DON'T MISS TODAY:

Back to Artist Profiles

9/4/2006 What's up? I'm a little relieved that this album is finished. The hard work is just beginning, which is touring behind this record. How's that going so far? The thing is, because we do about 200 dates out of the year, I never say, Ok, we're about to go on tour. We're always on tour. The only time we truly do stop touring is to make records. Right now the feedback is all that we'd hoped for. Our audience is pleased with the results. The reception that we're getting is pretty much what I expected it to be. Right now we're just going to concentrate on the structure of the show and how we can make it fit to maximize this record. Are you doing anything different with your live show for Game Theory? Technically the songs are different. I'm trying to take the Springsteen-esque shows that are two to three hours and compact it to 90 minutes. It's hard to do when you're trying to show all you can do in a short period of time. As time goes on, we're noticing that the audience has more of an ADD approach as far as spectating is concerned. For the time being, I'm just trying to fit about seven or eight songs from our new album into our current set list and go from there. Did Game Theory come out how you wanted it to? It was exactly how I envisioned it. We almost had a close call with "Atonement." I basically had to beg on my knees and talk to Thom Yorke from Radiohead. I knew I had the respect of the Radiohead cats so they granted our wish to us at the very last minute. We had a vision for this album and we executed it. Where does Game Theory stand against the other Roots albums? That's a really hard question to answer. It's like asking what's my favorite fresh air to breathe. I can't say what it is. There's always a challenge and the challenge for me has always been how to pack the maximum amount of punch in the shortest amount of time. It's easy to make a sprawling art record when you have 79 minutes to spare, but it's way, way, way harder to do the same thing when you only have a 45 minute window. It's really hard to get your point across. You have to make it much stronger and much more concise. The beauty of the challenge of this record, I feel, is more or less the fact that we were able to keep it so somber. I'm not saying there's no other album like this album in history, but this is 2006 and what's commercially viable in 2006 is not this record. I feel like that was risky enough to really make a statement and go with our hearts as opposed to following what the marketplace has with us. Did anything change on Game Theory with it coming out on Def Jam? Aesthetically, nothing changed. We always had complete artistic control of our product. You sampled Sly and the Family Stone on "Game Theory." You also sampled Sly on The Tipping Point with "Everybody is a Star." What is it about Sly that brings out the best in The Roots? That's an artist whose work I'm very, very familiar with. When you're dealing with an element you know inside and out, that lets you do different and creative things to it. If you compare our version of "Everybody is a Star" to the original "Everybody is a Star", the difference is night and day. I knew the original so well that it enabled me to flip it in a way that's translated as different because I was given license to do whatever I wanted to with it. They just opened the door and because Sly was so pleased with the song, as a reward, I was able to say, My real dream is to do "Life of Fortune and Fame" which at that point was just really unavailable on the marketplace. It was available on bootlegs but not officially available for commercial release. When they gave us the rights to do that and the masters, we made it happen. That was always my dream song and always my No. 1 choice. The fact that they granted that wish meant a lot to us. "Can we get that?" "No problem!" Shit! Were you nervous putting out "Don't Feel Right" since it's so different from everything else on the radio? No. We already knew going in that this album is going to stick out like a sore thumb. It's about putting your best foot forward. If you are not competing with what is out there in the marketplace, then the very least you can do is put your best foot forward, no matter what it is. I really don't believe in singles. I believe in albums. The purpose of releasing that song was to let people know the album was coming out. It wasn't to be on radio and video shows. We just wanted people to notice the record was coming out. I wasn't thinking necessarily if that song made sense next to "Shoulder Lean" or any other songs. How was it putting the J.Dilla tribute, "Can't Stop This", together? That was an emotional rollercoaster. We had that song for the longest, even before Donuts. It was still a J.Dilla tribute before he passed. He was going through all that treatment and that just amazed us. That song is autobiographical where we're talking about keeping true hip-hop alive. We were talking about J.Dilla. He made some of the most groundbreaking hip-hop on his deathbed. Once he passed away, we wanted to take the song even further. We started from scratch and made it a celebration of his life and did it in a way that was respectful and places him in the history books. What will you remember most about Dilla? That there was a person on earth who loved music more than I do. People who know me know that I love music. They know I live for working. They know I live for buying vinyl. They know I live for music trivia. They know I live for pop trivia. They know I live for collecting pop culture memorabilia. Dilla was twelve times crazier. I'm a person who tries to balance his life and work, at least in a 24-hour setting. Maybe eight hours for me, six hours for work, and maybe the remaining time for me. Not Jay Dee. He was the only cat I knew besides Pharrell who gets up at 7 or 8 in the morning to make beats I'm just going to sleep then. He was so focused and concentrated that he would be done by the afternoon. That's how focused he was. He would never leave that basement for nothing. I have to have some sort of life, like go to the movies, talk on the phone, get on the computer, go to MySpace, something…This cat always made music and he used to always try to perfect his craft. I just never met somebody so utterly committed to his craft as he was. The fact that he never got discouraged is amazing. I mean, if I was in his position and got fronted on by the mainstream for ten years, that would have taken a piece away from me. It seemed to make him better. He seemed to get his juice from the fact that the producers loved him. The fact that he could drive Pete Rock crazy with one beat or make me and Kanye go, Where'd you get those drums from? Maybe that kept him going, the fact that he was worshipped by the producers' producers. Is Peedi Peedi an official member of The Roots? I consider us to be the first mode of transportation made in the music world. I consider The Roots to be the first car. Everybody else is walking and using carriage rides and horses. We have a little space in our car and if you want to hop in the car for the journey, you're more than welcome. Peedi is going to serve a year. We're going to start our American leg of the tour in December and we're going to bring Peedi aboard and have him do a bunch of shows and see what happens. The same position that Rahzel had, the same position that Jill Scott had, the same position that Cody Chestnut had, the same position that Martin Luther had, Peedi's going to have. That's the fifth Beetle position. How's Malik B doing? He's doing cool. He's in Philly right now. He's working on his solo project right now, Psychoanalysis. Can he come back to The Roots? He never toured. In order to be in this situation, you have to give up your life and that's a tall order. It's one thing for me and Tariq (Black Thought) to do it, but it's another thing to ask Kamal and Hub and Knuckles and Kirk to adjust to it. The difference between us then and us now is that most of us are now with children. A lot of us are married now. 200 days is a long time not to be home. My crib is nothing but a storage unit. As soon as you walk into my crib you see sixteen luggage bags. None of them get unpacked. I'm sure the clothes are growing mold and the sneakers are destroyed. That's because I come home for one day. I say, I can either catch up with my peoples or wash my clothes. My peoples always win. I say, I'll grab another luggage bag and buy another round of clothes when I tour around Europe. You say the same thing when you come home again for two days. You compromise. That's not him. He can't see himself leaving for nine weeks at a time or four months at a time in a country he's not from. Some of us are built for it and some of us aren't. As long as he's there to spit on the records, that's all that counts. What's going on with Dice Raw? Dice is not a root. Think about it like Wu-Tang. Cappadonna is not a member of Wu-Tang. He might be there, he might not be there. We got Dice playing A&R. Because we have so much material, the way the music is judged is we'll work out some stuff. What happens to that hard drive that has sixteen hours of jam sessions is Dice will listen to it and we'll talk about it. We kind of got Dice in an office job, so to speak. He's the Karl Jenkins that's credited as the A&R on The Roots album. Whatever happened to Cody Chesnutt? He walked away from it. The thing is, you have to be careful what you wish for. There are a lot of cats who choose to have a revolutionary approach to their music. We can do all the revolutionary talk we want, but at the end of the day no matter how revolutionary you are, you're still playing the man's game. You have to decide whether or not you want to shake hands and kiss babies. I guess after four months Cody decided he was becoming the person he hated the most. There's a very independent nature about his music. He's the one who shared "The Seed" with us. Once he got into the industry, it just left a bitter taste in his mouth so he stopped and he walked away. Is another Beanie Sigel/Roots collaboration on the horizon? Beanie definitely has my favorite flow in the tri-state area, him and his whole clique. To me State Property was the heir to the Wu-Tang throne. You had six, seven, eight individuals that all had very unique flows and very unique voices. That's something that you can't find. Nine times out of ten you see cats that are grafted off whoever the most popular dude in the group is. They try to base their style on that. It's really ironic because Jay-Z would be the man to follow and pretty much any other batch of MC's would look at Jay's situation and try to base their shit off of that. I think that Jay looked at their situation and took them off that. Beanie, Freeway, Oschino and Sparks and Young Gunz, they had a very, very unique approach to the craft of emceeing. To see all those flows be that unique, that's very, very unique. That's a very, very rare thing. Are you still in touch with Scott Storch? I really haven't kicked it with Scott in a long while. He's very, very busy with his projects. We're still under the same management but as far as us just kicking it back and that type of stuff, nah, not really. If you could shoot a video today for "Never Do What They Do (Part 2)", how would it be? That's a loaded question! We actually flirted with the idea of doing a sequel to it. You also have to understand the age of the million-dollar video has eluded us. Videos are now at the lowest budget they've ever been at. The cliché ideas are sort of played out now. I think the million-dollar videos ended in 2000, 2001. I think Aaliyah's "Rock the Boat" was the end. I believe the million-dollar video ended in September of 2001. Everybody and their mother scaled back after that. It's kind of hard to poke fun at trends that are nonexistent nowadays. What do you want to say to everybody? At this rate, I just really, really want to bring awareness that this album is out. More than anything I just really want to bring awareness that this album is out in the marketplace and it's one of The Roots' strongest albums to date. You don't need a hot video or a hot song to get banged over your head twelve times a day to say that. http://theroots.com

By Brian Kayser

[28] REACT TO THIS INTERVIEW