Roots Are Strong On Mca

NEW YORK‹After three albums and nearly six years of nonstop touring, Philadelphia-based live band the Roots‹no samples, no drum machines‹have traded their underground cachet as the thinking head's favorite rap group for "next movement" leadership status as architects of new-millennium hip-hop-as-bebop.
The higher profile for the venerated six-member group comes with the success of its fourth album, "Things Fall Apart," which the act's new label, MCA, released Feb. 23 (Words & Deeds, Billboard, Jan. 23).
Thanks to a comprehensive setup and marketing campaign, which kicked into gear a full seven months before release and included everything from in-stores to online promotions, the album powered onto The Billboard 200 at No. 4 and bowed at No. 2 on Top R&B Albums in the March 13 issue. This issue, the set, which has sold 335,000 units, according to SoundScan, stands at Nos. 18 and 8, respectively, on those charts.
"It's been a long time coming," says Sean Taylor, PD of R&B station WQHT New York. "It took four albums, but they're there. The fact that it took four albums just means they were a little ahead of their times with the first three . . . They combine all genres of music, including bebop, under the hip-hop umbrella."
"Even though the Roots just released an album that debuted [near] the top of the charts, they are still very credible within the hip-hop underground scene," adds Violet Brown, national urban music buyer for the Torrance, Calif.-based Wherehouse Entertainment chain. "Through the years, the Roots have paved the way for many artists that are now receiving recognition. The underground is about to explode. Artists like the Roots are changing, building, and strengthening the face of hip-hop. They are truly the superstars of the underground."
BLAZING NEW PATHS
The act's status as a groundbreaker‹and its potential to blaze new artistic and commercial paths in the years ahead‹is clear to its new label, to which the Roots segued from Geffen.
"We're very proud of having the Roots on our label," says MCA president Jay Boberg. "We believe that they're a seminal band making music that's breaking barriers and providing a leadership role. The record company is passionate about putting our resources behind a group that strong."
That commitment extends beyond America, Boberg adds. "We have a worldwide plan to take the band to the next level. They're on their way to Europe in [the latter part of] April for live dates and promotional appearances, then back to Europe for festivals in the summer. They're a huge priority for all Universal companies around the world."
"This is the first time we've been promoted to the world," says bassist Leonard "Hub" Hubbard, adding that the setup at home has also been something of an eye-opener. "When we were at Geffen, they were literally just getting their urban department. MCA has been selling black music to the world for a long time. When they acquired the Roots contract [in the fall of 1997], things that didn't happen with Geffen started to happen, like a setup. This is the first time I've ever seen a "coming soon' ad for my group, ever."
"I really, truly feel that this is our first record," adds drummer ?uest (aka Ahmir Thompson). "The others were preparation and education. The humbling lesson to me is, if we had gotten success during that time period, we wouldn't have been able to handle it. We're older now, and I still don't know how to handle it. I'm numb."
Diving into the twin opportunities offered by foundation hip-hop's rhythm and rhyme abandon and jazz's fierce standards of musicianship, the Roots' lead MC, Black Thought (aka Tariq Trotter), ?uest, Hub, keyboardist Kamal, MC Malik B., and human beat box Rahzel "the Godfather of Noyze" take off where Last Poet Umar Bin Hassan left off in his cutting-edge spoken-word and jazz encounter, 1984's "Bebop Or Be Dead."
"We've come to rotate the standard of hip-hop," says Thought. "Within the tradition of what it used to be, we've come to change the standard to the way things should be."
The Roots are about hip-hop's scratch'n'sampled eclecticism accomplished through live instruments, vocals, mixing-board wizardry, and wide-ranging references that include the title's evocation of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's prize-winning novel (and the W.B. Yeats poem that inspired Achebe).
Grounded in the solid, intricate foundation of ?uest's slippery beats and Thought's quicksilver flow‹a torrential intelligence that refuses to simplify in any way‹the group layers in a dense weave of unexpected choices that still beams the artless spirit of a playground jam.
"A lot of people want to think we're just a freestyle group," says ?uest. "We're capable of performing in a spontaneous atmosphere, all of us, as you can see in our live shows and jam sessions. But everything [on new album] was planned‹every clink of the sticks, every distorted mike."
THE START OF THINGS
The album's first track, "Act Won," represents "the start of things," says Thought. "The first sign of change is things falling apart. Sonically and vocally, the rawness and texture represents us, the foundation. That's how shit sounded when people didn't have the option to be sonically refined."
That intro takes less than a minute, but it took four hours to piece together. A remixed collage of the Denzel Washington/Wesley Snipes jazz-as-art-or-commerce debate from the movie "Mo' Better Blues," the track slices other sound bites in and out to expand the dialogue, including snippets from previous Roots tracks.
That track slides into "Table Of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)" and Thought's kamikaze attack on the hip-hop status quo in "The Next Movement," featuring guest Scratch's vocal percussion, female duo Jazzyfatnastees' Bach-influenced chorale singing, and gently thrumming keyboard chords.
"Step Into The Relm" [sic], with its warm buzz and hum of old vinyl, beckons with the smoky intimacy of a basement bo—te.
A who's who of music's most inspired mavericks participates. "The Spark" floats Malik B.'s existential thoughts over fluid Middle Eastern riffs, courtesy of singer D'Angelo on keyboards. Jay Dee from Slum Village and the Ummah production crew took part in the creation of "Dynamite," also featuring jazz guitar noodlings from Tony Toni Ton band member Spanky.
A chance meeting with Zap Mama's Marie Daulne led to her contribution in "Act Too (Love Of My Life)"‹her artistry with miniature vodka bottles (which she and a Roots member drove all over Philly to find) filled to various levels to create different notes. "The whistle you hear is her blowing on the vodka bottles alternating with her singing, but you can't tell which is which," says ?uest.
Other tracks put a new spin on old school's esprit de corps. "Without A Doubt's" drum, percussion, and voice melee is rooted in Schoolly D's '84 Philadelphia classic "Saturday Night." Black Star's Mos Def joins Thought for "Double Trouble," an exhilarating tribute to hip-hop ancestors.
"100% Dundee," a roiling mass of hard beats, Rahzel's inhuman scratching, and Thought's triple-tongued rhymes, locates in another back-in-the-day space, with Malik B. and Thought getting busy "on some raw, off-the-top shit," says Thought.
Interlude "Diedre Vs. Dice" features Thought and Dice Raw, two members of the Fifth Dynasty MC clique, and Hub's cello improvisations. The hyped-up "Adrenaline," released last November as a white-label single, features Thought, Dice Raw, Bennie Siegel, and Malik B.
"You Got Me," the first official single, was released Jan. 25. Featuring Erykah Badu and Thought rocking a love joint, it is "the one that will have the longest life span," he says, "just because it's commercial."
"Don't See Us" was also leaked as a white-label release last September. "It was a sneak attack‹us coming back to the scene before we made a loud bang," explains Thought.
Spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker closes with the wrenching "Return To Innocence Lost."
"Each track tells its own story," says Thought, "but they unfold like the chapters of a book."
THE GENESIS OF THE ROOTS
The Roots' story began shortly after Thought and ?uest met in '87 at Philadelphia's High School for Performing and Creative Arts, where fellow classmates included the members of Boyz II Men and the Roots' original bassist, Christian McBride. ?uest's father is doo-wop singer Lee Andrews of the group Lee Andrews & the Hearts.
At age 5, ?uest was onstage, playing cowbell and tambourine; at 12, he began playing drums during his father's performances, and by 13, he was bandleader. "Those shows probably set the standard for the pacing of our show, for how good a show can be," notes ?uest, "and I wanted to apply that in hip-hop terms.
"I didn't think there was a place for me in hip-hop until I bought Public Enemy's "It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.' One moment a David Bowie loop, then the J.B.'s, a Jackson 5 loop, the Funky Four Plus One being scratched. I had all these records! I discovered how they did that and became obsessed with sampling. Then Tariq needed a person to do music."
For Thought, rapping "was innate," he says. He adds in reggae warrior fashion, "I just naturally started rhyming because I was immersed in hip-hop culture from Creation. That's the soundtrack of our generation. When it was fresh and new, so was I."
After the second Roots bassist left for college in Chicago, Hub, who had played in everything from orchestras to jazz and rock groups, stepped in.
Just before the group made its international debut, at '93's Moers Festival in Germany, it ducked into a studio for one long night to record 17 tracks for "Organix," "because they said that we could sell our product after our performance," Hub explains. "We got a standing ovation and sold out every unit we'd brought to the gig. "Organix' also functioned as our demo for the recording industry."
("Organix" was released by Cargo in 1997 and distributed by MCA.)
"Anyone who's ever seen us has said to a friend, "Check out the CD,' or, "Man, you have to come to the next concert,' " he continues. "That's been our thing from the beginning. We were lucky to play with Rage Against The Machine [during '97's Smokin' Grooves tour], which brought us to their multimillion audience. Like ['96's] Lollapalooza, that was fantastic for us, to play before 20,000, 30,000 people.
"When people think of musical instruments in contemporary music, they think of jazz and other music. They don't think of young people, what's on the street, and graffiti art. People who grew up with hip-hop have never seen musicians actually playing instruments to make those sounds. When they see the Roots, they're seeing people play their favorite breakbeats for the first time. The particular type of musicianship necessary to play this style correctly is not respected by some musicians because they don't know how to do it."
MCA senior VP of A&R Wendy Goldstein first heard of the Roots in 1993, during her first week working at Geffen.
"Someone told me about this great band in Philly, so I went there and saw them play live in a rehearsal studio," recalls Goldstein. "I was blown away by the level of talent and musicianship."
"There's definitely a "next movement,' as we like to call it," Goldstein continues, "and the Roots are the leaders of this movement. They're the "it' group, like when Hollywood gets a new actress."
Though a favorite of critics, the Roots' three previous albums did not approach the out-of-the-box success of "Things Fall Apart." The 1995 set "Do You Want More?!!!??!" peaked at No. 22 on Top R&B Albums; '96's "Illadelph Halflife" peaked at No. 4 on Top R&B Albums and at No. 21 on The Billboard 200. "Organix" reached No. 93 on Top R&B Albums.
"Things Fall Apart" is the group's second top five album on Top R&B Albums and its first top five title on The Billboard 200.
The current album's rapid success can be traced to a number of factors, according to Goldstein, including an increased outreach to radio.
"We didn't have an urban promotion staff [at Geffen]," she says, "so one missing element was urban airplay that would have gotten a hit single to a completely different audience. Now they've crossed over to an audience beyond underground heads because they have a radio audience of 39 million."
For the week ending March 14, "You Got Me" was No. 4 on R&B Airplay Monitor's Mainstream R&B Audience radio chart.
Touring also continues to play a major role in spreading the Roots' gospel. The band is currently on a 40-date solo U.S. tour, with 11 additional dates with the Dave Matthews Band.
MULTI-PRONGED SETUP
MCA started its setup last August, when the album was originally scheduled for release in November. With a lesser work, the product may not have lived up to what turned into a seven-month buildup with the revised release date, but MCA's various strategies built anticipation steadily.
"In their live shows, the element of improvisation is tremendous," says MCA director of marketing Naim Ali. "So one thing we did in setting up the project was showcase them everywhere, including the residency at Wetlands in New York [featuring open-mike jams], which created a tremendous buzz.
"The setup campaign was strictly one of increasing awareness of the quality of the music on the album," Ali continues. "We weren't pinned to any first-week numbers. We thought we'd come in and hang steady and then get a little bump" after the group's appearance on "Late Show With David Letterman" aired March 2.
The setup fell roughly into five phases. "For phase one, we did a graffiti cartoon of a boombox with the Roots' faces," says Ali. "We put that on postcards and did a mass mailing of 200,000 to our lifestyle list, to let them know the Roots were coming."
Phase one included releasing "Don't See Us" to college stations and mix-show programs "as a white label to generate a buzz and link it to the last album," says Ali.
Phase two launched in September. "It involved the band doing promo dates and paid gigs in the Northeast and Atlantic coast areas," says Ali. "The regional promotion guys escorted local tastemakers, retail, and radio guys to the venues. We took care of the food and drinks and took them backstage to meet the guys and played the album for them.
Once they'd seen the performance and heard the album, the buzz really started to grow."
Phase three, involving the Internet, kicked off in October with numerous Web site promotions.
The fourth phase, involving a large number of consumer print and outdoor ads (snipes and billboards) overlapped with previous and subsequent phases. "We did snipes all the way up to Feb. 23," he adds.
The label launched the ad campaign with a full page in Rolling Stone's Oct. 29 issue, which featured a cover story on "Hip-Hop Now: The Top 50 Players," which included the Roots.
"We escalated the ads from October to November," he continues.
The ads featured the five photos used for the album cover. Each is a documentary photograph that illustrates how "things are falling apart" in modern life. Although a different cover was featured in ads each month up to the release date, the main cover is the well-known World War II shot of a burned toddler sitting amid bombed-out rubble.
"A lot of kids have bought five CDs to get all the covers," says Ali.
Phase five focused on the BET world premiere of the "You Got Me" video, on Christmas Day. Set in the Brooklyn, N.Y., projects, the video portrays Thought walking on streets littered with human bodies, alternating with cutaways to Badu singing. Breaking from the usual rap video excess, the poetic black-and-white images of "You Got Me" blur the line between inner and outer realities, then invert the two for the clip's final impact.
"Other than the animated images of the group on the postcards sent out in August, the public never saw the group unless they went to a show," says Ali. "The video was the first time the mass public saw the guys."
The single was released to R&B and crossover radio Jan. 25.
On Feb. 22 in Philadelphia, the Roots kicked off a series of in-store performances and autograph signings; the events attracted up to 2,000 people each in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Then the group hit the road for more promotions and its current national tour, which kicked off Feb. 27 in San Francisco.
"The Roots are about real music," says Ali. "If they had to work hard, blue-collar jobs 12 hours a day, when they'd get off work, they'd be playing for free, because there's a passion. And the group is positive and intelligent. There's no violence, degradation of women, drug lingo, and they don't use the "B' word in the album. Coming from Philly, they're not touched by the glitz and glamour of New York and L.A. They went to school, read books, picked up the paper, and learned what was going on in their town."
With a tour schedule that packs 40 shows (plus interviews) into 30 days, "we've revamped the shows so we can take a break," says ?uest. "The Roots show is now like a variety show. The first part concentrates on 45-60 minutes of our material. Then we'll take one of our favorite acts on the road. The [opening] group usually opens to a half-empty house, so we make it the halftime act. This time out, we're taking Black Moon, a well-respected Brooklyn group. We close with our eclectic set, like our solos. It's about pacing, because to do a three-hour show, you need everyone's attention."
In addition, the Roots will hold another open-mike jam session at Wetlands April 5.
"That open-mike show definitely keeps us on our toes because you don't know what's going to happen next," says ?uest. "Right now we're trying to be the underdog champion; there's a whole slew of black female artists trying to do cutting-edge shit who aren't getting their due."
That's where the Roots' Motive imprint, distributed by MCA, comes in. The roster includes album guests Jazzyfatnastees, Dice Raw, and 3-7000-9.
"We're running the gamut of sound," says Thought. "It's not a hip-hop, alternative, R&B, or reggae label. It's a record label dealing with premier, quality music across the board and production for whatever you need."
Other projects on the Motive slate are a compilation from Fifth Dynasty, the MC clique Thought spearheads that includes Dice, MARS, and others, and "more eclectic things we can't do in the Roots that we'd like to do," says ?uest. "I would like to put out an instrumental with breakbeats on it."
As for breaks, as in rest and relaxation, "there are no breaks," says Thought. "I'm on the battlefield, and you can't take a break during a revolution. It's definitely on now, but this is just the first leg of the decathlon. I don't feel pressured to do the same trick twice," he adds, referring to "You Got Me's" runaway success.
"At the same time, I know that the next thing we do definitely needs to be as innovative," he adds. "It doesn't have to be in the same realm, but it has to be as sharp, as cutting-edge, because that's the standard people expect from the Roots."