Slave To The Ism

So a new Roots album dropped on April 29–16th anniversary of the Rodney King verdict and subsequent LA Riots. Smart asses.  Cover image looks like a cross between Buckwheat and Fantasia’s Chernabog flying over Tara.
In 2006, Game Theory had me convinced the murk missing from new and improved digitally sterilized hippity hop could return to above ground albums. Said murk could then signify more than shoestring production, function instead as a grimy sonic patina for a psychological landscape—and turn listening into a way of thinking through Riot smoke. Scrawly cover w/ChernaBuck? Buckabog? and cheeky release date said maybe the thoughtful murk was back.
It’s back and better on Rising Down.
I submit to you that Rising Down is There’s A Riot Goin’ On with a faded 9/11 bumper sticker on a past-prime and GPSed gas-guzzler broken down somewhere between a war protest and a whut. It seems The Tipping Point’s Sly-jack on “Star/Pointro” and Game Theory’s titular track’s Stone quotes were part of a ritual du cheval.
Game Theory rocked its paranoia in a broader American voice (it takes two to play a game of hangman, whether you’re using pencils or people). Something didn’t feel right, but what? Rising Down seems a more specifically focused Black protest. As I told my wife, it’s like going to a crowded barber shop in a hood near a Black college and the patrons are watching CNN.
Consider the post-Imus middle finger in the virtuosic “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction).” OR the re-tasking of party chant and classic dance-jam metonymic phrase beautifully defaced by Jazzy Jeff’s digits in “Get Busy.” OR Black Thought, Truck North and Saigon’s racial profiling plaints on the somber, country-tinged “Criminal.” OR the conflation of school shooters, child soldiers and suicide bombers with each other and a virulent kind of minstrelsy on the stunning “Singing Man.”
This album is so steeped in a deeply critical (versus cartoonishly performed) Black® thinking that The Roots include an oral footnote explaining how “yelling” works in many black cultural interactions. What they shouldn’t have to explain (and don’t) is how Rising Down’s contextualizing track “The Pow Wow” is  the raw sound of Panic!!!!! (not Illadelph Halflife’s track of the same name); rather Black folks’ centuries old anxiety when crossing swords with a white institution (in this case, the music industry) and the familiar yet dreaded sense that things are about to fall apart, that we must codeshift or else. Here, The Roots choose “else.”
On Riot, when Sly sings: “My only weapon is my pen” (“Poet”), he makes a statement of voluntary disarmament. That album’s silent “There’s A Riot Goin’ On” neither celebrates nor condemns the burning buildings. It does not codeshift, it watches. Sly’s efforts to bridge Soul (meaning black) to Rock (meaning white by then) had succeeded (even as The Roots’ efforts to broaden their audience have) and there in the midst Sly stood, watching the optimism of the 60s bleed out black at Altamont.
Check how Riot’s “Thank You For Talkin’ To Me Africa” undoes Greatest Hits’s “Thank You (Faletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” by transforming the brash rally-funk of “Faletinme” into the wounded, sullen mutter of “For Talkin To Me”; then listen to how The Roots “Becoming Unwritten” becomes “Unwritten” or how the joyful Go-Go-esque closer “Rising Up” attempts to reverse the world weary drone of opener “Rising Down.” Yet by choosing a musical idiom (and a guest, Wale) from Washington, DC, the sonic relief of “Rising Up” busts loose in the shadow of the capitol—The Roots seem well aware of what happens when the powers that be don’t feel like letting one be oneself. Agin.