On a stormy eve in recent history, the legendary Roots crew deigned to pay a visit to the illustrious educational institution that I attend, which happens to be overwhelmingly white. The Roots, if you didn't know, are overwhelmingly black, which made for quite an interesting evening. 'Fork editor Ryan had sent me The Roots Come Alive for review, so I felt it my duty as a critic to pay far too much cash in order to bear witness to this live music phenomenon. And what a spectacle it was. As the seething throng of white bodies lurched quasi-rhythmically to the abundance of soul presented on stage, I began to wonder if The Roots really felt compelled to try very hard to impress the crowd.
I would imagine that this is something of a burning question for The Roots, who play a massive 250 shows each year. They could be doing crossword puzzles up there while halfheartedly rapping, and the vast majority of the crowd would still be jumping around madly. This particular crowd was so thoroughly unfunky that when Black Thought thrust the mic toward the crowd for an exhaustively planned and explained "rock, rock on" for the tenth time, the crowd still seemed genuinely surprised and temporarily stunned. So something just seems fundamentally askew when, for example, Black Thought busts out with a "y'all wit' me, Switzerland?" after an ill groove on The Roots Come Alive. Grandmaster Flash would roll over in his grave, and he's not even dead yet.
Regardless, The Roots' devastatingly funky show is represented pretty accurately on The Roots Come Alive. The problem with this record is that the group is fairly rugged and raw, replete with their live instrumentation, on their proper LPs. Thus, a live album by The Roots adds very little beyond crowd noise and many extra "y'know what I'm sayin'"s. The songs are more or less faithfully recreated, with highlights being the creative beatboxing and vocal scratching that are absent from the originals. Black Thought continues to be one of the most intelligent and skilled MCs in the business, but this is no more apparent here than on their prior works. For the amount of talent ?uestlove has, the beats he throws down are too often trite, with a hard snare hit inevitably falling on counts two and four. He does break it down for the people on "You Got Me", just as he does on the Things Fall Apart version, but such moments are too few and far between.
The primary appeal of The Roots Come Alive for fanatics is the inclusion of two new studio recordings on the disc, the weaker of which also appears on the soundtrack to The Best Man. (You're about as likely to remember this Taye Diggs classic as you are to recall The Wood.) On "The Lesson-- Part III", however, The Roots are in top form, offering a promising vision of continued mastery on forthcoming records. Overall, though, a live album should be awfully exceptional in execution or reinvention to garner a high rating, regardless of the quality of the original tracks. As fresh as The Roots can be onstage, this performance resembles the majority of other live records on the shelves today-- it's merely average when held against the studio material.
