I've always liked it, but it came out right as I was getting out of the habit of writing about music, so I never addressed it much and let it sort of float away from me the way all new music did in 2014/2015, just going back to it every once in a while without any real intent other than listening to a Roots album I wasn't as familiar with as the others. Anyway, I've been listening to it all afternoon and I think it's pretty incredible as a thing to think about (I also felt this way about undun, for the record) but also think it undoes itself from being a classic with some bad musical choices that are even more striking on a 30 minute kinda-EP.

8.41/10

(all caps inserted where there were italics, except for album titles cause that's too much work)

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Collage artwork looms large over this album as both a concept and a rule. The cover art, licensed from perhaps the most famous collage artist in the history of the form - coincidentally, Romare Bearden was also a pioneer for civil rights reform in Harlem - composes the images of two men from the fragments of as many as fifteen different faces, from light to dark skin, full color to monochrome. The two men age from cranium to jawline back and forth across the spectrum of oldhead and babyface, two phrases which themselves pose an interesting juxtaposition: age has a way of removing the familiar features of your face, wiping away what makes you cute and charming and vibrant in favor of meat atop passageways atop bone atop...

Is it a coincidence that ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin came from The Roots' braintrust at the same time their Tonight Show cemented itself as the country's favorite destination for late night reprieve from the woes of the world, a place where Donald Trump could go to have his hair ruffled as the band responsible for songs such as "False Media" smiled silently in anticipation of the next commercial break where they'd play rearrangements of funk and soul standards?

undun was, is, to be frank and for all its imperfections, one of the most bold and astonishing recordings in hip-hop history. I still have no idea whether its duality was on purpose, but ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin has me leaning ever more severely towards yes, yes most certainly. In its execution, this album takes a different tact, allowing the band to fracture into more traditional roles, but it is even more incredible for it. The Roots offer a rumination on what it means for soul-rap, skinny jeans pioneer Kanye West to be primarily a trap artist in 2016; what it means for Black Thought and Greg Porn to be rapping with a casual viciousness akin to Wooh da Kid or Alley Boy when they could by all rights be reverting back to the picnic raps that made their first two albums such summer fun; what it means that they just don't have the time to sit in a bunker and bang out their response to untitled. unmastered., forget about To Pimp a Butterfly.

...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin is a profoundly dark album, even for a group that counts Game Theory, undun and Things Fall Apart among its discography. It whittles all the talking points of their past decade into small, almost disposable chunks. It nods towards the bleak experimentalism of late-period Radiohead (a favorite reference point for the band since Game Theory) with the composition of "Never", all gnarled synthetic orchestra and voices subsumed by technology. John Lennon née The Beatles' "Revolution No. 9", perhaps the only famous example of collage-as-music, earns a tip of the hat in the radio-glitch framework of "Dies Irae / The Coming". It has little time for anything other than its state of being, and that state is dark of night, disheveled hoodies slightly ajar as sighs emit exasperation and souls exchange planes of existence unconvinced of the timing, that the RIGHT ABOUT NOW of it is best.

...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin could just about get by on being Black Thought's lone verse on "Never" and a bunch of instrumentals and made its point, but as a three-act play the length of five viral Late Night videos, the album takes just enough time to expand on that song's primary thrust, perhaps best summarized by a quote from Kent Russell's I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son: "...whatever it is that's out there- it's going to get in. No matter what. It's going to get me, in the end. Relieve me of my life. Contemplating this, I fell through to a sound sleep." The only real way to conquer a death-filled existence is to accept death and become it.

Like all albums of The Roots' making since Game Theory, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin has its flaws. Dice Raw's chorus on "Black Rock" could very well be the worst thing this band has ever committed to tape, so blatantly tuneless and full of that tunelessness it can only be excused in concept (and even then, I think this is ?uest's friendliness getting the better of his musical intuitions). The album seems to be in a hurry to be over, leaving it to the listener to find the allegorical and symbolic value in it. A rare instance of an album leaving the listener wanting more and that being a bit of a deduction.

It is also pretty resolute in its distaste for humor, draping even their "Puck addresses the audience" moment in unwavering Christianity and a saccharine cadence that brings to mind the scrolling credits to a cynical romantic comedy in which the idea of romance was the joke. "The Coming" is a pretty psuedohymnal that seems unconcerned for its placement on a piece of pop music; I'm not sure I'm criticizing The Roots for making a Carla Bozulich tribute track, in fact I quite like it - but really? As one of just eight and a half actual original works? Maybe I'm just jaded.

After all, It's such a firecracker of an album. The lyrics are mostly whip smart and the production surprisingly contemporary for a band whose spent the better portion of the decade entrenching themselves in a sort of AOR rap bubble (that I love, others don't, whatever). True enough, its pocketbook nature emboldens the Black Thought purists amongst us ever more furiously, but trimmed by half and removed from the totality of a plot line this approach to what a "The Roots" album is for the first time feels entirely of a piece with everything else the record wants to express, rather than a platform for the band's (talented, but c'mon) friends to get some exposure at the expense of cohesion, or gratification. I grow weary of this album from time to time, sure - that'll happen when you wind up listening to something on repeat for two hours damn near every time you encounter it.

I've heard it pondered that the despair pervasive throughout The Roots' work since James Yancey's passing is a symptom of that death, but I don't buy that - they were already on this path when he was still a part of their collaborative process. More accurate, I think, is that these are men in their 40s in seats of great privilege, prominence and adoration, and yet black lives matter, still and most prominently, in the sense that they are so frequently lost. There is no one life that brings this worldview about, but all of them, from the root upward, wilting amongst water.

To quote self-immunization 'expert?' Tim Friede, from the aforementioned Russell book: "You have to become the snake. The snake - they call it a 'recessive' step when you lose something through evolution. But the snake IMPROVED itself by getting rid of legs, extra lungs, everything."

Or, quoting the same during a self-inflicted, venom-induced seizure caused by a series of four bites from the most venomous rattlesnake in the world over the course of a single day: "I am gloved in fire."


1|Theme from the Middle of the Night|1:27 4 - 4.25
2|Never|3:54 5
3|When the People Cheer|3:01 4 - 4.75
4|The Devil|0:38 4
5|Black Rock|2:41 4
This song is almost impossible to rate because every bit of it is so good except for the chorus which, again, I cannot understate, puts me in a vice and squeezes until I resemble a kesme noodle and back again.
6|Understand|2:50 4.5 - 5
7|Dies Irae|1:07 5
8|The Coming|3:01 3.25 - 4
9|The Dark (Trinity)|5:17 5
10|The Unraveling|4:20 4.25 - 5
11|Tomorrow|5:06 4

Overall: 48 - 49 4.41/5 87 - 89%: Exceptional; repeated listens demanded; BUY IT


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz