Musical History Tour: The Roots

"Good Music" by The Roots

The best and most tasteful decision Jimmy Fallon ever made was hiring The Roots to be his Tonight Show band. Considering the history of music on the Tonight Show, the bands—meant to entertain and hype audiences leading up to shoots and during breaks—have all been versatile with popular song. Only Branford Marsalis, who played what he wanted, bucked the job description. Kevin Eubanks and his band brought rock, R&B and pop into the show's repertoire, and The Roots could do all that and bring in, naturally, Hip Hop. Even before hiring them, Jimmy envisioned The Roots playing a bigger role than just as a hired audience to laugh at his jokes. In a call back to Carson, Jimmy features their skills regularly in sketches, and games and musical routines. The best thing about Jimmy's tenure is his palpable camaraderie with The Roots, a relationship not prominent between host and band since Carson and Doc. "Retiring" to the regular job for Tonight came after nearly twenty years of albums and hard touring. The Roots self-released their debut album Organix in 1993.

At first, The Roots found it difficult to get signed. Not gaining any career traction in their native Philadelphia, they moved to the UK and toured Europe and had to self-produce their debut. As such, Organix lacks studio polish. Instead, The Roots were still finding their identity and sought to chronicle that growth on record. Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson on drums and Josh "Rubberband" Abrams/Leonard "Hub" Hubbard on bass are the album's beat and melody in an radical embrace of stark minimalism that has a flexible affinity with jazz, funk and R&B rhythms. Guitar and keyboards are only occasional touches to get the listener moving a bit. Overtop is almost always Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter who delivers breathless rhymes as the primary emcee. He can fall into similar rhythms and rhyme schemes from song to song but delivers with undeniable power and cleverness.

In this freeform chronicling of artistic growth, each song owes a lot to The Roots's Hip Hop influences with the jazz-attuned Tribe being undeniable. They try a few times to replicate their own versions of earlier alternative rap hits like "Can I Kick It?" or De La Soul's "Buddy." Songs like "Grits" and "Pass the Popcorn" allow lyrical play with a rather undefined metaphor but don't have the same ear for a single. Despite the spare instrumentation, the rhythm section already has a deep well of musical references to pull from, incorporating them into songs in a manner halfway between sampling and jazz quotations, and Black Thought is just as willing to rap as to try slam poetry or scat. The experimentation can be just as silly as serious like with a bass line call back to the "Inspector Gadget" theme song or just a 14 minute-long, "Longest Ever," posse cut featuring the Foreign Objects, The Roots's attempt to create a hip hop collective akin to the Native Tongues (Tribe, De La, Jungle Brothers,...) "Good Music" is the album's musical and lyrical peak opening with a nod to underground radio world-building, incorporating storytelling and band lore, using a clever echo-like round in the chorus and breaking down into a fun time.

I don't think I really needed to say all this because Black Thought says it all in "Leonard I-V":

And I speak up loud so you can hear me yo
Is it a Tribe Called Quest? Is it the JBs?
We're cool like that, but yo we're not the DBs
It's the group, The Roots, with the organic rap style
Plus the groove from the rhythmic rhyme file
Umm...I'm a big fan of the Soul
But I'm trying to get this Roots shit in control
So I hate when people say
"Umm—you remind of me De La Soul,"
'Cause I got a soul of my own, and umm
Yo, The Roots are taking big steps and
You can listen as we progress in
Sometimes I might come to teach a lesson
Other Times it's with a crazy question like...

Yo, whatever happened to Leonard Parts One to Five?

The result is a testament to Thompson and Trotter's pursuit of a destiny written in song. Shaggy, fun, full of potential, devoted and indebted: The Roots are trying a little bit of everything to start. They don't know quite who they are yet but they know where to go to find out and we, the listeners, get to witness the first steps.

Thus ends the year-long-plus journey through the audio history of The Tonight Show. Thank God. Wouldn't have done it in hindsight, but I...really wanted to cover The Roots.

Here is the discography surrounding The Roots's debut album:

Organix

"Pass the Popcorn" by The Roots