Tracks 5 and 5 from Illadelph Halflife (1996)

Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Things Fall Apart (1999)

Tracks 17 from Undun (2011)

The second half of the '90s were when I started playing drums, when I fell in love with hip hop, and when The Roots really became nationally well known. So they became a formative influence to me as a teenager, even as I appreciated that most rap was built on drum machines and loops, I thought it was cool that The Roots planted their flag for the idea of a live band making hip hop, with an amazing drummer leading the charge. 

Sadly, a couple of guys who were crucial to The Roots' early history have passed away in recent years. Leonard "Hub" Hubbard, who was the band's bassist from 1992 to 2007, died in 2021. And rapper Malik B., who recorded and performed with The Roots on and off over roughly the same period, died in 2020 (shortly after he passed I made a Spotify playlist of a couple hours of Roots songs with Malik B. verses). "Water" is a pretty amazing song that Black Thought wrote to/about Malik B. during a time when he was estranged from the group. 

When The Roots became Jimmy Fallon's house band in 2009, first on "Late Night" and then on "The Tonight Show," I thought it might slow down and/or water down the band's recorded output. For a few years, though, it seemed to revitalize them, with three of their artiest, most uncompromising albums coming out in the space of four years (and of course, "Here I Come" is now best known as the opening music for "The Tonight Show"). Then, the members of The Roots started to branch out and do some pretty cool things outside the group: ?uestlove has written a few books and directed the Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul, and Black Thought has finally started to really get his props as one of the greatest MCs of all time thanks to a series of collaborative albums and some amazing radio freestyles. 

As great as Black Thought has been on his solo run lately, I think it's kind of silly that it took this long for him to really get his flowers. If you listen to his best verses on this playlist, he was always insanely good at rhyming, but maybe being part of hip hop's greatest band, with flashy instrumentalists and beatboxers and other rappers all around him, made it hard to focus on him as an individual. 

The band's indie debut Organix isn't on streaming services today, but one song "Good Music" is available via their two-volume 2005 retrospective Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide To Understanding The Roots, which includes some other album tracks like "Act Too," "BOOM!" and "Thought @ Work." Things Fall Apart and Game Theory will always be my favorite Roots albums but it was fun to pick through all the albums and remember great songs I never spent a lot of time with Phrenology which I realize is a big album to a lot of people. How I Got Over has over 10 times as many Spotify streams as Rising Down (for perspective: those albums were released two years apart, both before Spotify existed in America, and both peaked at #6 on the Billboard 200). I really love Peedi Crakk's run of Roots guest spots, especially "Long Time" and of course Beanie Sigel had a great verse on the Roots single "Adrenaline!" The Roots have been backing so many giant rap stars on TV for so long that you can almost forget that they were once seen as pretty snobby and adversarial towards mainstream rap, but they could always rock with other rappers from Philly of any stripe. I'd love a whole project of State Property rappers spitting with The Roots.