The Roots at First Avenue
Forget Jimmy Fallon—Black Thought should host his own late-night TV talk show. In concert, The Roots MC is less a rapper than a true master of ceremonies, a ringleader directing the audience’s attention toward different spectacles onstage. It doesn’t really matter that only about one in 20 of his words is intelligible; his energy is fluent, and at The Roots’ show last night at First Avenue, he kept the audience rapt through a full two-hour set.
The Roots can safely be called the hardest-working group in hip-hop. As the house band for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, they usually perform five times a week, allegedly busing to New York from their native Philadelphia for each show, and then tour on the weekends. Since 1993, they’ve released eight studio albums, and debuted the first single from the ninth last week on Fallon. They've won a Grammy, and have been nominated for five others. Beyond that, drummer Questlove—whose afro is the group’s most recognizable emblem—is a prolific Twitterer, posting constantly about the minutiae of his life (“How in the blue f@#$ am i eating a $74 turkey sandwich?!!?!?!”), which is a considerable time commitment.
And yet they haven’t really had a hit single since 2002’s “The Seed (2.0).” But their mediocre commercial success is irrelevant when they perform. A concert isn’t about a group’s Billboard ranking, but about moving a crowd, which, despite their rigorous schedule, has been The Roots’ strength for the last 15 years.
So while the audience couldn’t exactly sing-along to many of the songs—even if they thought they knew the words to, say, “Respond/React,” Black Thought’s unceasing monotone delivery made the track almost unrecognizable—they latched on to mini-covers of “Iron Man,” “Jungle Boogie,” and “Apache.” Then Damon Bryson, a.k.a. Tuba Gooding Jr., walked out into the crowd with his sousaphone. Maybe it was the Dr. Seuss-like name of the instrument, or maybe it was the spectacle of seeing a 4-foot-tall horn wrapped around the musician’s body, or it could have been the brassy squawks that came out from the thing, but it was mesmerizing to see Bryson play the hell out of the sousaphone, blowing as if his tongue had been stung by a bee.
And really, the same goes for each bandmember. Everyone got a lengthy solo—except for the drummers, who played a mid-set duet—and no energy was ever lost: a rarity for hip-hop shows, where the crowd typically is impatient with instrumentation, wanting to hear a catchy hook instead. Because each Roots member was such a distinct player (the sexy guitar, the funky bass, and the serious keyboards), each riff added a new flavor. The solos were inserted within the songs, so “You Got Me” and “Mellow My Man” turned into 20-minute jams reminiscent of a Phish show. This wasn’t a rap group; this was a band.
But then it all came back to Black Thought. Even when it seemed like he spoke a foreign language rooted in rhythm instead of words, his charisma gave meaning to his words. And when he indicated through some intonation in his voice that the set was about to end, the audience wanted to keep listening.
