The Roots Release New Record
Cameron MacIntosh (600 words)
Tariq Trotter (Black Thought) and Ahmir Thompson (?uestlove) have come a long way since their friendship at Creative and Performing Arts High School in Philadelphia. The two’s musical bond has resulted in one of the most groundbreaking hip hop groups of the last few decades. In 1986,?uestlove first met Trotter when he was humorously thrown out of his school by security guards. In his autobiography, Thompson recalled, “The dude was thugged out to within an inch of his life.” A year later, they began busking on the streets of Philadelphia with Thompson playing bucket drums. Just seven years after their first performance at their school variety show, The Roots were headlining major music festivals with a Top 40 record.
The band’s most recent gig, however, has launched them from a group adored by hip hop fans to household names across the nation with their position as house band of The Tonight Show hosted by Jimmy Fallon. As Thompson stated in a recent interview, “The way it was presented to me was, look; you guys can make the same amount of money playing 8 minutes of music a week as you would playing 200+ shows a year.” After 18 years of selling out venues across the globe, the offer didn’t sound bad.
However, with the “bandleader phase” of their career in flight, The Roots’s albums are seldom released in comparison to earlier years. When their strangely titled new record, “…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin” was released on May 19th, 2014, audiences were curious to see what Fallon’s house band had left in them.
From the first bar of the album, beginning with the track “Never,” it becomes apparent that this is far different from any previous Roots record, and for some maybe not in the best taste. The Roots’s musical mastery and introspective lyrics have always resonated well with a vast audience, and it is for that combination of technical prowess and great songwriting that many consider them music so extraordinary. Their music describes aspects of life that many other main-stream artists don’t dare to touch on, serving as interesting, organic, and grooving representations of what is going on beyond the realm of popular culture and into the world as a whole.
To say the least, the new record is the most dismal, and perhaps hard to understand out of any of the band’s prior albums. It may take the listener two, three, or 30 spins to adapt a taste for it. The Roots’s neo-soul and “jazz rap” reputation is much less obvious, with few tunes even breaking the three minute mark. Simply put, they don’t dig in, and the impact of new ideas within the record are quickly lost when they can’t last throughout its duration. Lyrics are often dark, with aggressive and harsh music underneath coming from the band’s instrumentalists. To make matters more bizarre, after the bleak tone of the record, it concludes with “Tomorrow” (feat. Raheem DeVaugh,) with a catchy, upbeat chord progression and a message along the lines of “everyone wants tomorrow today; make the most of now.”
This record is an odd departure from The Roots’s usual projects, and will certainly catch fans by surprise – for better or worse. After groundbreaking albums like “Things Fall Apart” and “The Tipping Point,” it is strange to see a band with such integrity and thorough appreciation for music in its entirety give up that rare gift. Unfortunately, given their “day job” 5 nights a week, the creative juices simply might not be able to flow as they used to.
The 2014 Tony Awards
Laura Ben-Asher
Above: Host Hugh Jackman on Sunday, June 8th
Tony history was made once again Sunday at the 68th Tony Awards ceremony, held at New York City’s Radio City Musical Hall. Hugh Jackman (who appeared on Broadway in The Boy From Oz, and more famously in Les Miserables, X-Men, etc.) hosted, presenting multiple awards, singing, dancing, and honoring past and present Broadway stars and artists.
Like almost every significant award show, this year’s Tony’s ran 15 minutes over the allotted three-hour timeslot, forcing the producers to cut the annual “In Memoriam” segment, the expected tribute to recently deceased figures in theatre. Other footage cut from the broadcast included awards being presented during commercial breaks, such as design awards (Sound design, lighting design, costume design, and scenic design; each for both plays and musicals) and more notable awards, such as best score and orchestrations. Both went to Jason Robert Brown, for The Bridges of Madison County.
There are consistent surprises and snubs in both the nominations and wins, and this year was no exception. While the frontrunners in certain categories succeeded as expected, such as Neil Patrick Harris (Best Leading Actor in a Musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and Bryan Cranston (Best Leading Actor in a Play, All the Way); the biggest surprise award winner of the night seemed to be Jessie Mueller, who beat previous Tony winners and heavyweight Broadway veterans Idina Menzel (of Rent, Wicked, and most recently Frozen) and Sutton Foster (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Violet) to win for her performance of Carole King in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
Out of all the performance awards given out Sunday, arguably most the significant was Best Actress- given to Audra McDonald for her performance as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. This was McDonald’s sixth Tony, not only breaking the record previously set by Broadway legend Angela Lansbury, but making her the first actress to ever be given an award in every performance category. McDonald was emotional and overwhelmed while accepting the award, which was only exaggerated when she was given a standing ovation by everyone in the theare, showing the love and appreciation the intimate Broadway community holds for performers and anyone in the business.
In the days leading up to the formal awards show, no theatre professionals seemed to have an ironclad prediction over what show would take home the biggest award of the night- Best Musical. Most articles, websites, and editorials came to the consensus that All the Way, (a show about President Lyndon Johnson’s first days in office and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) would take home Best Play- which it did. However, those same analysts could not predict which show would take home Best Musical.
The critics were split between After Midnight, Aladdin, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, and Beautiful. Some thought the spectacle that the tourist trap and all ages demographic of Aladdin would give it an edge (besides being a Disney production), while others thought the historical and cultural homages that After Midnight and Beautiful provided would give them the advantage. Ultimately A Gentleman's Guide came out victorious, the only musical with all original music.
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