaginable-because of the hubris it represented, because of the imperialist, Tower of Babellike push behind the idea of making the world's largest cruise s.h.i.+p. There's a chilling, if not exactly accurate line in there about the s.h.i.+p's captain, Edward Smith, who went down with it: "E.J. Smith, mighty man / Built a s.h.i.+p that he didn't understand." That song is a monumental work, a nearly perfect example of how a song can extract a fearsome sermon from history. And then there's a woman named Minnie Wallace who's a kind of shadowy figure in the blues, not very prolific, not a major artist, but she wrote a song called "The c.o.c.keyed World" about the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Many black people in America were proud of the way the Ethiopians and their emperor, Haile Sela.s.sie, tried to repel the invaders, and some of them even tried to go fight in the resistance. Wallace's song is a kind of strange reverse view of that Afrocentric moment: it's from the perspective of a woman who is lamenting the way that the situation in Ethiopia is taking her husband or boyfriend away from her, or at the very least directing his attention elsewhere. "This old c.o.c.keyed world will make a good man treat you mean," she sings. "He'll treat you just like a poor girl he's never seen." Blind Willie Johnson's t.i.tanic song was written nearly two decades after the s.h.i.+p sank, but Minnie Wallace's song was a quicker reaction: The invasion took place on October 3, and she recorded her song only nine days later. She was reflecting on events before they even had a reflection. (That's about as fast as Neil Young did with the Kent State shootings and "Ohio," or as Tom Petty, with "Peace in L.A." following the Rodney King beating-now that's from-the-headlines songwriting.) I don't remember if either Blind Willie Johnson or Minnie Wallace ever came up while we were making Game Theory, but those were the kinds of songs we had in mind: outward blues. The world had just gone wrong, was continuing to go wrong, whether it was the breached levees in New Orleans or the murder rate in Philadelphia, and we wanted to say so, in no uncertain terms. It was our right as artists but also our responsibility. Did I say a lesson? Sorry. I meant a lecture.

And yet we didn't close our personal window onto the world, either. The alb.u.m opened up with a tribute to Dilla, "Dilltastic Vol Won(derful)," which sampled Slum Village. If The Tipping Point was a chronicle of compromise, the sound of the Roots back on their heels, Game Theory was an ill.u.s.tration of what happened when we planted our feet again. The tour that followed was augmented with a miniature bra.s.s band, a reminder of the collaboration with the TBC Bra.s.s Band we had envisioned and a kind of memorial to the fact that it was no longer possible.

What's a late-career renaissance? Maybe it's just what happens when you clear your ears and clear your head. We had set aside some of the distractions of The Tipping Point, as well as and some of the unreasonable expectations that stretched back as far as Things Fall Apart and Phrenology. For the first time in a while, it made complete sense again to be in the Roots, to be a Root, to be making the things we were making.

I was also doing more production work. One day, James Poyser and I got a call asking if we'd be interested in producing the new Al Green record for Blue Note. We jumped at the chance. Al Green was more than just another soul vocalist. He was a legend, or maybe even more than a legend. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to reenter that neo soul s.p.a.ce and bring his sound into the present. James and I lined up musicians. We lined up guest vocalists like Anthony Hamilton and John Legend and Corrine Bailey Rae. We called in a bunch of songs and got ready to go.

What we learned pretty early on is that working with Al Green isn't exactly like working with other singers. For starters, he showed up the first day all ready to sing, and without much interest in meeting the rest of us or even learning our names. We were just supposed to run tape and let him do his magic-which, by the way, was an approach that worked much of the time. The problems arose when it didn't work, or when Al and the rest of us didn't exactly see eye to eye. There's a song on Lay It Down that Al was oversinging: we wanted him to go subtle, and he was going rough and intense. We didn't like the way he was doing it. But breaking the news to him was another matter entirely. We decided to let Rich be the bad guy and broach the subject with him. It didn't go well. Al insisted that this was his voice and that he could only sing it one way. "I'm not going to do it any other way no matter how many times you ask," he said.

"Okay," I said, and the rest of us started packing up.

Al didn't like that. He wanted us to beg him to stay, but we had been practicing reverse psychology, and even reverse reverse psychology, for years-in the band, with friends and collaborators. You couldn't run that kind of game on us without getting it run right back on you. "Where are you going?" he said.

"We thought you didn't want to sing anymore."

He was mad. "Right," he said. "If you motherf.u.c.kers put your computers away, and concentrate on your job, and stop worrying about my job, then you might see how things fit. If you think it's so easy to sing that part, you sing that part."

We agreed. "You're right, Al. We're wrong, Al."

The more we tried to placate him, the madder he got. He was mad at us, mad at the computers, mad at technology and the pa.s.sage of time and the nerve of young producers who dared ask him to do something that he, Al Green, didn't feel in his bones. But after he boiled over, he calmed down, and he sang beautifully. Replay that ad infinitum, and that will start to give you some sense of how Lay It Down got done.

Game Theory had recharged us somewhat, especially since we felt that we were making our music for a label that unconditionally supported our vision. As we started to collect material, it became apparent that we were headed in an explicitly political direction. It would have been hard to avoid it, frankly. It was the end of 2007, and we were shooting for a mid-2008 release date, which meant that we had a responsibility to at least think about the presidential election. And it wasn't just any presidential election. It was an election where the Democratic field had been fairly quickly narrowed down to Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and John Edwards. In November, Oprah Winfrey got into the game, announcing that she was going to actively campaign for Obama, and that changed everything. The Iowa caucus went by, then the New Hamps.h.i.+re primary, then Nevada, then South Carolina, all Obama victories, and all of a sudden it was plausible that the Democratic party might have an African American nominee. It's hard to overstate how important that was within the hip-hop community. Around that time, John Legend came to us and presented us with an idea for an uplifting record that would sum up all of the promise of America, and how an Obama presidency might crystallize that promise. We thought that was a great idea, to make music from the optimistic feeling sweeping the country. We eventually put that record out in 2010, as Wake Up, and it was a beautiful, affirming collection of songs by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Ernie Hines, Baby Huey, and others. It was a labor of love and also a labor of light, a way of acknowledging the power of the yang surrounding the Obama candidacy and what followed.

But there was also a flip side: the growing backlash. It may be all too obvious now, after five years and one more election clotted with birther insinuations and "food-stamp president" slurs and Paul Ryan worrying out loud what effect Obama's reelection might have on Judeo-Christian values, but the racially tinged ugliness was just getting into gear. Rising Down was our response to the response to Obama's rise, even though it came out before he was actually elected. For cover art, we used an 1896 propaganda poster called "Negro Rule." It shows a black devil taking over a plantation, a terrifying black figure plucking innocent, hapless whites from the earth. We wanted to think about what would happen once the magic wand wasn't working quickly enough for America, once Obama was an actual president facing actual crises rather than primarily a symbol. Would the people sit back patiently and give him time to work through the country's problems? Would Obama's detractors block him the way that other presidents had been opposed? Or would there be a special dimension to it (a dark side, so to speak)? All these thoughts, all these ideas, coalesced into what may have been our most consistent record since Things Fall Apart. It was so unified in its message, in fact, that one of the songs we thought would be the lead single, a track called "Birthday Girl" with Patrick Stump as a guest vocalist, had to be taken off the record. It was a topical song, a story-song about the perils of men dating younger women. But it was also a pop song, and it just didn't feel right with the rest of the material. The production was dense and menacing, louder and harsher than any record we had made, and so were the lyrics. The alb.u.m took on prescription drug addiction, the way the media distorts the news, the risks of technology, and the financial crisis. And that's just on the t.i.tle track. There's another song, "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)," where Tariq says the word n.i.g.g.a three dozen times, and not one of them is gratuitous: the whole thing is a fearless look at the tricky business of black male ident.i.ty. We made sure that the whole enterprise was sent off with a sense of community. On The Tipping Point, we had hardly any other rappers joining us; here, we had nearly a dozen. We were speaking for other acts, and letting other acts speak along with us.

We knew that there weren't many records like Rising Down, not in our own catalog, and certainly not in the music world at large. Hip-hop in general was in crisis, with a sense that maybe the only way to succeed was through a kind of minstrel-show behavior, act a certain thuggish or clownish way to satisfy society's sense of what a hip-hop star should be. Hip-hop sometimes felt like it was over, which had been a common refrain ever since De La Soul declared they were dead and put flowers on their own grave back in 1991.29 But here we were, with the increasingly likely prospect of a black president. Wasn't it about time that everyone else stepped up, too?

When the record came out, we held our breath a bit. There's a scene in the movie Set It Off where Cleo, played by Queen Latifah, gets surrounded by the police and goes out in a blaze of glory. That's how we felt a little bit after Phrenology, and even more pointedly after our experience with The Tipping Point. We had said our piece and found our hill to die on. We weren't going to compromise for anyone. We had the att.i.tude that every record we were making might be our last and that we were well within our rights to give the finger to naysayers on our way out. That's why those alb.u.ms are so angry in comparison to some of our earlier work. If you're going to kill us off, we're going to give it to you on the way out.

Critics understood the record in the spirit we intended it. They praised it almost uniformly. Harry Allen, writing in the Village Voice, compared us to Samuel R. Delaney. The New York Times called it our "best alb.u.m since Things Fall Apart"; the Daily Telegraph, in London, said it was our best alb.u.m ever. And even though Robert Christgau gave the record an A, for the first time I didn't feel like were earning good grades. I felt like we were teaching the cla.s.s.

I had heard rumors from Neal Brennan that Jimmy Fallon was starting a late-night talk show, and that he might want to open a discussion with us about being his house band. I took it with a grain of salt. We had just graduated to the point where we were making good money on the concert circuit-not as much as real rock stars, but the top of the mountain for us. After swimming in purgatory for fifteen years, we were making a steady living, and I didn't think I could turn my back on that.30

At the same time, I was looking to buy a new house in Los Angeles. I had a number of residences, though I wasn't really using them. I had bought Jazzy Jeff's condo in Philadelphia and set my mom up there. I had a place for my dad. I lived in a small apartment that I didn't see very much, at least not while we were recording. At some point along the way, maybe 2007 or so, I decided that it made sense to buy a place in L.A. also. I was there so much anyway, and every trip I took ended up costing me at least $4,000 by the time I got done with airfare and hotel and food. If I had a house, I figured, it would pay for itself. I was being responsible with my money. I was always responsible. It's not like I'm a spendthrift. When you become a hip-hop luminary, you're supposed to go to Jacob the Jeweler and get yourself a $65,000 chain. I went there exactly once in my life, and got the cheapest item on the list: a very simple tennis bracelet for the girl I was dating. Jacob took me out of the store to a coffee shop across the street. He didn't want anyone to see that he was letting me off so easy. And it wasn't about the jewelry. The stuff I wanted was small time. I might drop five grand total on a record collection, which is something that I could easily afford, but even that seemed to send my business manager, Shawn, and Rich into fits. They were like high-school bullies with me when it came to my finances. And keep in mind that these are the same guys who managed other artists who were considerably less conservative with their money-guys who might at the very same time be buying a new Porsche for a p.o.r.n star, say. So I felt that asking for a house was fair. It was a solid investment, a way of saving money. I was proud of myself for thinking of it. I did the math, prepared a presentation, and went to Shawn, who promptly said no.

The begging lasted for three years, and finally he relented. I bought myself a place in Silverlake, but nearly a year went by, and I still hadn't really moved in. That's when Shawn started to put the heat on me. "See," he said. "You said that you needed this place, but it's just sitting there empty, eating up your mortgage payments." When I finally got around to moving into the house, it was a big deal. And then, my second day out there, on my way to a Roots show at UCLA, I ran into Jimmy Fallon.

"Hey," he said. "What are you doing out here?"

"Moving into a place I got."

"Nice," he said. "Hey, listen: I have something to ask you."

I knew where he was headed. "Your show? Yeah, Neal mentioned it to me."

"Oh," he said. "You think you'd be interested in something like that?"

I knew the answer was no. I just couldn't see giving up the tour money we were making. "Maybe," I said.

"Great."

"Why don't you come by the show tonight?" I said. Jimmy said he would.

I headed home, figuring that I would deal with the idea of Fallon the same way that I dealt with the meeting at Geffen back in the early nineties: not going to happen, but nice to think about anyway. Back then we took the meeting for a free gla.s.s of orange juice. Now I was indulging the idea because it felt nice to have a prominent fan. Having him come to our show wasn't hurting anyone.

He came to the show, hung out with us backstage. And then, about ten minutes in, I saw something I thought I would never see in my life. I was in an interview and when I got out I saw Jimmy with almost the whole band-Tariq, Tuba, Owen, Frank, Kamal, and others-making a huge human pyramid. Everyone was laughing. By that point, the band had taken a lighter turn, personality-wise. Owen really made the most of the fun factor that Tuba brought to the group, and Kirk came alive in ways I hadn't seen before. Jimmy brought all of that to a boil, in the best sense, and I couldn't help but laugh at how silly they all looked. Oh, s.h.i.+t, I thought to myself. We're stuck with this guy, aren't we?

I can't say that I really knew what it meant. I just knew that we fit with Jimmy like hand in glove. It hadn't even been ten minutes and he was already able to get everyone loose and joking-no small feat, since we were a fairly guarded band. Relations.h.i.+ps, while never exactly toxic, were not always as open as they could have been. But from that first meeting Jimmy had the ability to turn us all into thirteen-year-olds. The spirit of J. M. Barrie is in him. He's a very childlike presence. And it worked like a charm.

That night, at our after party, Tariq came up to me and gestured over to the corner, where Jimmy was joking with some guys. "I think I can see this happening," Tariq said. And I could, too.

Jimmy was sold on us and we were sold on him, but Lorne Michaels was skeptical. He was honest about why: he felt that the Roots, already established as artists, would distract Jimmy, who would be struggling with the pressures of a new show. No talk show comes out of the gate winning, he said. There's no honeymoon period; instead there's a period of being kicked and beaten, a trial by fire. The only person who really had it good from the start was a.r.s.enio Hall, and his show was as much a social experiment as it was a comedy show. But once we made it clear that we understood those risks and that we were willing to work to Jimmy's benefit, Lorne agreed. We were in Korea playing a show the day of Obama's inauguration, which also happened to be my birthday. We flew back to New York and reported to work at NBC on Wednesday.

I laugh so hard at those shows now. I have told Jimmy a million times that when we get to our thousandth show, we should air the first practice episode. Now we have such a perfect rhythm, almost telepathic, but back then everything was awkward in the extreme. Plus, Jimmy was dealing with pressures from the other side; I remember watching the way Lorne walked around the set pointing at things, and thinking how a.n.a.l retentive he was about every little detail. He didn't like the cuts of the intro montage. He hated the curtains. He wanted certain lights to point in a different direction. At the time, he seemed like a fussy uncle; it didn't really occur to me that he was a guy who had run a late-night empire for almost forty years. As it turns out, those fixes weren't just minor details. They were major improvements. The difference between what the show is now and what it was in practice is vast, and more than a little was due to his initial detail mongering. Lorne used to say that the average late-night show didn't really catch on for about for four years. It took us about a year.

Justin Timberlake and Robert De Niro were the guests on our first real show. Once again, this was a stroke of brilliance from Lorne: he booked De Niro because he wanted a very difficult guest interview for Jimmy. He knew that the press would be relentless regardless, so he figured that he might as well give them a reason.

We introduced De Niro with the theme from the TV show Taxi, because he had starred in Taxi Driver, and we used the Bee Gees' "Nights on Broadway" for Justin because of the fake Brothers Gibb talk-show skit that he and Jimmy had done on Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

The first show was rocky, though less so than the practice one. The second show was less rocky than the first. But I still wasn't convinced that we belonged on a late-night TV show. When you're in a new situation, there's always a flash of recognition. Sometimes it's the flash that you can't handle it. Sometimes it's the flash that you can. And sometimes it's the flash that illuminates you for everyone else, that shows that you've been able to handle it all along. For us, that came the second week of taping. One of the writers had come up with an idea for a bit called "Freestylin' with the Roots." Jimmy would go out into the audience and talk to them about their lives, their jobs, whatever, and we would take their answers and turn them into a song. This required Tariq to freestyle and for me to give him a beat, which had been happening since high school. But Jimmy upped the ante by asking us to play the answer song not just as hip-hop, but as surf music, or heavy metal, or country.

We killed it. We were right there with the audience. We took everything that was thrown at us and spun it into gold. For me, that was the turning point. I started to see that there was a new way to live, and that this might be it: a day job with a steady stream of new challenges. It wasn't easy, especially at the beginning. We practiced six hours a day six days a week. We refused to fail-not because we needed the job, necessarily-but because we needed to refuse to fail. If that's a little abstract, so be it.

Fallon's show was also a musical education, or maybe it makes more sense to say that it was a reeducation. There I was at the age of forty, exposed to a whole new world of music, and at first I wasn't sure how to handle myself. I freely admit that I initially dismissed Dirty Projectors when they first came on the show, probably about five months into our run. Even at that point, I was starting to see a pattern among Brooklyn groups-broken-down drums, rickety keyboard setups, rock bands that copped a certain att.i.tude-and I mentally put Dirty Projectors into that category. I was pretty sure that I'd be getting more of what had already, for the most part, failed to impress me. But the second they started performing, there was this incredible vocal complexity: the three female singers doing this syncopated thing that sounded like a keyboard program, then all of them s.h.i.+fting into these intricate, choirlike vocals. Kirk and I looked at each other with our jaws on the ground. "Holy s.h.i.+t," he said. I could see every syllable falling out of his mouth like he was on Electric Company. Back in the dressing room, we were like little kids. "Can you f.u.c.king believe what we just saw?" I said.

"Was that ProTools or real?" he said.

I just shrugged, still a little bit in shock. It just so happened that Amber Coffman, one of the singers, was in the hallway. Kirk went out there, still in his underwear. "Hey," he said. "Can you come here a sec? Would you mind doing that one more time?"

She got the whole band and brought them in, and they duplicated the performance exactly. If I had been in disbelief before, now I was numb with amazement. At the time I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and I was obsessed with this whole theory that expertise was the result of 10,000 hours of concentrated practice. But that didn't make sense here. Who does those kinds of vocals? Who could conceive of them, let alone execute them to perfection?

I posted that dressing-room re-creation online and it turned out to be my first super-viral video. Every blog picked it up. It made me look cool and forward thinking because Dirty Projectors were cool and forward thinking, and that set me back on my heels a bit. I had heard the band's name, seen little articles about them on Pitchfork, but I wouldn't have given them a chance if I didn't have the best seat in the house. Ever since then, I have vigilantly researched every band that gets booked on the show. It has turned into a modern-day equivalent of digging in the crates. The second I find out that a band has been booked, I go to Metacritic and read their reviews. I go to Rdio or Spotify and listen to their alb.u.ms. I look for their interviews on YouTube. I want to make sure I'm well versed by the time they arrive-not just so I feel I can understand them when we back them on the show, but also to see if it's worth investigating a future collaboration.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE