Link: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/9116220.htm

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Spare beats, and large ideas

On "Tipping Point," the Roots' boasts make way for knife-sharp comment on universal themes.


It's possible to take in most of The Tipping Point (Geffen **** out of four stars), the Roots' galvanizing sixth effort, and come away thinking it's just another series of boasts glorifying one rhyme-sayer's skills over the meager gifts of others.

After all, Black Thought is prone to withering assessments of his peers, and their flip side, self-mythologizing tales about how he talks sharp, "like a razor blade under the tongue." Then there's his incessantly brash delivery: Proceeding from a quintessentially Philadelphian position that assumes confrontation, he's a contrarian who didn't just overcome obstacles ("... took the cards I was dealt, turned 'em into hot spit"), but set out to change the rules of the game.

Go a bit deeper into the album's 12 tracks, and what emerges is a rhetorical sneak attack.

Raps that start as typical bravado evolve into riffs on homeland security, or criticism of political complacency among African Americans. Tucked within autobiographical recollections are screeds against mindlessness in music ("Every record ain't a record just to shake behind"), or all-points civil-liberties alerts ("They're fixing to write another Patriot Act again").

It would be one thing if the weighty stuff hit listeners over the head, Public Enemy-style - the most overt message of this record is its cover, a posterized arrest photo of Malcolm Little just before he became Malcolm X. The genius of The Tipping Point lies in its quick-cut approach and the way Black Thought slips larger ideas into otherwise ordinary accounts of the daily struggle, shifting the scene from a South Philly scramble for cash to the more universal struggle to retain poise in the face of adversity.

The Tipping Point is less musically ambitious than Phrenology - the Roots traded the previous album's orchestrational appointments for a symphony of ice-pick snare drums and lean, mean guitar riffs, and left vast open spaces for the switchblade prose to shine.

From the first track, a clever reworking of Sly and the Family Stone's "Everybody Is a Star," through the whomping "I Don't Care" and the highly syncopated duet between Black Thought and drummer ?uestlove, "Web," the rhythm section does what it did during the disc's formative jam sessions - it simmers along, threatening to boil, reinforcing the rapped themes with surprisingly economical touches.

The Roots might not tip into the thick of commercial urban music with something as edgy and subversively provocative as The Tipping Point. But its spirit and live-band vitality represent an important contribution all the same - showing that sparks can fly when hip-hop's numbingly predictable formula gets shoved a step or two in the direction of spontaneity.

-- Tom Moon

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The age of the ignorant rapper is done: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

"One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died. I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the crate on my stoop and went in to get something and I returned to see the sanitation man put the crate into the crusher. I rushed him and caught him flush on the temple with a titanic right hand and he was out cold, convulsing on the floor like a infantile retard." -- Mike Tyson