The Roots, Spin 1999

The Roots’ new album, Things Fall Apart, bears all the signs of the Big Statement. There are five separate covers, each featuring a disturbing historical paragraph (a crying baby sits in the ruins of Hiroshima; two terrified civil rights activists run from Southern cops; the bloody hand of a dead man clutches a playing card; etc.).

The record's title is taken from a literary classic: Chinua Achebe's melancholy novel about the human cost of modernizing Africa. But Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson says the world-chaos theme didn't arise from such recent troubles as bombings and impeachment: It came from a recent article on '80s hiphop legend Big Daddy Kane.

"He sounded so sad, going on about how he's lost in today's marketplace, like, 'Yo, I don't know what's going on nowadays,' " Thompson says. "We were on the tour bus reading it, and Tariq [a.k.a. Black Thought] said, 'He's like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. In fact, this is the world right now.' " Thankfully, the album's a touch less heavy. In keeping with 1996's Illadelph Halflife and the playa-parody 'What They Do' video, the new album's main villains are hiphop's forces of wackness. The song 'Ain't Sayin' Nothin' New' takes on empty-headed MCs more interested in making a Jeep payment than a point.

Still, the Philly crew and such like-minded guest stars as Common and Mos Def (of Black Star) are more interested in teaching by example: introspective atmospherics, where-are-we-going? Rhymes, funky live instrumentation (as usual), and even a fiery spoken-word track by Ursula Rucker. "We thought the smartest thing for us to do," says Thompson, "was to celebrate true hiphop as opposed to just saying, 'Shit's fucked up.' "

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