MO' META Blues Part 10

We finished out our tour and flew back toward the end of the month to do some dates in Jacksonville, Florida. That was the same time that Biggie's Life After Death came out, and that's all you heard anywhere. A few days after that, I went up to Richmond, Virginia, to do some work with D'Angelo. We went out one night, D and I, and we counted eleven cars all playing "Ten Crack Commandments." The verses weren't synched up, so it wasn't like the song was on the radio: it was eleven different drivers independently making the decision to play the song on their own CDs or ca.s.settes.

I finally made it back up to New York. Biggie's death was still hanging over the entire hip-hop community. One night, Q-Tip told me that I had to see this kid named Mos Def at Lyricist Lounge. I knew of him a little bit through his first group, Urban Thermo Dynamics, and also from some of his acting roles: he had been in The Cosby Mysteries and also in Michael Jackson's Ghosts short.

Tip and I went to Wetlands to see him, and he was a new brand of MC. I had never seen such a charismatic, engaging, comfortable performer. He was like a veteran comedian who also had awesome hip-hop skills. The centerpiece of his act was an a cappella twist on Slick Rick's "Children's Story." Slick Rick's version is about a street crime; Mos's flipped the narrative so that it was about a record producer who jacked hits from the eighties, used them as the basis for new songs, and destroyed hip-hop in the process. It was clearly about Puffy and what he had done as producer for Biggie and others, and Mos was virtuosic with the narrative: the crime, the chase, the repercussions. I was standing there off to the side, amazed by the parody, his wit, how perfectly he had recast the song. There's a verse at the end-"This ain't funny, don't you dare laugh, just another case of the wrong path"-and with that, Mos just stopped and did a B-boy freeze. It's the exact moment that was captured on the cover image of his Universal Magnetic twelve-inch.

I was standing off to the side of the stage, and I went crazy. I did this over-exaggerated a.r.s.enio Hall barking. I high-fived people I didn't even know, pounded knuckles with whoever was in sight. "Yo! He killed that s.h.i.+t! That was amazing!" I was laughing so hard I was snorting. Then, all of a sudden, out of the corner of my right eye, I see something and I shrink back. The only way I can describe it is that it was like the moment when Ola Ray backed herself into a corner and turned to see the ghoulish Michael Jackson in the "Thriller" video. Except that it wasn't ghoulish Michael Jackson. It was flesh-and-blood Puffy and eight of his goons. They were walking as a pack, dressed in the blackest of the black, like Run DMC on the cover of Down with the King. I was midway through another high-five or knuckle b.u.mp and I brought my hand down, slid to the side, and thought to myself, "Well, this is the moment I might die." I thought I was going to get a beatdown that would be talked about throughout hip-hop history. Even if that doesn't happen, I thought, I have officially, definitively, irreversibly ruined the Roots. There's no coming back from this moment. Puffy just stared at me. This was the first time he or any of his group were seeing me since the "What They Do" video. Biggie was no longer around, but his death was fresh, and one of the last things he had done was feel bad about the video we made. In my mind, I kissed my career good-bye.

But Puffy and his posse pa.s.sed by me and walked to the dressing room. When I unfroze, I went to find out why they were there. As it turned out, Q-Tip had invited him to see if he would look at Mos as a possible signing. This made sense, though it made Mos's choice of song make less sense. I thought it was a little weird, frankly. You're going to do this "Children's Story" parody knowing that the guy it's about, the guy it takes direct aim at, has been invited to consider you for signing and possibly change your life?

I didn't have time to pa.r.s.e the finer points of Mos's motivation, or anything else for that matter. I needed to get out of there quick. There was only one problem: Tip was my ride. I waited nervously and eventually Tip appeared. "We need to have a meeting," he said.

"A meeting?" I tried to sound casual.

"You know," he said. "Just a discussion. Let's all sit down and talk."

I wasn't prepared to sit down and talk, but it didn't seem like I was going to get out of there, so I went into the back and we all had an impromptu summit: me, Mos, Puffy, and his goons. Puffy started off the meeting, and he let it all loose. For starters, he felt like Tip had set him up. But he was more angry for the string of comments, for his perception of how I had acted toward Biggie. "You s.h.i.+tted on my man," he said. "He had all of Brooklyn on your d.i.c.k. He turned everyone on to you. And you treated him like dirt. You were his favorite."

I tried to explain myself as best as I could, and we came to a kind of understanding. When we parted that night, it was cordial, if not exactly friendly, and as we've both gotten older, we've mellowed considerably. Nowadays, it's nothing but love for Puff. He invited me to Marrakech for his birthday a few years ago but I wasn't able to go. When I think about that night, and that period in my life, I wonder how much of it was just young musicians talking s.h.i.+t and strutting their stuff. Everyone goes through those dumb rebellious phases, mainly because they're using music as a means of showing off their personality. They wear it as a badge. And it's a shame that people are so willing to hang their personality on their artistic tastes. If you're part of the segment of hip-hop that wants to be seen as thoughtful and progressive, then you don't readily admit that you like Jay-Z's Blueprint. If you're part of the segment that needs to keep its thug-life street cred, you don't readily admit that you like Things Fall Apart. What a s.h.i.+tty way to go through life, hiding your love for music so that people don't think the wrong things about you.

At the same time, though, I wrote that manifesto to fax over to the Source, which means that I thought that there was a principle at stake. It's still a principle, I think, and it's still at stake. Just recently, I was talking to a book editor about hip-hop. "Right," she said. "Is that the period where rappers were talking all about how they wanted to rape and beat women?" At first I bristled at the characterization. Then it hit me that I see hip-hop in much greater detail than most people. I've devoted at least half my life to it, so I'm a connoisseur even if I don't always think of myself that way. Pick any era and I can retrieve a vast array of awesome thought-provoking hip-hop artists who were genuine political thinkers, artists who were genuine comedians. A more casual observer will only see what's put in their face. That was the problem with hip-hop in the Biggie era, and it's the problem with what pa.s.ses for hip-hop now.14

In general, I don't like to blame the creators. They are making work that appeals to them and the people in the room with them. They are making something that is, at some level, genuine. But the distributors, the networks that bring art to the population, they are the ones who ensure that there's a flattening and narrowing. The younger me may have sat up all night with bandmates raging against Puffy or DMX or whoever, but the fact is that they were never the problem. The problem was that someone in the corporate chain of command felt that there was a need to play those songs fourteen times a day and to eliminate alternatives.

My thoughts about Puffy and Biggie on the one hand, and about Mos Def and D'Angelo on the other, started to come into focus in those months after Illadelph Halflife came out. What was missing from much of the pop culture I saw-and not just hip-hop, by any means-was humanity. It made me realize that I had fallen into a kind of rigid inhumanity of my own. I had spent years learning to become a perfect meticulous drum machine, but now I wanted to go in the direction I thought music was going in, which was toward the woozy, f.u.c.ked-up sounds I heard coming from artists like D'Angelo. There's an option on drum machines that lets you quantize them, program the drum sounds so that they sounds right, whether you're an eighty-year-old j.a.panese woman or the son of Bernard Purdie. Suddenly some artists were switching that off, and their drums would sound strange at first, but then warmer and better. Switching off perfection switched on the human quality. Real drummers slow down. They speed up. There are different dynamics at different times. Very few artists understood that. Prince definitely did, even though he didn't do it every time. D'Angelo was suddenly willing to be imperfect, and that was exciting to me. But there were so few artists who really embraced it. There was RZA, but he was an accidental tourist-he would loop something, it would sound exotic to him, and he would keep it. Maybe the only other producer who was hearing sounds the way I was hearing them was J Dilla. More on him later.

As I started to enter this alternate world of sound, where human error was perfection, where warmth and organic playing mattered more than precision, my relations.h.i.+p with D'Angelo became more and more central to my work. We had started work on his next alb.u.m, which was now named Voodoo, and I knew I wanted to see that through to the end. The Roots were a dicier proposition, especially after Illadelph Halflife stalled, like its predecessor, after three hundred thousand copies. That's when Rich had a brainstorm. He decided that since we had a new label president-we had been transferred to MCA, still under the Geffen umbrella but a different part of the company-it was time to make some new demands. He told the label that we had simple needs: we wanted them to spring for a bunch of jam sessions at my house-I had my own house by now, a modest place on St. Albans in South Philadelphia-and two fifteen-pa.s.senger vans. We hired a chef to cook the best food, and that was the siren song that started bringing people in. Before I knew it, there was round-the-clock music: singers, musicians, MCs.

Some of the people there were from the Roots, but most weren't. Most were normal people who aspired to careers in entertainment. All were welcome. And so the next thing you know, the girl who worked at Jeans West wanted to sing. That was Jill Scott. The pizza delivery guy, Jamal, thought that maybe he'd take his turn on the microphone, too, because he had done some singing, and he thought he had something to contribute. That was Musiq Soulchild. The little teenager up past his bedtime, wailing jazz songs out of his mind, was Bilal. The stripper girl was Eve, who was still calling herself Eve of Destruction. A friend of mine visited from Atlanta and brought a girl with a guitar, and that was India.Arie. Jasmine Sullivan was there, ten years old but with the voice of a grown woman. Common was there. All of this unfolded in my living room in South Philadelpha in the late nineties.

It was a madhouse. People were milling around outside, waking up the neighbors, playing loud music until all hours. But it wasn't people playing loud music on boom boxes or stereos. They were actually playing it on guitars and singing with microphones. They were making loud music, putting it into a s.p.a.ce where there had been no music before. By the seventh week, I was calling the police to say, "There's a disturbance at 2309 St. Albans." Just to get some sleep, I was calling the cops on myself! But when I think about that time, the most amazing thing is how many of those artists made it. There were at least eighteen record contracts in the room, and at least nine of the people who became recording artists ended up bigger than us. And yet, it was an indisputably magical time, a kind of rebirth. If hip-hop had died at the 1995 Source Awards, I felt like something new was being born on St. Albans.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Are there hip-hop creationists?

I'm an evolutionist. In fact, I have a theory that hip-hop, being a living thing, evolves in five-year cycles. But I also have a theory that it's a little bit behind the beat, that the evolutionary moments occur not right on the decades and half-decades, but on the 2s and the 7s. The whole thing gets under way in 1977, the year of the big New York blackout and punk music and underground clubs beginning to sp.a.w.n a new kind of DJ culture. In 1982, there's Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and the rise of drum machines, and also Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message ushering in a new kind of politically conscious hip-hop. In 1987, there's the absolute peak of mature early hip-hop, with records like Eric B. and Rakim's Paid In Full and Public Enemy's "Rebel without a Pause" single, which was the first glimmerings of the Bomb Squad sound that would produce It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back the following year. And 1992 is all about Dr. Dre's The Chronic, which changed absolutely everything about hip-hop: production, marketing, videos, chart success.

The fifth period of this cycle started in 1997, which was the end of the line for Biggie and Tupac and the start of what they wrought: a new era of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous charisma. In "Bad Boy for Life," P. Diddy rapped, "Don't worry if I write rhymes / I write checks," and that became more than just a clever aside, it was his style of hip-hop. Virtuosity disappeared and this other kind of skill-a ringmaster skill, something closer to what you'd find in a corporate manager-emerged. It was also a watershed year for Jay-Z, who had established himself with Reasonable Doubt in 1996, suffered through a terrible period following Biggie's death-they were very close, the twin pillars of the East Coast scene-and then had trouble getting commercial traction for In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. At least, that is, until "Streets Is Watching" made him an icon. That same year brought a new minimalist phase in production, specifically the work of Swizz Beatz on the one hand and Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo as the Neptunes on the other.

So that's where we were, as a hip-hop nation. Puffy was taking obvious sampling to its extreme. The Neptunes were stripping down songcraft to its skeleton and also riding the crest of a cult-of-personality wave. And where were we? Where was I? I was perched on the precipice of what would eventually be called neo soul. I was processing all the sounds around me, all the artists who were helping to make a new kind of music from those sounds, and I was feeling an energy I hadn't ever felt before. That house party that was running at all hours in my house in Philadelphia had migrated to New York, to Electric Lady Studios, where we were working on D'Angelo's Voodoo in one booth and Common's Like Water for Chocolate in another, and trying to find time in the middle to get the next Roots record together.

One day in the future, kids will turn to their parents and ask what life was like before Skype. Well, I can tell you one thing: it was more expensive. I probably could have had another ninety grand in my pocket if it wasn't for hotel phone bills. In the mid-nineties I must have poured $100,000 into hotel phones. The last time I got a gargantuan hotel bill, in fact, was at the end of 1996, or maybe the very beginning of 1997. I was on tour, and Q-Tip started calling my pager. I checked my messages, at the hotel's extortionate rates, and there was no message, exactly, only music: that third interlude from the Slum Village alb.u.m. D'Angelo called soon after that and left a message of his own. "Whoo!" he said. "We've got some s.h.i.+t that I'll bet you haven't heard."

I called D'Angelo back. "The f.u.c.k was that?"

"It's Jay Dee's group," he said. "Slum Village."

I told him to put more of it on my answering machine. He called and put three snippets on it. I kept calling to listen to it over and over again. Three hours pa.s.sed and the bills began to mount. But I knew that the record, Fantastic Vol. 1, was pus.h.i.+ng us all toward something larger, toward a kind of music that many of us had dreamed about but did not possess the vision to turn it into something real.

Jay Dee, J Dilla, Dilla... call him what you will. I had met him for the first time, apparently, during one of the earliest moments of the Roots' national emergence. It was back in 1995, the week that Do You Want More?!!!??! came out, and we played a show at Irving Plaza in New York and then went west for shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Rich had told us for years that we were in our Rocky period, spending all our time in the gym so we could come out and win our first fight decisively. Finally we had reached the ring. The New York show, in particular, was my hip-hop dream: there were so many people in the audience whose work I had admired, like Grand Puba, the Pharcyde, the Wu-Tang Clan. Backstage, I was talking to the Pharcyde. "Why are you guys here in New York?" I said.

"We're getting more music from Q-Tip," Imani said.

"What?" I said. "You're not working with J-Swift anymore?" He had produced their first record, Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde, but there were rumors that he was suffering from various personal problems, amplified by substance abuse issues.

"No," Imani said. "We're doing this next record with Tip and Diamond D." That was exciting for me: the Pharcyde and Q-Tip making music together. But as it turned out, Q-Tip didn't have anything for them, and he referred them to a guy he was working with named Jay Dee. I was disappointed because he was just a protege. I wanted to see the real thing. And not for the first time and not for the last time, I didn't react well to my own disappointment. I s.h.i.+ned Jay Dee off the same way I did D'Angelo the first time I met him, just literally ignored him. I looked the other way. I struck up a conversation with the people around him.

About a month later, the Roots were opening for the Pharcyde for a series of shows. After we finished playing one, we packed up our gear and went out to the parking lot, where I had a few minutes to kill before a kid from the local college came to pick me up for an interview at the college radio station. I headed back to the van to pick up my Triple Five Soul wool jacket, and as I went, I could hear vibrations coming from the back of the club. The Pharcyde had just taken the stage. I paused by the van, because the only thing I could really hear, amid all the rest of the noise and music, was a crazy discrepancy in the kick drum. It was almost like someone drunk was playing drums-or, more so, that a drunk, brilliant four-year-old had been allowed to program the kick pattern. I had to see what I was hearing. I left the van and ran to the front of the club to listen, and when I got there, the band was playing the first cut from Labcabincalifornia, "Bulls.h.i.+t," and Dilla was just going crazy on the kick pattern. At that moment, I had the same reaction I do to anything truly radical in hip-hop. I was paralyzed, uncertain how to feel. Usually, if I go over the top with my approval for an alb.u.m or a band, it turns out to be a solid achievement: a four-star product, maybe even 4. But like I said, if I'm brought up short by a piece of artwork, if I'm conflicted, confounded, and made uncomfortable, nine times out of ten that thing will change the course of history. That's the feeling I got when I heard Dilla's kick pattern on "Bulls.h.i.+t."

Then, a few years later, in my hotel room and lonely on the road, I heard the fruits of that experimentation, which was the Slum Village record that Dilla made. It was a messiah moment, in a way, for people like me and D'Angelo and Q-Tip. We had been looking for someone to lead us out of the darkness, to take us across the desert. Most of the time in those cases, you don't know who you're looking for until you see them. That's how people felt about Prince, or Jimi Hendrix before him, or about the Beatles, or about the Beach Boys. There wasn't a sound there and then, suddenly, there was one. It's a magic trick.

At first, to be honest, working on the new Roots alb.u.m, Things Fall Apart, was a side dish for me. Voodoo was my main project. If someone had run into me in the street, I wouldn't have been able to stop talking about it: about the way that D'Angelo was going to revolutionize soul music and revitalize the very idea of soul, the way that it was going to permanently change the way that audiences experienced recorded sound. There was such excitement, such a strong sense that it was going to be a landmark. I was also working on Common's Like Water for Chocolate, an alb.u.m that was also knee-deep in experimentation and excitement, and which also had the spark of the new. In my head at that time, the notion of a Roots alb.u.m was a distant third. But maybe that just meant that it was kicking around in my subconscious absorbing everything I was learning with the other projects. Take production, for example. I've talked in the press about the way that an afternoon session listening to new material from DJ Premier, J Dilla, and D'Angelo made me recognize that I needed to work harder to be taken seriously as a songwriter and producer. Well, what I was starting to see was that I was already working harder; it was just a matter of opening my eyes to what was around me. For most of my time in the Roots, I had learned production from Bob Power, who had been an excellent mentor when it came to the basics of engineering and producing. Under him, I went from being mostly ignorant to being entirely competent.

But Voodoo was both a step to the side and a leap forward. That alb.u.m was engineered by Russell Elevado, and everything he did on it-his philosophy about sound, his methods for producing it and capturing it-were revelatory. I went from having a strong command of primary colors to being suddenly aware that I could create any color I wanted. Growing up the way I had, with an appreciation for the warm sound of sixties and seventies records-remember, the band my father and mother created was one of the groups sampled on Dr. Dre's The Chronic-I had labored under the fear that I would never reach the level of the break-beat G.o.ds. The artists who made those original songs worked with different equipment in a different time. They got sounds that were fuller, hairier, at once more uneven and more complete than anything we could get. Or so I thought, until I worked with Russell. On Voodoo, there's one song, "Greatdayindamornin'," that has a second half to it called "Booty." For that interlude, Russell took my drums and fed them through a guitar amp, through a processor, and then back to the board. It gave them this unimaginable a.n.a.log sound, like they were drums coming from 1950. Another day we'd come in and he would have everything set for a level of extreme compression, well beyond what I had been told was acceptable, or he would start recording vocals through these ribbon microphones that I'd never heard of before. New equipment, new techniques, a willingness to experiment: it was a profound awakening. If the color a.n.a.logy doesn't work, here's a food a.n.a.logy: If Bob Power taught me how to make a pizza, it was Russell who taught me endless ways to prepare it.

I spent so much time working with D'Angelo that it caused understandable resentment within the Roots sometimes. It wasn't that my loyalty was questioned, exactly, but my focus was. It was a concern, obviously, though Voodoo wasn't the only culprit. While finally focusing on Things Fall Apart, I ran into Gerry Brown, Raphael Saadiq's engineer, who was working in the studio next door. Gerry is world famous for his all-year-round Christmas decorations during his sessions. Curious to see his elaborate arrangement, I burst into Studio B, and there she was. Gerry made introductions. I was smitten. I instantly ignored my alb.u.m responsibilities for about two weeks, always finding an excuse to wind up in her sessions. We talked about music, I picked her brain, and I introduced her to my new favorite discovery of 1998: Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Meanwhile, the alb.u.m was slipping away from me. I didn't care. You couldn't tell me that things weren't accelerating with this girl, though progress was slow and I was-I always am-a nice guy. Then she mentioned a boyfriend. Our three-hour calls shrunk to "I'll call you back," and that either happened, or it didn't. That's the story of how I met Alicia Keys.

In the Roots, everyone had their role. I realized very early on that my role was to occupy the left, to add the sense of experiment and artistic risk. I was entrusted with that blue-state material. Tariq, on the other hand, defended the basic template. In his head, his audience was the guys in the barbershop, and so he was always wondering how far he could let me stray from that before he was embarra.s.sed by my ideas. In my head, I was pleading my case before Reginald C. Dennis's Mind Squad and other examples of the hip-hop intelligentsia. Sometimes I thought of our records in terms of that scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly, in the fifties, is failing to get his parents together, and as a result his image is starting to fade from the photograph he's carrying with him. I would listen to the music we were making and imagine if the review was fading from the front page and becoming somehow secondary. If we weren't breaking new ground, if we weren't raising the stakes aesthetically, then what were we doing? It was that kind of creative tension that kept the band vibrant.

As the sessions that would produce Things Fall Apart continued, as we started trying to capture this moment that people would soon start to call neo soul, I was determined to keep those left-of-center ideas in the music. Fairly soon, though, I ran up against my limit as a songwriter and a pop-music consumer. The Roots had long been the loudest and most powerful hip-hop group around, but we used to watch with a mix of confusion, frustration, and amazement as groups sped past us on the charts, acts that were playing the junior circuit to our senior circuit picked up steam and found themselves out in front. The two groups that were the most similar to us, in terms of sensibility, were OutKast and the Fugees; during that period stretching from 1997 to 2001, they were hip-hop's idea of what the left of the spectrum looked like. But as much as we may have felt a kins.h.i.+p with them, or even compet.i.tion with them, we weren't them. At some point, I realized why. It was something I wasn't doing, something that maybe I couldn't do. I don't know how to put it diplomatically, but I didn't really know what pop songs were.

I had always been that way, even as a kid: as I said, I listened to the parts of the song that were in the background, or the secondary effects that were serving the main song. The main thing sometimes escaped me. When I started making my own records, I struggled with that same problem. My idea of making a catchy R&B-flavored song was limited to getting a certain texture in the instruments, or hiring someone to sing a hook. The rest of it, the real work of a pop song, eluded me.

There was one moment during the recording of Voodoo that really brought this home. We were recording DJ Premier's scratches for "Devil's Pie," and Q-Tip had just left the room to go work on something else, so there were four of us left there: Premier, Dilla, D'Angelo, and myself. During a break, Premier asked if anyone had any new s.h.i.+t to play for the group, and D'Angelo went for a ca.s.sette and played a bit of a new song, and the whole room just erupted in hooting. Then Dilla put on some new Slum Village s.h.i.+t and it was the same thing: an explosion of excitement. Then Premier, who had started the whole thing, played an M.O.P. song and some new Gang Starr material that he was working on for The Ownerz.

I was last at bat. All I had on me was a work tape for what would eventually become "Double Trouble" on Things Fall Apart.15 It didn't have finished vocals yet, didn't have Mos Def's verse. It was just a skeleton. I played it, and I will never forget the feeling that came over the room, including me. It wasn't that they didn't hoot and holler like they had for the other songs. They did. But they didn't mean it. I know the move people resort to when they're not quite into a song: they keep a straight stare on their face and bob their head a bit, not saying anything, not making eye contact. That's the sign of death. That's what they all did to me, and I felt humiliated. I was like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: I will not be ignored! I went back into the studio that same night and gave that song a radical, extended facelift. I refused to sleep until I had that thing up and running.

I knew from then on that anything I did had to meet the standard of the room. It wasn't enough to appeal to some unseen critics. I needed the artists around me to react with more than the straight-ahead, quiet-as-the-grave head bob. It was a turning point in my understanding of my own career. I knew that the other guys respected me as a drummer, as a player, but I also wanted them to respect me as a producer and a songwriter. I took a long look at myself after debuting "Double Trouble" for the room and realized that if I wanted to be in their fraternity, I had to pull it up a notch.

As a group, we were lucky to still have our relations.h.i.+p with Scott Storch, who had never lost sight of his great sense of melody. If I was putting in extra time and extra effort to get the rhythmic details right and Tariq was concentrating on the lyrics, Scott's right hand was always ready with a melody. Those three things combined to help us set course for Things Fall Apart. Plus, we had a theme. The Chinua Achebe novel of the same name is about a Nigerian man who returns to his village to find that the only constant was change, that Western ways were wiping out the traditions that made his culture distinctive. That resonated with me as an a.n.a.logy for what had happened to hip-hop: we were part of a music that had, at least early on, been so new, so true to itself, but there had been a corruption from the outside, and what was once there was gone. That was the spatial dimension of the idea, inside threatened by outside, but there was a temporal dimension, too, tradition threatened by newcomers. That gave the whole thing a different kind of spin. We were on our third record. We weren't new kids anymore. But we weren't h.o.a.ry old bluesmen either. Or were we? We were starting to write songs about our personal travails that didn't sound like ambitious whining. We were maturing, whether we liked it or not. And if blues is, as Ralph Ellison wrote, an "autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically," then that's what we were recording. Just listen to "The Return to Innocence Lost," the powerful poem by Ursula Rucker that closes the record. It's about violence in an interracial marriage, the tragedy of asking children to look up to a man who isn't prepared to be a father. It's about choices made in life, as wrong as often as they're right, and the fact that time extends past that, into a place where new choices have to be made. Is there anything more blues than that?

I don't know whether we felt at the time like Things Fall Apart was our make-or-break record. That may be the hindsight talking. But we certainly felt like a gap was opening up between us and a certain segment of our audience, namely the traditional hip-hop audience. After just two records, the second of which was fairly conservative by hip-hop standards, we were already feeling like we were on the margins: not strangers in a strange land, but strangers in our own land.

We tried to make sense of it on wax. For the start of the record we picked an excerpt of the dialogue from Spike Lee's 1990 film Mo' Better Blues. It's a scene when Bleek Gilliam, played by Denzel Was.h.i.+ngton, is lamenting the demographics of the crowds who come to see him play. Bleek is an aging trumpeter, a defeated purist, a little weary as he walks his road and more than a little disenchanted with the way that the black community has cooled to the jazz that he considers sacred. "If we had to depend upon black people to eat, we would starve to death," he says. "I mean, you've been out there, you're on the bandstand, you look out into the audience, what do you see? You see j.a.panese, you see-you see West Germans, you see-you know, Slavolic, anything except our people. It makes no sense. It incenses me that our own people don't realize our own heritage, our own culture. This is our music, man." Bleek's speech must have sounded familiar to our ears.

But the scene in Mo' Better Blues isn't a speech, it's a dialogue. Bleek is answered by Shadow Henderson, played by Wesley Snipes. Shadow's a hotshot young saxophonist, and he has a different idea about artists and audiences. "That's bulls.h.i.+t," he says. "Everything, everything you just said is bulls.h.i.+t. Out of all the people in the world, you never gave anybody else a chance to play their own music.... That's right, the people don't come because you grandiose motherf.u.c.kers don't play s.h.i.+t that they like. If you played the s.h.i.+t that they like, then people would come, simple as that."

And the scene isn't just a dialogue. It's a dialectic in the cla.s.sic sense: a way of setting an idea against its negation in the hope of finding a ray of light. That problem-how to stay true to our idea of our music and also be appropriately inviting to audiences, how to court audiences without compromising the music we were making-was something that had plagued us since the beginning. We had been through at least two different versions of Roots-ness: the far left-of-center of Do You Want More?!!!??! and the tougher, more straightforward approach of Illadelph Halflife, and in both cases a certain size audience had come along for the ride, but when we turned to look at the backseat, saw empty s.p.a.ces along with the smiling faces. Back in 1994, if you were a major label act selling three hundred thousand copies of a record, you were on the bubble. You were extending yourself into commercial s.p.a.ce but not capturing the imagination of the mainstream. We were making music that mattered to us, but we needed to know that it mattered to anyone else-or, if it didn't, why not. The fact that we were somehow falling short was a source of consternation, not as bad as the scene that Ursula sketched out in "The Return to Innocence Lost," but a kind of suffering nonetheless. We had given most of our adult lives to that point to the band. What if success never came to us, or never came in the form we expected? Was there something we were doing wrong? Was it because we were too uncompromising? Was it because we weren't good at writing hits? Were we coming up short in the entertainment department or long in the substance department? Either one of those things could affect a record's sales.

The thing about dialectic, though, is that it's a process. You have the thesis (in this case, Bleek's argument that black people should support jazz, or is that hip-hop) and the ant.i.thesis (Shadow's argument that the artists who create that jazz, or is that hip-hop, need to be more mindful of the entertainment needs of their audience). Did we have a synthesis? It was 1999. The year before, OutKast had released Aquemini, which had a song called "Synthesizer." It was a slow burner, with George Clinton singing a filthy bridge part about cybers.e.x and "psychosodomy." Andre 3000's verse got back to the t.i.tle. He gives examples of the way that technology allows men (and women) to alter themselves so that they're not quite human anymore. There are riffs on plastic surgery and cloning, on virtual reality and virtual spirituality. Then, toward the end, there's a broader condemnation of the breakneck pace of modern life ("Hurry, hurry, rush, rush, world on the move") and the capricious nature of laws and rules ("marijuana illegal but cigarettes cool").

"Synthesizer" is about a culture in crisis, a modern America that's knee-deep in suffering. It's less direct than "The Return to Innocence Lost," but it's suffering nonetheless. How can society give us the tools to change ourselves but not, at the same time, treat the self-hatred that makes us run away from our true selves? Why are some things (cigarettes, say) labeled as permissible, even desirable in some ways, while other things (marijuana, say) are labeled as unacceptable or even illegal? And why has society been allowed to accelerate beyond the point where it makes sense to most of its citizens? That quick pace, without regard for the people caught up in it, risks destroying value, whether in food or art or music or human relations.h.i.+ps. "Instant, quick grits, new, improved," Andre raps, not sounding convinced that they're an improvement at all. Progress pulls us along but it also holds us back.

So what to do? "Synthesizer" was a jester at the gallows. It laughed and left you hanging. Some people (most?) might think that the t.i.tle is only about the process of becoming dehumanized, synthetic like the processed sounds of a synthesizer. Most people (some?) wouldn't see it as a call for the other kind of synthesis, the good-faith attempt to resolve opposing elements that is at the heart of the dialectic process. Unless that's exactly what it was. And if it was, if hip-hop was once again telling stories about the tearing of society's fabric, about well-intentioned people cast adrift, then wasn't it doing the good work that soul music had done before it, and blues before that? When Rich and I wrote the manifesto in Paris about Biggie and hip-hop materialism, about how the music was getting away from the people who listened to it, and the world that contained the people who were listening to it, those are the kinds of thoughts that were on our mind, and they remained there when we released Things Fall Apart. We wondered if they would continue to fall apart-and if not, who would keep them together, and how.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

How did I know we had finally made it?