On their sixth album, the Roots backslide a bit on the creative promise they showed with 2002’s Phrenology. Instead of expanding into more ambitious and experimental areas — the way Outkast has, for example — the Roots tend to fall back to basics with vigorous, but ultimately conventional, lyricism.
There are definitely some truly great moments here: The album opens with near-magic on “Star,” a mesmerizing song that is one of the finest of the group’s career, and Black Thought is a one-man tour de force on “Boom!” where he mimics Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap down to their velour sweats. But The Tipping Point also has some of their blandest production ever, and, at 10 tracks (plus two hidden cuts), the compactness of the album makes the problem spots stand out more than usual. “I Don’t Care” and “Duck Down!” in particular seem derivative and commercially tailored.
Excerpts from interview with Questlove:
Q: How did the Roots get to their new album “The Tipping Point?
A: The tip of the point was probably one of the — even though it’s the more simple of — of The Roots discography it’s probably the hardest to achieve, only because we had such a short period of time to execute the record. So, we went on a month by month trial basis.
For the month of September, of 2003, we held song writing sessions. Normally, when we song write or create songs, uh — we’re at the mercy of our touring schedule, which we’re never home. Usually in sound checks, somebody will hold up a mobile phone and play their answering machine, or if we have a video camera, you know, many — there are many a demos that we’ve done where we’re playing and I’m holding the video camera with my left hand, but playing with my right hand. And that constitutes song writing. Basically, all the songs on the “Things Fall Apart” record were written that way. but we decided to do a proper song writing session; something we haven’t done since uh — “Do You Want More?” our second album. And what we did was we totally refurbished our studio and we kind of included all the amenities that were guaranteed that all key six members of the group would be in attendant, every night on the nose. So, pretty much between the hours of four or five p.m. until three, four, five a.m., sometimes.
All those things were needed to — to keep us together and what we did was, we invited a whole slew of songwriters; some well known; some not known. We also just had all the comforts of home. So, pretty much, all of our friends were there. It was a party atmosphere. We wanted to do a synthetic album and a live traditional Roots album, but sort of them meshing at the same time. So, what we did was, we held jam sessions for the whole months of September and ‘til we had satisfactory amount of hours logged on, to the jams.
So, you’re talking about seventy, eighty hours worth of music, of which in the month of October, we literally just sat there and listened to all 80 hours worth of the music and picked and kept notes on what we liked and what we didn’t like, and pretty much November is how we crafted the record.
We had a team of outside producers, in which they took bits and pieces of our jam sessions. They would sample them on their own or make songs on their own for those jam sessions; hits – that’s how songs like “Don’t Say Nothing” or uh “Duck Down” got created. Also, “Why”, “What’s Going on?”, got created as well, that same way.
And “Love with the Mike” the same way. On our side of the fence, songs like “Guns are Drawn”, songs like “Star”, songs like “Somebody’s Gotta Do it”, were cooled from the jam sessions. And we either had to rearrange them manually, take the jam session tape and sort of re-sample them or just sometimes just replay it over again. And initially it was going to be a typical Roots, seventy-nine minute affair. And somewhere mid-through the recording process I’ll say around January, we decided to call it a day and just leave it at ten songs.
Q: Why did you decide to name the album “The Tipping Point”?
A: We named it “The Tipping Point” after a book written by Mal, Malcolm Gladawell, and Malcolm sort of makes the observation of how phenomenon, or the art of phenomena, is started. And his observation is that sometimes a small idea can start from just one person’s mind, stretch into two people. And those two people tell their friends and so on and so on and so on and so on, so on. And it spreads like a like a virus, so to speak. And we felt as though that seed for us was planted with our first album, “Organics” 12 years ago. And slowly but surely the Roots parameter just grew and grew and grew and grew to a boiling point.
And I guess this is our way of saying, this is sort of our moment, so to speak. But also, our album titles, reflect the state of hip hop and the state of society as a whole. This could be The Tipping Point for hip hop. You have a lot of hip hop, that’s more art based, sort of coming out on top now.
Q: Which producers and special guests did you work with on the album?
A: I’ll say that a majority of a term that I will loosely call fluffers, as in I guess people to sort of motivate us, we used a ton of those people. People that didn’t even make the record; people like Chaos, a crew, and MC from Toronto. We also had The Neptunes. Pharell and Chad did three songs with us. Of course the usual suspects, Jill Scott, Balow, Kindred, Music, Jaguar Right, just a whole slew of the songwriting community in Philadelphia chimed in. And they sort of motivated us, even if their songs didn’t make it, motivated us to get to a finishing point. At the end of the day, Devon the Dude, made the final cut, Gene Gray a very incredibly skilled MC from Manhattan, made the record. Dave Chappelle, esteemed comedian, I guess probably the comedian that’s generating the most buzz right now, in the United States.
Q: On this album you’ve worked with some musicians…But who are the core members of the band?
A: The Roots is always constantly rotating. I mean the heartbeat and the nucleus of the Roots will always be, myself, Questlove, and Black Thought, the lead lyricist. and under us is Kamal, our key board player and Hub, our bass player. And there’s always the position that I call the Fifth Beatle position. Sometimes he’ll buy a fifth person. Sometimes he’ll buy four or five other people. So this go round, we have three gentlemen who have names of other people. Kirk Douglas, is our guitar player. He replaced Ben Kenny, who was our previous guitar player. Ben Kenny got stolen from us by the rock band, Incubus.
They needed a bass player and from us touring with them so much, they took Ben. So in came Kirk Douglas, not the actor. Martin Luther, not that Martin Luther, but Martin Luther is a vocalist from San Francisco, the Bay area in California and he is a very gifted young man, who kind of came to us, sort of gypsy style.
He actually, ironically, came to Houston Texas, to attend his grandmother’s funeral while I left Houston Texas, to fly back to Philadelphia, to attend my own grandmother’s funeral, of which I had Frank, our percussion player drum for me. And he kind of just stayed on the road, with us. He was visiting Cody Chestnut at the time and just sort of it was like a traveling circus. He just sort of stayed with us. And the third member is Frankie Knuckles, not that Frankie Knuckles. Frank, has sort of, I guess, been my percussion protégé for some time now. He’s been playing with me since ’99. I first took him on the road with the DeAngelo tour. And I guess he and I have a percussion chemistry, sort of like Batman and Robin and so we complement each other well in our work. So, he just basically became the auxiliary member of the Roots. So that’s how we’re rolling now, eight deep.
