Let me end all speculation ladies and gentlemen and officially announce that yes indeed Hub played his last show as a member of The Roots on August 31st of this year.

One has to understand off the bat to be a member of this group is to sacrifice your life. If you look at it (and this is applies to most of the artists that you talk about on this site) there is nothing "normal" about our lives. Well at least my life. (Hold the violins please.... there is cool shit like 1am jams with Prince in his living room watching Joni Mitchel dance like a teenager.....but there is also a downside like being in your mid 30s and your dating life is still on some high school shit.)

Even as i write this i got 34 minutes to haul my ass to rehearsals for the VH-1 tour. (this is after sleeping for 5 hours fresh from working with the Score winner of the VH-1 Hip Hop Awards, which came after a 4:30am lobby call to the Las Vegas airport, which came after all the crazy MTV activity and gigs i had to do, which came after the morning flight and the 6am lobby call from Montreal which came after the 10 hour mission to get a lawyers affidavit to get me into Canada (a mere half hour before stagetime)---of course not before trashing my entire house looking for my lost passport.---that was just 48 hours.

try to make that 17 years.

This isn't a pity party. Nor an explanation. Just a confirmation. I understand that most of you are a little miffed that you weren't given the option to say "goodbye". Truth is Hub really didn't want to make a big deal about this. Which is probably why we defied him anyway and had a "moment" onstage which got quite emotional after his last solo. We got about 16 bottles of bubbly and tried to have a 2 fish/5 loafs of bread distribution to the crowd so that we could properly send him off.

So what of The Roots now? We've had the workload of about 7 groups and have been on the road since most of you were in high school (or even worse listening to your older siblings cassettes of our first couple of albums) and sometimes opportunity knocks. (in this case it's in the form of film/tv scoring)....the show will go on (i have yet to go to those "what are we gonna do now?!?!" posts on the boards.) it went on after Rahzel, Scratch, and Ben. and it will go on.

I say we use this moment and opportunity to raise our cyber glass and toast Hub in his new endeavors.

(raises glass) -?uesto