The Roots
...Come Alive
[MCA]
Rating: 5.7
On a stormy eve in recent history, the legendary Roots crew deigned to pay a visit to the
illustrious educational institution that I attend, which happens to be overwhelmingly white.
The Roots, if you didn't know, are overwhelmingly black. This made for quite an interesting
evening. Ryan had sent me The Roots Come Alive for review, so I felt it my duty as a
reviewer to pay far too much cash in order to bear witness to this live music phenomenon. And
what a spectacle it was. As the seething throng of white bodies lurched quasi-rhythmically to
the abundance of soul presented on stage, I began to wonder if the Roots really felt compelled
to try very hard to impress the crowd.
I would imagine that this is something of a burning question for the Roots, who play a massive
250 shows each year. The Roots could be doing crossword puzzles onstage while halfheartedly
rapping and the vast majority of the crowd would still be jumping around madly. The crowd was
so thoroughly unfunky that when Black Thought thrust the mic toward the crowd for an
exhaustively-planned and explained "Rock, rock on" for the tenth time, the crowd still seemed
genuinely surprised and temporarily stunned. So something just seems fundamentally askew when,
for example, Black Thought busts out with a "Y'all wit' me, Switzerland?" after an ill groove
on The Roots Come Alive. Grandmaster Flash would roll over in his grave, and he's not
even dead yet.
Regardless, the Roots' devastatingly funky show is represented fairly accurately on The
Roots Come Alive. The problem with this record is that the Roots are fairly rugged and
raw, replete with the live instrumentation, on their proper LPs. Thus, a live album by the
Roots adds very little beyond crowd noise and many extra "Y'know what I'm sayin'"s. The songs
are more or less faithfully recreated, with highlights being the creative beatboxing and vocal
scratching which is absent from the originals. Black Thought continues to be one of the most
intelligent and skilled MCs in the business, but this is no more apparent here than on their
prior works. For the amount of talent that ?uestlove has, the beats he throws down are too
often trite, with a hard snare hit inevitably falling on counts two and four. He does break
it down for the people on "You Got Me," just as he does on the Things Fall Apart version,
but such moments are too few and far between.
The primary appeal of The Roots Come Alive for fanatics is the inclusion of two new
studio recordings on the disc, the weaker of which also appears on the soundtrack to "The
Best Man." (You're about as likely to remember this Taye Diggs classic as you are to recall
"The Wood.") On "The Lesson-- Part III," the Roots are in top form and offer a promising
vision of continued mastery on forthcoming records. Overall, though, a live album must be
quite exceptional in execution or reinvention to garner a high rating, regardless of the
quality of the original tracks. As fresh as the Roots can be on the stage, this performance
resembles the majority of other live records on the shelves today-- it's merely average when
held against studio material.
-Taylor M. Clark