It’s safe to say that this might’ve been the only album launch in history to combine a knee-deep deluge of multi-coloured blow up balloon animals, Rahzel, didgeridoo, avant garde jazz piano, a string quartet, interpretive breakdancing, a choir, sampling wizardry and spoken word poetry…while an imposing collection of nooses hung from the ceiling and Questlove presided over everything as he alternated between DJ mixer and drum kit.
Album launch parties — and listening parties, for that matter — tend towards the free-booze affairs, full of insider-y industry types looking over each others shoulders for the next person to talk to, or the typical ‘hey, let’s play the album from start to finish’, maybe with some cool projection behind us or whatever.
The Roots launch for their new record titled …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin was anything but straightforward. Taking place in the Anspacher Theater inside NYC’s stately Public Theater, it took on the role of African American history walkthrough, setting up the ideas and forms that birthed hip hop, and album sampler exploded into intertwining set pieces that were by turns jarring and captivating.
There was the interpretive breakdancer Jay Donn, swimming and cavorting through a sea of balloon animals and popping them underfoot; Questlove’s sampling of Nina Simone and James Brown and drumming alongside the discordant piano attacking antics of DD Jackson; Rahzel teaming up with multi-instrumentalist Craig S Harris and his didgeridoo to make some noise; Roots MC Black Thought’s spoken word involving statements like “N*ggas! Jews! Crackers! If there’s a Hell below…Then we’re all… gonna… go”. The highlights, though, were the amazing drum machinist sampling of Jeremy Ellis providing one of the most, er, enlivening moments of the night and then the closing eruption of Roots guitarist Kirk Douglas tearing apart Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’.
And no live hip-hop MCing. Tracks from …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin were presented with sampled vocals, which certainly didn’t stop ‘Black Rock’and ‘Tomorrow’ from being unassailably badass.
That was the idea of the evening, and what the Roots were looking to explore. The program that accompanied the show stated that at the heart of the album is the question ‘what is hip-hop anyway? What does it sound like and why? What is it supposed to accomplish?’It wasn’t just about a reimagining of the primordial musical and cultural soup that informs the way we view, articulate and experience hip hop; Questlove and his merry band of maestros tried to challenge the way music can be experienced as an art form, and get us questioning the ideas of interpretation and representation.
As an expression of artistry and hip-hop, there are few groups who would even attempt something as confronting and challenging as The Roots did. That was the point.
