The Roots albums since TFA have been kept to 13 or less tracks. Maybe Rising Down had 14.

And that’s cool because I don’t love long albums.

However, if you’re going to make that decisions then you can’t fill the album with multiple guest spots from Truck, Porn, and Dice. It just becomes a mix tape at that point.

I’ve also heard on here that Roots albums have always had a lot of guests, which I don’t believe to be true but even if it was, the percentage of time they took up was just less due to the albums being longer.

Illadelph has;
6 - Dice
7 - Bahamadia
11 - Mars & Dice
12 - Common
17 - Q-Tip

That’s 6 MCs on 5 songs out of a total of 20 tracks. Obviously I’m not counting singers because that doesn’t take away verses from Thought which is what this is about.

With that said, we also have not only verses but also hooks being taken away from Thought decreasing his time even more.

TFA has;
6 - ELO
8 - Dice
9 - Mos
10 - Common
13 - Beans & Dice

Which is exactly the same 6 guests over 5 songs.

And again, nothing against Truck or Porn...the latter has had some dope ass verses which I would definitely keep 1 guest spot per album for him, but we have come to expect guests on Roots albums to be more along the lines of Double Trouble and Love Of My Life which are potentially the best back-to-back songs on any of their albums. All time classic shit right there.

This doesn’t mean I want the same guests but damn, just be more selective and keep Thought the focus. Perhaps they just want to give the others some shine but I’m assuming they could do that by working on their albums and not turning The Roots albums into a block party.

I remember as soon as I opened The Firm album in 97 and looked through the booklet...prior to hearing the album, I told my boy... “I don’t know about this one man” because I saw the line up. Nature and Dre. Foxy solo. Pretty Boy and Foxy. Wizard. Nature solo. Canibus and Nore feature (which were dope). AZ and Half-A-Mil track. The reason we fucking copped the album was to hear Nas and AZ on the same tracks. That’s it. And that didn’t happen and the result were terrible. I’ll take Foxy and Nature on every song with them...but you AT LEAST need to have those two together on the majority of tracks.

Maybe it’s me being picky but I really think after Game Theory, they really didn’t capitalize on what was potentially their most interesting work.