About

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

"The Roots were one of the chief proponents of alternative hip-hop. And with this 1999 release (their fourth), they managed to capture their famously explosive live sound and break through to mainstream audiences. It couldn’t have happened on a more deserving record. “You Got Me”, the band’s excellent collaboration with Erykah Badu, was the hit (and a Grammy winner), but it’s one of many gems on the 15-track album.

Things Fall Apart is what music fans might call a grower. On first listen, it’s almost unwelcoming. Weird time signatures and abrupt shifts in tone punctuate abrasive rhyming and harsh, sometimes cacophonous lyrics. Indeed, any album that begins with this piece of dialogue from Spike Lee’s film Mo’ Better Blues demands to be met on its own terms: “The people don’t come because you grandiose motherfuckers don’t play shit that they like. If you played the shit that they liked the people would come. Simple as that.”

No, TFA is not for the faint of heart. The album takes its title from Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel of the havoc wrought by colonialism in an African village (late in the album, the band name-checks the legendary author on the propulsive “100% Dundee”.) It’s a fitting title for an album that describes, in unflinching detail, the fractious nature of modern urban life. The band also rails against mediocrity in mainstream hip-hop, most notably on the scorching “Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’ New”.

But the most startling thing about this album is the utter inventiveness and power of the music. Reaching back to hip-hop’s musical forebears (primarily jazz and funk), The Roots craft a potent sound collage for their trenchant manifesto. Along the way, they tap a who’s who of progressive hip-hop (Mos Def, Common, Jay Dee). The result is nothing less than a dark, urban opera for the new millennium." - Consequence of Sound