MO' META Blues Part 16

Where were you when Michael Jackson died?

I was in the commercial break of the second segment of the Fallon show. We were about to introduce Tiger Woods, when my road manager, Keith, ran on stage. He had a look on his face. He came right up to me and said, "Yo, Michael Jackson just died." It was a shock to the system. It was still the first year of the show, and once you drop a bomb like that, there is no going back to the silliness and lightheartedness that is Jimmy Fallon. That's over. You're in another s.p.a.ce. At first, I wasn't sure whether to believe Keith. Who believes something like that the first time they hear it? Because my computer was next to me I went on CNN. (The rule with black people is that it's not legit news until a legit white news source confirms it.) I was probably looking at the GlobalGrind website, and they were reporting it, but I thought no, that can't be true. But CNN was saying the same thing and that eliminated any doubt. I was so overcome with misery that we just stopped playing the song. My face went numb. It was as if I had been told that both my parents had died in a fire. People in the audience, some of whom hadn't heard what Keith said, didn't understand.

I had heard the news earlier that day that Michael Jackson was headed to the hospital, but it was murky at best. And I had a theory about it that I was telling people all afternoon. When Michael announced his run of fifty shows, I had made a plan with a girl to go see one of them. We were trying to decide which one. Did we want to see a performance in the first half of the run? The finale? As a performer, I knew that other performers really get in their zone in the exact middle. Catch them too early, and they're still working out the kinks. Catch them in the second half of the run, and you might get a bored superstar. But then it occurred to me that maybe the whole thing was more tenuous than that. The Jacksons had a history of scheduling shows and tours and not quite making good on them-I had never heard the word exhaustion until the Jacksons came along. I had seen some Janet shows on a tour that was later canceled due to exhaustion, and it turned out the presales were too small. Michael had pulled the exhaustion trick at the Beacon Theater in 1995; he was supposed to do an intimate HBO special, and at the last minute-exhaustion. When he entered the hospital this time, I figured he was trying to find a way out of the grueling fifty-show commitment because he just wasn't ready. I took a hard-line, disappointed-fan stance: "Come on, Mike, I knew you were going to pull this s.h.i.+t. Exhaustion, here we go."

But then it wasn't exhaustion at all. He was dead. I went home that night to Philadelphia. At that time my trainer and my engineer, Steve, were in my house, and I sensed something coming on, something inside me, a welling up of grief. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I had a loud, screaming breakdown. And so I went and got in my car. I didn't have tinted windows, so I didn't stay out on the street. I drove around until I found a parking lot that spiraled all the way to the bas.e.m.e.nt. I parked there and wept uncontrollably for ten or twelve minutes. I remembered first encounter with Off the Wall at the Carlton House in Pittsburgh, in the winter of 1979, when I was wearing a worn-out Fish That Saved Pittsburgh T-s.h.i.+rt that I got for free and spent my evenings recording TV shows on a Realistic tape recorder so I could play them back and memorize them. I remembered first encountering Thriller in Puerto Rico in 1982, where my parents did a four-month residency, where there was summery, tropical weather in the winter and posters of these young guys named Menudo, whom I had never heard of but who drove the girls crazy, and where my dad made me go to the outside bar and sit by the drummer to learn samba and bossa nova rhythms. I didn't have a record player there so I just spent a month studying the Thriller disc and wondering why "Human Nature" had all these weird ridges in the groove-the shaker parts. It was psychic tunneling, a way of going back in time, a way of reliving my own childhood through those songs and those records. And you know in Goodfellas, how Robert De Niro beats the phone in the phone booth? I beat the s.h.i.+t out of the back of the front seat. I cried until I had a ma.s.sive headache.

We went back to work the next day. We asked permission not to wear our suits, to wear Michael Jackson-related stuff instead. I got my T-s.h.i.+rt company to make me a quickie s.h.i.+rt, what I call Helvetica in Harlem, that had the six names of all the brothers. Other members of the band wore leather jackets and studs. Erykah Badu joined us in New York to sit in with us and we spent the day making sandwiches and trying to come to terms with Michael's death. And we played his songs on the air. Usually, they would be too expensive to use, but there is a special stipulation, a death memorandum, that grants a 48-hour grace period where songs can be used for a standard rate for news purposes. I don't know if the full weight of the loss. .h.i.t me then, or later, or if it has. .h.i.t me yet. It wasn't that I expected him to make more great music, necessarily. I figure that with everyone who's designated a genius, especially people of color, has an expiration date. But Michael was so woven into the fabric of my life that it was painful and also unthinkable to have him suddenly gone.

There was no thought of tabling the Roots' own music when we went to work for Jimmy. But we knew we'd be making the record in a different environment, with different framing questions. How does a hip-hop band mature into middle age? There was no precedent. There was no blueprint. As we went into How I Got Over, which was our ninth studio alb.u.m and eleventh overall, it wasn't clear to me at all what we were supposed to be. When I sat down to think about it, I could only think about what we weren't supposed to be, what we couldn't be any longer. There's no throw your hands in the air, wave 'em like you just don't care. There's no psst, hey baby. So where were we again? We were at the edge, at risk, aesthetically. The risk was in the very fact of the alb.u.m, and answering the question of how we moved forward. I remembered when we first signed with Geffen, and they had said something to us about releasing our ninth alb.u.m, or our tenth, and I had stopped them cold. "That just doesn't happen," I said. "Hip-hop bands don't do that kind of thing. They're usually three and out." I wasn't trying to be disingenuous. It was just that back in 1994 it was hard to imagine being a hip-hop recording act across the span of two decades, or three. I'm sure that the Rolling Stones had the same confusion when they finished up with Let It Bleed and looked back over the sixties. Ten alb.u.ms? Maybe that was supposed to be the whole story. I'm almost certain that neither Mick nor Keith thought that they were only one-quarter of the way through their career. And yet, we had arrived at How I Got Over. We couldn't reverse time. We had to take time as time took us. That's the theme that you hear all over that alb.u.m.

It started with the song I still consider the centerpiece, "Dear G.o.d," which was a song originally recorded by the Monsters of Folk, the supergroup with Jim James, Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Mike Mogis. The Monsters were guests on the show, and we backed them up on that song. When they sang it in rehearsal, it just blew me away. It had been a long time since a song floored me as much as that song did-I'd have to go back to Cody ChesnuTT, at least. I thought it was the best gospel song I had heard in what seemed like forever, but it also sounded like an emo song that was crying out for a Ghostface Killah rhyme. I walked right up to Jim and told him that I loved it and wanted to find some way for the Roots to record it.

Then I called Rich, told him that I had found the touchstone that would help us set the mood of the new record, and sent him the song. I was accustomed to Rich rejecting my epiphanies-usually strategically, so I'd have to redouble my efforts and make a stronger case-but this time I felt it in my bones, and he agreed.31 For me it wasn't an existential lyric. It wasn't questioning the existence of G.o.d. It was more about social justice and how any divine being with an interest in his human creation could allow certain circ.u.mstances to persist. It reminded me of what KRS-One said on Edutainment twenty years before: "If the Christians really heard Christ / The black man never would've lived this life." The song felt sincere, earnest without being naive. It made Tariq human to people and not just a virtuoso rhyming machine. That mood spread throughout the entire alb.u.m. We found a way to be mature within the context of hip-hop, and to reach out to the people in our audience who were trying to find a way to grow old gracefully. For all those teenagers who grew up on Paid in Full and People's Instinctive Travels and Fear of a Black Planet, we were offering a dignified path into middle age. And it was a spiritual awakening for us, as well. I wasn't always happy with the results of our career. There were alb.u.ms where I got frustrated, or let myself be envious of other artists. We still hadn't had our Bentley moment. How I Got Over made me think, for the first time in a while, that maybe I was doing things the wrong way, that maybe my perspective was crooked. I don't want to be too grandiose about it, but I had a sort of spiritual awakening, at forty, on our eleventh record.

Part of it, too, was that we made that alb.u.m under different circ.u.mstances. Tariq had become the guy who needed the certain room in California, a particular engineer, a special atmosphere that allowed him to write lyrics. I always felt that I worked best when I was uncomfortable as h.e.l.l. The worse the conditions in the studio got, the harder I worked. We recorded that alb.u.m in the little room at Fallon, and it was a reset for me, a bracing return to working the way I needed to work.

That alb.u.m has lots of guest stars on it: not just Jim James singing "Dear G.o.d," but also Joanna Newsom, John Legend, and the Philly rapper Peedi Peedi. Some of those artists we had already known, but some of them came from the new job. Joanna, for example, came to our attention because we were in the loop at NBC, going to Sat.u.r.day Night Live after parties, and Joanna, Andy Samberg's girlfriend, was always around.

It's a short alb.u.m, our shortest. It's a soft alb.u.m in some ways, not in the sense of lacking resolve, but soft in the sense that it's clear-headed, sometimes jazzy, less bunkered than Rising Down. It's an alb.u.m that's about itself, in a way, about how you go on as you're getting on. The New York Times called it "a serious deliberation on perseverance," and other reviewers noticed that there's an undercurrent of self-help in the lyrics, or at least a consideration of what kinds of things-plat.i.tudes, philosophies, magical thinking, realism, religion-might provide the necessary lift in a time of doubt. The financial crisis was in full swing, and plenty of reviewers viewed the alb.u.m as a response to it, which was a satisfying way to look at it. That's the old Roots adage, to make sure that every alb.u.m works on three levels: as a personal statement, as a statement about hip-hop, and as a statement about the world.

My first car was a Scion, and I got it by accident. When they first released it to the market back in 2004 they wanted me to do a commercial for them. I agreed in principle, but as we went along they discovered that I didn't have a driver's license. I grew up in a two-van household, and when we went on the road, as the youngest son, I had two very specific jobs: navigator and DJ. On the one hand, I knew all the maps and all the routes; on the other I was responsible for making mixes to keep the driver company-and to make sure that he or she was concentrating on the task at hand. Maybe in the middle of the night there would be a little bit of soul and then Rahsaan Roland Kirk shrieking away on the tenor sax to make sure everyone stayed awake. When I was too old for my parents to drive me around, friends drove me around-Josh, who was in the Philadelphia street-musician incarnation of the Roots, had a station wagon. And then we were the Roots, and we had a Land Cruiser that Rich drove. I tried to explain that to Scion, but they weren't having any of it. "You think we're going to let you get behind the wheel of this vehicle without a license?" they said. They regrouped and came back two weeks later with a new idea: they were going to build a spot around sending me to driving school; they would pay for it and doc.u.ment the experience. Right around that time, I met a girl who lived out of town-she was a designer at HBO-and I figured that at least with a car I could drive from Philly to New York to see her.

So that was my one and only car. I had a ritual that when we finished a record I would take the finished mix and listen to it as I drove around. This is a common practice in the record industry. In the bas.e.m.e.nt at one of the studios we recorded in, they had a full-size van that engineers used to sit in when they were working on a record. Jimmy Iovine told us that back in the seventies, he used to have a half-car set into the wall so that people could listen to alb.u.ms in their natural environment. When we wrapped How I Got Over, I put it in my jacket pocket and went out to the Scion, Portable Studio A, to take it around Philadelphia and see if it held up. It was late Sat.u.r.day night, early Sunday morning. No one was around except for the cops, and after about fifteen minutes one of them pulled me over. The first officer checked my license, gave it back to me, let me go. About fifteen minutes later, I was pulled over again, same thing: license, please; thank you, sir; you can go.

The alb.u.m was working for me-I liked what I heard-but after a little while I was hungry, so I got myself a fish sandwich on Broad Street and pulled over to eat it. That's when the third police cruiser pulled up alongside of me. The officer got out, walked up to the car, s.h.i.+ned his flashlight through the window. "Evening," he said.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Questlove."

He stared at me for a second, eyes narrowed in confusion, and then his face uncreased. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Hi." He came closer to the car, friendly now.

I was happy that he wasn't giving me any trouble, but now my curiosity was aroused. "Tell me something," I said. "What's the matter? Why am I a magnet for you guys tonight?"

"Oh," he said. "That's easy. We're in the Temple University neighborhood."

"Right," I said.

"And you're in this car."

"And me in this car what?" I loved my Scion. It was part of my ident.i.ty. I thought anything more lavish was the kind of thing a drug dealer would drive. This was the car of a thoughtful artist, a man who didn't live through his material possessions.

"It's the wrong car for you," he said. "It just doesn't look right. If you were driving an SUV, you'd look like a professional football player. But this little thing sets off alarms. It looks like you took it from a college student."

One of the best things about the Fallon show-maybe the best thing-is that it's a test of ingenuity every single day. It sent me back to the days of working with Dave Chappelle. But that show was brilliant guerrilla comedy; it happened on the fly and then some. The Fallon show is a day job in the best sense. We're in by noon and gone by seven, and in between we make a show. It's highly structured, and as a result, the opportunities we have for creativity are really distilled: not reduced at all, but disciplined, forced into existing forms and packages. "Freestylin' with the Roots" is one of the highlights for us. One of the others is the walkover.

The walkover, or walk-on, for those who don't speak backstage, is the song that the band plays as a guest comes out from behind the curtain and walks over to the host's desk. Once upon a time, maybe, it was straightforward, a little musical cue or a song a.s.sociated with the artist. But then came Paul Shaffer's work on Letterman, and the walkover became its own little art form-an obscure musical reference that the audience (and sometimes even the guest) had to decode.

From the beginning, I wanted the Fallon walk-ons to be cla.s.sics of the genre, the talk-show equivalent of video game Easter eggs. When we had Salma Hayek on the show, rather than play "Mexican Radio" or even "Salmon Falls," we did some Internet research and unearthed the theme song from the first Mexican soap opera she ever starred on, Theresa. She knew it faintly at first, or at least knew that it was something she should know, and her eyes went wide when she figured out what it was. When Edward Norton was on promoting The Bourne Legacy, we played Patrick Hernandez's 1979 disco hit "Born to be Alive." And we thought we had a great left-field pick when we played the Dave Matthews Band's "The s.p.a.ce Between" for football player Michael Strahan, but somehow he knew it immediately. Howard Stern once came up to me during a bathroom break, confused, to ask me why we played this disco song by Bell and James for his wife, Beth Ostrovsky. "She's from Pittsburgh, right?" I asked. He nodded. I explained that everyone from Pittsburgh gets that treatment-it's a band in-joke that refers back to the late-seventies basketball comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. I'm not sure he was satisfied by the answer. The Fallon walkovers, as trivial as they may seem, have been the culmination of everything I've cared about my whole life: making strange musical connections, reveling in the way that something obscure can illuminate something obvious.

Because the songs we select are a kind of code, some of the guys in the band use them to slyly flirt with female guests. I let Kirk talk me into playing The Lonely Island's "Lazy Sunday" for Christina Ricci because he had heard she has a Chronicles of Narnia tattoo on her back. I did it but got no reaction at all. I put him on six-month probation for that suggestion; he was forbidden to send any more secret messages to anyone. And I can remember one case where I totally fumbled the ball. We had a famous actress on-I won't say who, to protect both her and myself-and I thought she had been in a particular movie, and I built the walk-on around that t.i.tle. After the show, her publicist came up to me. "Hey," she said, "what was that walkover song? I'm not sure I understood the reference." I started to explain, but the blankness in her face stopped me. I realized I had made the wrong reference completely. I had confused her with someone else. I was so embarra.s.sed.

But even in the walk-on world, there are limits. Chuck Berry may be the inventor of rock and roll, but he still thinks he needs a payout of $2.5 million anytime anyone plays "Johnny B. Goode" on TV. That seemed to scotch our plan to play it when Michael J. Fox came on the show; we wanted to recreate the whole prom scene from Back to the Future-you know, where Marty McFly plays the "Johnny B. Goode" solo and one of the guys in the band, Marvin Berry, calls his cousin Chuck? Rather than give up, though, we found a workaround. We played "The Clock," by my father, which is basically a B-flat blues ripoff of the Berry cla.s.sic, and that gave us the solo we needed. I played the role of Marvin Berry in the skit.

Most of the time, the walk-on is harmless fun, a way to flex our musical and pop-culture muscles. But there are times when it gave us a chance to practice a bit of commentary. When Ashlee Simpson was on, we played a Milli Vanilli song to tweak her a little bit for her lip-synching scandal on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. (Viewers with sharp ears may have noticed that we didn't even do the original song, but the version from VH1's Behind the Music, where Fab and Rob were stuck singing the t.i.tle phrase because of a computer glitch.)

And then, in late 2011-November 21, to be exact, at the height of the Republican primary season-we found out that Michele Bachmann, representative from Minnesota, was coming onto the show. Bachmann had been offending people left and right with her comments about gay rights and Muslims in America, and she also seemed to have a casual relations.h.i.+p to the truth. I learned that at one point, fact-checkers had set a limit for themselves on how many of her evasions and misrepresentations they were going to catch. That was my starting point, and I set out on a mission to find the best song about politics and evasion and untruth. I considered "Lies," either the En Vogue one or the McFly one, but we don't generally sing any lyrics, so I ended up picking Fishbone's "Lyin' a.s.s b.i.t.c.h," a ska number from their 1985 debut. It had a good little melody and lots of energy. It seemed funny to me. I figured it would be another exhibit in Ahmir's Hall of Snark, and not much more than that.

So, that's what happened. Michele Bachmann came out on to the show and spoke to Jimmy. She didn't know what song we were playing. I'm sure almost no one knew what song we were playing. That was part of the fun of it. I felt satisfied to the point of smugness. We had pulled one over on the man.

Then, the next day, satisfaction and smugness turned to ego. I was sitting around at home thinking that I had done something historical, something political. I had struck a blow for truth. I wanted credit. When you want credit for something and you don't want to operate via traditional channels, where do you go? In this day and age, you go to Twitter. That's where I went. Someone tweeted me a question: "Was that 'Lyin' a.s.s b.i.t.c.h'?" I answered like someone in the grip of ego, which is exactly what I was: "Sho' nuf." That was it. The fuse was lit. The news began to spread. Then a conservative blogger got hold of it and it spread some more. I went to sleep, and woke to a reverse tooth fairy situation. Instead of finding money under my pillow, I found my phone flas.h.i.+ng with six missed calls, all from Rich.32 I had a sense, maybe, what it was about, so I looked on Twitter and saw that I had more than seven hundred mentions. Then I called Rich back.

"You know this is a problem," he said.

"How much of a problem?"

"Looks like this could be a big problem."

"How big?"

Rich paused. I didn't like the pause or what was in it. "I don't know," he said. "This could be a wrap for you. This could be a wrap for us." My heart sank. Had I taken the band down with me?

By the time I got to work, the fire of outrage was blazing. Fans online were cursing Jimmy. People were calling the NBC switchboard. The conservative blogger Mich.e.l.le Malkin re-tweeted something that included my name in it, and all of a sudden I had three thousand more responses. I had benefited from things going viral, but now I was suffering from the same thing. At one point I pa.s.sed Jimmy in the hallway and tried to play it all off as a joke, and he nodded, trying to keep a good face on it, but I could see how exhausted he was.

By two o'clock, it wasn't just a conservative firestorm, but a feminist one. Women were posting letters of support for Michele Bachmann, lining up against me for saying "b.i.t.c.h." Even Sara Gilbert, on The Talk, came out to say that even though she found Bachmann's politics reprehensible, she was left with no choice but to be an ally in this particular case. That's when things s.h.i.+fted into a whole new dimension of horrible. I had picked the song so that I didn't have to sing it, but the fact that it could be seen as misogynistic just escaped me. The word is so commonly used in certain music, and means something slightly different: it has as much to do with cowardice and slipperiness and unreliability as with gender. It wasn't that I wasn't thinking clearly. It was that I wasn't thinking at all. At least, not about that. I just wanted to hit a home run in the game.

We had a meeting in Jimmy's office, Team Fallon and I, and they told me that things were looking bleak, but that we would try to ride it out. Jimmy made a formal apology to Bachmann on Twitter, which put me squarely in the crosshairs (which, to be fair, was exactly where I belonged). In the end, we got lucky. That Tuesday night there was a Republican debate, and Bachmann went out and made a blunder. She was a member of the House Intelligence Committee, and she said that six of Pakistan's fifteen nuclear sites had come under jihadist attack. Almost immediately, people were up in arms. (Is that a pun? If so, it's not a good one.) They claimed that she had disclosed cla.s.sified information. Her staff had to get busy putting out that fire, fast. Plus, it was the week of Thanksgiving, which disrupted the normal news cycle. We were saved by the skin of our teeth.

Things could have gone differently. They almost did. I had some friends at Fox News, and on that Tuesday, I asked them for the damage report. As it turned out, people over there had combed through every last lyric of every single Roots alb.u.m, looking for a smoking gun-something violent, something misogynistic-and found nothing. There was no story there. Finally, the politically correct, mindful hip-hop that we had been practicing from the beginning-the same thing that had maybe kept us off the chart or kept our posters off the walls of teenagers' bedrooms-had worked to our advantage.

I have replayed that episode in my head hundreds of times, like Kennedy obsessives do with the Zapruder film. My drum set is up on a gra.s.sy knoll. Jimmy's desk is the book depository. The whole thing happens in terrible slow motion, though there's clearly only one shooter: me. In retrospect, I would have chosen Sam Cooke's "What a Wonderful World," with its "Don't know much about history" line.

A few days later, I heard from Fishbone. Their management loved me for it: they were wondering why all of a sudden people were cheering so loudly for the song in concert. Unfortunately, Angelo Moore was scheduled to be on the show to promote Everyday Suns.h.i.+ne, a doc.u.mentary about the band, but we had to disinvite him: Jimmy figured that a year should pa.s.s before anyone a.s.sociated with the band came on as a guest. But we still used other Fishbone songs. For instance, we did "Bonin' in the Boneyard," from Truth and Soul, when Jennifer Lawrence came on to talk about Winter's Bone. The best thing to come of it happened a year later, on David Letterman's show; after a Top Ten about Bachmann, Paul Shaffer played a few seconds of "Lyin' a.s.s b.i.t.c.h." It was almost like I was dreaming, but I'm sure I heard it. Thank you, Paul.

And then there was Steve Martin's reaction. When he appeared on the show as a guest in December of 2011, he found a way to turn the controversy into a bit. He wanted us to do a number of different songs, each of which annoyed him in a different way: he wanted the first one to be offensive, the second one to be too boring, the third one to be too generic, the fourth one to be our revenge for him objecting to every previous selection, and so on. Eventually, we'd try Carly Simon's "n.o.body Does It Better," and that would satisfy him. We did Steve's bit, and that was the moment where I finally felt that the heat was officially off.

You'd think that the Bachmann debacle would have taught me all I needed to know about tact, but you'd be wrong. Some time after that, I was on Andy Cohen's Bravo show, Watch What Happens Live, and he asked me which guest I most dread coming on Fallon. I said Tina Fey, and then I tried to explain why. Since early in my career, I always felt a kins.h.i.+p with Philadelphia artists, every actor and singer and author. We had met Tina Fey on Letterman when we were both guests, and we tried to make small talk with her and failed. It was painfully awkward. Then we were at another function and it was painfully awkward again. Even though she was from the Philly area, even though she was from the same NBC family, she felt distant to me. I'm not saying it was her any more that it was me. She just felt distant.

There was also an issue with her appearances on Fallon. In the history of the show, there were only a handful of guests who came out to talk to Jimmy without waving to the band. We had a little ritual where we marked that kind of thing down. Tiger Woods did it, twice, and Tina Fey, at various points, had done it five times. Maybe it was shyness or reserve. I understood that; I often felt the same way. But after a while it wore on me. All those things were on my mind when I was asked the question on Andy Cohen's show, and I said something that I thought was a tongue-in-cheek, faux-wounded remark: "Tina Fey, you are never nice to the Roots. We're from Philadelphia. Be nice to the Roots!" But of course, because the media is a game that people play, they took that one sentence out of context and found a freeze-frame of my face, looking angry, and all of a sudden there I was on the front page of the Huffington Post, having trouble yet again with a powerful woman.

This time, Lorne had a fit. "I want him out of here," he said. "He's gone." I thought that he was a little angrier than the incident deserved, but it was only about seven months after Bachmann, and things had been building. In fact, I think that I was fired for about an hour, until Jimmy begged for my job back.

And now it's now, which means more s.h.i.+fts and more settling. The past tries to cozy up to the present while the future cowers. But now isn't only now. It's the recent now. Toward the end of 2011, the Roots finished a record, undun, which was one of the most rewarding works we had ever made. It's a play in sound about a character named Redford Stevens, and it's also an attempt to integrate more indie-rock and even cla.s.sical elements along with the neo soul and jazz (we took the name of the character from a Sufjan Stevens song, which we put on the alb.u.m, and part of the last movement is a free jazz piano-and-drums duet with me and D.D. Jackson that floats off into strings), and it's also an iPhone app with pictures and videos (we wanted to show this character's life, which was short and sometimes violent, like the alb.u.m, and like the confused and thwarted and frustrating and joyous lives of many other young men, black or white or any other color), and it's also a return to Game Theory in the sense that it's explicitly political, and a return to Things Fall Apart in the sense that it's elegiac and mournful and personal (the character, Redford, is a composite, but he's a composite of people we knew, of people from Philly, of people in Tariq's family, of the life that Tariq or any of us might have lived if the Roots hadn't happened), and a return to many other moments in music history, from the late nineties, when high-concept hip-hop records were all the rage (I specifically had Prince Paul's A Prince Among Thieves in mind) to cla.s.sic rock (the t.i.tle of the record is lifted from a song by the Guess Who, the great Canadian band featuring Burton c.u.mmings and Randy Bachman-no relation to Michele-although their song is a gentle, sad portrait of a woman unraveling because she's been deceived, not a young man being unraveled by society). But undun was also a record very much of its moment, a record only made possible by the changes in our life, and the fact that the Fallon job afforded us a place to work in tight quarters, a daily s.p.a.ce where ideas could reverberate, as well as the freedom to go back to the kind of expansive, complex records we had always dreamed of making, but without fear of selling poorly.

Acrobats love to talk about working without a net like it's the bravest thing in the world. But the thing about working without a net is that if you fall, you die. It's better to work with a net, and to know that you can attempt the tricky maneuver without permanent consequences. It's an answer to the dialogue between Bleek and Shadow in Mo' Better Blues, or maybe just a third voice in the conversation. (SCENE: Ahmir pokes head in door. Bleek and Shadow look up. Bleek: "Who's that big fella?" Shadow: "And what the f.u.c.k is the deal with his hair?")

Redford Stevens was one kind of young American in crisis, but between the time we finished the record and the time it came out, in December that year, the country started to focus on another kind of young American in crisis: the students and activists who came together around questions of corporate greed and economic frustration and set up camp in Zucotti Park in downtown Manhattan, and then elsewhere around the country. The people in the park were at once hopeful and pessimistic, at once determined and disorganized, with one eye turned toward the policy decisions and inst.i.tutional factors that were ruining ordinary lives and the other turned toward personal decisions that were doing the same. People liked to say that the Occupy movement was like one big protest song, but the grievances weren't always specific enough for that. Sometimes it sounded to me like one big blues song.

And we went on through the rest of it, too. We recorded an alb.u.m with Betty Wright, the queen of Miami soul; you could call it her comeback record, but people like her never really went anywhere. Instead, times change around them. I kept waiting for D'Angelo to resurface with the follow-up to Voodoo, and for a brief moment, it looked like he might. There was momentum toward the end of 2011, and then he and I had a triumphant appearance at Bonnaroo in the summer of 2012. He was every bit as hypnotic as he had been a decade before. I try to keep track of young artists in all genres, whether it's the ones who show up on Fallon or the ones who show up on my iPod. And I keep thinking about the persistence of hip-hop.

The persistence of hip-hop. It's a funny word, persistence. It means not giving up, but it also means just pa.s.sing on through time. It's the will to survive but it's also inertia. So which is it? There's still big money in hip-hop for some. There are still acts who come out and top the charts-though topping the charts isn't what it used to be, and people don't seem to stay there very long at any rate. But something has been lost. I say this well aware that I risk seeming like a grumpy old man, the curmudgeon who's always grumbling about the glory days. But at least some of what I say is simply true.

The other day I was listening to some old records, and Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause" came on. It was that Daryl "Hasaan" Jamison trumpet squeal, which ascended and transcended like Coltrane's spiritual longings when it happened back at the dawn of the seventies, in the J.B.'s, but became something much more revolutionary and urgent when the Bomb Squad put it in the Public Enemy song. That's a piece of music that just straightens your G.o.dd.a.m.n spine. But the real secret to that record is how personal and relatable it is: "No matter what the name, we're all the same / Pieces in one big chess game." So where's the distance between the artist and the listener? There isn't any. That's why you can take it in. That's why it can fill you up. And those are the things that make sense to me, even now, twenty-five years later, at a time when most hip-hop has done away with the personal, the relatable.33

We just went through an election, and some of the same issues surfaced there. Think about how Mitt Romney played his hand, how he came out at first swinging his millionaire stick, saying that he wasn't going to apologize for his success. At the same time, he was trying to tell a story that people would understand, or want to take part owners.h.i.+p of. And when it became clear that he was failing at that, he went to phase two, the convention phase, Operation Humanize, which was overshadowed a little bit by Clint Eastwood's chair act but pushed him far enough that he was starting to get some traction again. And then there was the leak of the earlier donor dinner, the comments to money men about "the 47 percent," and much of the goodwill that was starting to build dissipated overnight-not only among people who Romney had specifically insulted, but among plenty of people who were undecided. And through all of this, there was the same undercurrent of racism that we had talked about on Rising Down, the same reluctance to completely accept a black leader. Donald Trump kept trying to thread the needle with birther accusations. Maybe this sitting president isn't a real American. Maybe this election-of a man, by the way, who was scrutinized the first time he ran for office-is a case where we need to take a closer look. This all happens on a more fundamental level than policy disputes. It would be comedy if it wasn't a kind of tragedy. There's a song called "Pimps" by the Coup that takes place in a millionaire party, and Rockefeller and J. Paul Getty are there, and all of a sudden they burst into rap. It's rapped, in character. They talk about their money and power, and how they "make the army go to war for Exxon." At one point, Trump comes up, and they're a little embarra.s.sed by him, and he breaks into this ragga toasting: "Trump, Trump, check out di cash in a-mi trunk." It was hard not to think about that song during the election, and after, as Trump kept mouthing off on Twitter, promoting himself, trying to get more eyeb.a.l.l.s for his TV show, Celebrity Apprentice. But then it was over and Obama won his second term. That was yet another kind of accomplishment to put next to and in some ways above the first term: he wasn't just a novelty president, someone that America's fickle finger settled on for a second, but he was-he is-a real president.