...and then you shoot your cousin
For all the fun they have as the house band for *The Tonight Show*, The Roots get down to business when they enter the studio. Billed as a concept album, *ATYSYC* features rappers Black Thought, Dice Raw, and Greg Porn relating vignettes about income inequality and spiritual bankruptcy within the African-American community. Brooding amid layers of soul breaks and the kind of erudite samples that fans have come to expect from music encyclopedia ?uestlove (\"Black Rock\" borrows funk chestnut \"Yeah Yeah\"), the album is more meditation than celebration. With its mournful piano and slumping beat, \"When the People Cheer\" is a representative sample: \"Everybody asks if God is all that/But I got a feeling he ain\'t never coming back,\" sings a children\'s choir on the hook. Longtime fans will be familiar with this somber side of The Roots, while newcomers used to them as Jimmy Fallon\'s sidekicks will discover a whole different side of this legendary hip-hop troupe.
…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin, but most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication.
In 2014, The Roots are at once closer to and further removed from the pop culture mainstream than they’ve ever been. While they’re on network television five nights a week, wringing chuckles as the game house band for Jimmy Fallon’s Gen X-hugging update of The Tonight Show, they’ve all but given up on reaching that…
If hip hop was founded on principles of sampling, then The Roots are not only its protégés, but also its modern purveyors.
Check out our album review of Artist's . . .And Then You Shoot Your Cousin on Rolling Stone.com.
The Roots album graced by a Romare Bearden collage is less than half the length of each studio set the group released from 1995 through 2002.
As the Roots have become more visible and successful, their last few album projects have become increasingly sombre affairs.
A mosaic of hard-knock tales from urban America impresses <strong>Killian Fox</strong>
...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin is an album whose sole focus is reportage, with no individual aspirational narrative to disguise the ugliness.
This inspired concept album populated by various tortured souls is an emotive, socially minded triumph, writes <strong>Tshepo Mokoena</strong>