Undun is the story of a man, Redford Stevens, dying in reverse, rewinding from the moment he became a statistic and hitting the points in his life where he's at his most self-aware. That he's a criminal who got caught up in the familiar street-hustle trappings that the modern media's documented countless times is a pivotal detail-- it's hit at an angle that seems to emphasize the futile inevitability of it all. His life could be any number of misdirected narratives that ends with a toe tag, and what details listeners learn about him are hazy, buried under archetypal turns of fate and decisive struggles. That this protagonist is a fictionalized composite of a handful of real people, filtered through a matter-of-fact narrative that splits character ambivalence with journalistic impartiality, only makes his lack of direction and the failure of any real closure stand out even more. "Lotta niggas go to prison," Dice Raw states on "Tip the Scale", "how many come out Malcolm X?"
So the Roots' latest album isn't a sprawling, rise-and-fall crime story, not a condemnation or a veneration of a man living outside the law, not a bullet-riddled grand guignol heavy on explicit details of soldiers getting cut down. It's a character study of a man whose existential crisis ends only with his death-- a death gone largely unspecified, the glamor and tragedy washed over with a doomed resignation. That's a hard thing to pull off, even for a band as given to deep-thinking concepts as the Roots are. And when your main lyrical catalyst is Black Thought-- a man more given to allusions than direct statements-- it's likely that it'll take a while for the full scope of Undun to really sink in.
If and when it does, it might strike listeners as a bit skeletal: omit the mood-setting instrumental bookends, including a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off Sufjan Stevens' "Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou)", and you've got maybe a half hour's worth of material. By ?uestlove's accounts, writing Redford's story introduced the headaches and challenges that come with scriptwriting into their songwriting, and what's left on Undun is the end result of frequent revisions and rewrites that attempt to reconcile character, theme, and continuity. If it comes at the expense of nuance, it's not always obvious: There's an easy-to-trace narrative line from Redford's acceptance of his fate ("Sleep") to his acknowledgement of how close it's approaching ("Make My"), back through declarations of aggravated toughness ("One Time"), and celebratory fatalism ("Kool On"), along ups and downs that juxtapose motivation ("Stomp") and helplessness ("Lighthouse"). When the vocal portion of the album ends with two of the bleakest sets of verses in the Roots discography, peaking with the estrangement of "I Remember" and the desperation of "Tip the Scale", Undun reveals itself as a story where a man's actual death isn't quite as tragic as the circumstances that pushed him to it.
The catch is that the inevitable familiarity of this storyline, even in the service of a deep emotional study, is almost an end in itself-- a cycle seen far too often, played out in terms anyone who's ever been or known someone with their back against the wall can understand. And if Undun succeeds at putting one man's criminal-world struggle with free will and fate in empathetic terms, it does so at the expense of any unique details or unusual traits that would set him apart-- Redford is humanized, but he's not entirely individualized. If you've bought an Apple device in the last couple of years, you can download a free app that includes some world-building video clips and photos that give him more of a full-life context. If you're still relying on a Blackberry and a clickwheel iPod, you're left with the voices of Black Thought, Dice Raw, and the now-more-googleable Greg Porn to fill in most of the blanks. They're admirable technicians and can be charismatic on their own terms, but voicing raw emotion isn't a major strength for any of them.
What you do get is a heightened sense of perplexed frustration, and there are times when Black Thought actually hits another level in his lyrics to meet it. A resilient, on-the-grind turn of phrase like "I'm never sleeping like I'm on methamphtamines/ Move like my enemy 10 steps ahead of me" ("Kool On") is delivered with the same emphasis as a bitter, regretful line like "I'll leave the memories here, I won't need them/ If I stop thinking and lie, now that's freedom" ("Lighthouse"). But if that's one of the reasons Undun feels almost relentless in its singleminded dejection, it's also proof that, if Black Thought can't always push through a sentiment with his voice, he can at least deliver the fuck out of an idea.
The other MCs in the Roots' core provide some welcome shifts in tone: Greg Porn's nasal drone often slips into bluntly nihilistic imagery ("Put the knife in ya back cut down to the red meat/ Daddy should've let me be a stain on the bed sheets"), and Dice Raw's rapper/singer double-threat role continues to provide a heart of much-needed pathos. His closing line on "One Time" might be the most pitch-perfect moment of film noir cynicism on the album: "To make it to the bottom, such a high climb." When Phonte and Big K.R.I.T. deliver guest verses that still feel like relative afterthoughts, it's a bit disappointing, but they come strong enough to keep the album's fated, introspective mood consistent.
There's one other aspect to Undun that gives it a sense of ambivalence, even if it's a minor and comparative one: The music itself feels less immediate. After How I Got Over channeled frustrated, brooding soul toward a gradual expansion into triumphant liveliness, the limited palette of down-to-mid-tempo dirges here feels almost stiflingly gloomy. Which means it works-- if this album is a cinematic experience, the score here fills in the cues for moods that the MCs mostly just suggest. The drums-and-keys structure feels more delicate and less urgent than the Roots' best meditative moments, and what few tracks there are with some kick to them-- the burbly guitar-driven "Kool On", the worried funk of "Lighthouse"-- have more of a pull in their chorus than anything in the instrumentation does. Yet the cumulative effect of all that mournful weight is effective enough in the story's service. And in the run-up to "Tip the Scale", a string-accented elegy loosely reminiscent of "You Got Me", the idea comes across that any glimmer of optimism in this album would be beside the point. This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.
