I'd like to provide you with perspective on maybe what it's like to be The Roots and then have you think about your points and possibly consider how much they lack substance.

I'll start off by saying I would NEVER want to be a member of The Roots. A band like this has ultimately painted themselves in a corner which leaves them open to be critiqued in ways most artist never encounter.

1st Point: The Roots are musicians that are playing a style of music that has very unreasonable limitations when it comes to creativity. Hip-Hop is sample based music where the musical changes are kept to a minimum. For example, let's take the guitar in the song "In The Music"...It's basically 4 bars of repetitive 16th notes that repeat throughout most of the song.

This is how Hip-Hop is constructed and its one of the only forms of music that's based solely on the "Break Beat" format. With that said...It's almost boring for an actual musician to live within this confined structure when they're trained to play music that has fewer restrictions.

If you've ever been in a studio and tried to colab with a musician who's never played on a lot of hip-hop tracks before...then you may have seen how difficult it is for them to just play 4 bars over and over. For real musicians it's DULL and because they have the ability to do so much more....it's a frustrating ordeal if they really don't LOVE Hip-Hop.


2nd Point: Now let's take that perspective and apply it to The Roots. Their makeup consists of two drummers, a bass player, a keyboard player, a guitar player and a world class emcee.

Their audience is full of old-school Hip-Hop heads, and hippie kids from all types of races/nationalities who are very critical listeners. Most of these fans are actually musicians and artist themselves. Because of these factors and their incredible track record of putting out superior music...They have an unrealistic pressure to continue to make better music while being confined to a format that's full of 4 to 8 bar breaks, and only being able to stretch that out to about 5 minutes of music because that's the attention span of the average listener.

In contrast, let's look at John Coltrane's 1957 release of Blue Train (It's on my desk at work so forgive me for going on a tangent). This album has 5 songs....that's right 5 SONGS. The lengths are 10:39, 9:06, 7:11, 7:55 & 7:03.

I pointed this out to illustrate that musicians (which The Roots ARE) haven't always had to strangle their creativity for the sake of "The Industry". This goes back to my point of how hard it is for them to make "good" music when the crux of their ability is hampered by the format of Hip-Hop.

Now let’s talk about the audience a little more. The Roots have VERY critical fans...where in contrast; someone like Young Joc could release the same type of music year after year and as long as the machine is pushing it....he'll never have to worry about the type of critiques that The Roots encounter.


I could go on, but I'm sure I'm not saying shit that's particularly mind blowing. This is common knowledge, but I do think that this perspective gets loss when we try to compare them from album to album. I love the integrity of their art and the effort they put into their craft.


On last point:

Thought has been getting a lot of crap from the media and fans lately. I do think that he sounds bored on the mic sometimes, BUT he too has the same problems in front of him when it comes to the music. Emcees are supposed to get it all in within 16 to 32 bars...AND on top of that, constructing real complex cadences (which he CAN DO) in most instances is a turn off for audiences. So once again you have someone whose ability is hampered by a format that doesn't reward acceptional skills.

You'd never see a rule in the NBA that point guards can't go to their opposite hand when going to the hole because the "crowd" can only take in so much.





Lastly, FUCK ya'll haters....

I'm done for now









You don't impress me!!
http://www.myspace.com/bluejay1972