If It’s Artificial Let It Be: The Roots’ Things Fall Apart at 25
Looking back on the album that put the Philly band on the mainstream map
The Roots have become as mainstream as it gets, having spent the last decade as the house band for The Tonight Show.
Founding member and drummer Questlove has his own sort of celebrity as a producer, author, publisher and all-around personality. At this point, it seems like the band was always destined for this level of fame, but their ascension was never inevitable. In the late ’90s, they were at a tipping point (yes, allusion intended). They’d released a string of strong albums built on jazzy hip-hop, and 1996’s Illadelph Halflife even charted, but their career had come to a proverbial fork in the road. They won critical acclaim and a solid fanbase with their distinctive underground sound and unique content, but they weren’t winning commercial success by performing artistic but apparently niche music. They’d very quickly find their career taking off as all the pieces came together for one of rap’s great masterpieces, 1999’s Things Fall Apart.
The album’s Grammy-winning single “You Got Me” highlights the elements that came together to make the record so successful. The song opens with tense build, a smooth guitar woven over Scott Storch’s keys with a simple bassline working through it all. The as-yet-unknown Jill Scott wrote the hook and sang it, but discovered only when she heard it playing on the street that she’d been replaced by Erykah Badu (allegedly at the label’s insistence that the song feature a more famous artist). Eve (credited as Eve of Destruction but mostly unnoticed at the time) raps the female part of the verses. The band builds steadily before Questlove’s drumming changes the nature of the song in its final minute. Black Thought and Eve tell the story of a couple that feel fated to meet, stress about their time apart, but ultimately choose fidelity over the easier options provided by their lifestyles. It’s an unusual story with a sound that only The Roots could have provided.
VIDEO: The Roots feat. Eve & Erykah Badu “You Got Me”
The tone of “You Got Me” speaks to the creative fecundity of the area. Questlove was on a mission to improve his production and was working with a remarkable group of artists including J Dilla (who did some production for this album) and D’Angelo, Common and Badu on their own albums. The Roots recorded over 100 songs of their own, enabling them to choose an elite selection for their new album, and the neo-soul ideas they were immersed in were finding new prominence in their playing. At the same time, they were finding a harder edge and more direct approach to their rapping, making for a perfect combination.
After an introduction about the music business taken from Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, The Roots get after it properly with “Table of Contents Pt 1 & 2).” Although the band’s now several albums in, it feels like and introduction to their paired MCs, with both Black Thought and Malik B. delivering sharp, representative verses over a busy but uncluttered backing. The act takes it one step farther on “The Next Movement,” with Black Thought immediately punning on his group’s name as he describes them as a “legendary foundation.” By the end of the first verse he turns himself into a plant (and a detoxifier) by describing himself as “lifting a seed” and “sippin’ chlorophyll.” His drinking turns into a faucet drenching his listeners, and he’s exactly half right when he says, “You’re head is throbbin’ and I ain’t said shit yet.”
It’s a dizzying display, but The Roots are still just gathering momentum, even as they put forth a key theme of the album: their love for hip-hop itself. “The Next Movement” (with both DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Jazzyfatnastees) proclaims that the band has “the hot hot music,” but the statement turns out to be as much about genre and style as it is about The Roots themselves. The groovy “Double Trouble” carries a respectful throwback sound as Mos Def joins Black Thought for a ideal pairing (as if Thought and Malik B. weren’t already perfect). The two throw lines and references back and forth before the track closes with a string of specific allusions to old school hip-hop.
On “Act Two (The Love of My Life),” Common joins Black Thought to personify hip-hop as a woman with whom they’ve had a complicated relationship. The song’s laden with allusions, history, and disses, but even without catching all the references, the theme is clear: “hip-hop, you’re the love of my life.” That love never falters as the final third of the album pushes just as hard as the openers, with “100% Dundee,” “Adrenaline” (with an up and coming Beanie Sigel) and “Don’t See Us” providing a string of aggressive rhyming. Only “The Return to Innocence Lost” breaks the feel, as Ursula Rucker delivers a spoken word piece that, while an abrupt stylistic change, serves to ground the album in the violence and despair of an inner city life. All the bravado and allusiveness of the album can’t escape the real struggles of the world, and The Roots don’t want to do that.
The album ends with a hidden track about The Roots’ persistence, suggesting that there’s more to come even as it looks back to debut album Organix. The band’s ability to mix history with forward-thinking music would help them create an album both utterly of its time (as the alternative rap scene became more visible again) and completely timeless (as it remains a classic). Things Fall Apart quickly went gold and eventually went platinum. The group would go through some lineup changes after this release and would briefly feel scattered even as they kept up the pace (their work on Jay-Z’s MTV Unplugged marked a compelling interlude). It would take three years to produce a studio follow-up, the forceful and ambitious Phrenology, but the band remained in their ascendancy.
Since then, they’ve released consistently compelling albums and gotten that late-night television slot, but they’ve never surpassed that breakout album that remains as influential and inspiring as ever.
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