In seventh grade, I caught the bug and paid a really pretty girl $15 for a Roots cassette bootleg she'd made. The group at this point had become a minor street phenomenon in the local alt-weeklies, but Black Thought's city-specific freestyles over ?uestlove's soul-powered grooves still remained a guarded Philadelphia secret. The Roots had also garnered attention then for having attending the prestigious Creative and Performing Arts high school (CAPA), as the school's artistic mission was so rigidly anti-popular and l'art pour l'art. It was win/win: The CAPA tag offered The Roots instant artistic legitimacy, and The Roots made CAPA the coolest place in the world.
Six records in, several Roots members are no longer even Philadelphians, let alone CAPA alums. Still, I've always tried to understand each Roots album as capturing the band's original CAPA vs. Pop paradox: smart lyrics and jazz backbeats whose abstract tendencies never came at the expense of accessibility. By 1999's Things Fall Apart, however, The Roots had discovered a balance within that paradox and fulfilled their initial promise, and 2002's experimental Phrenology documented the band at a critical point of self-revision: Beyond the intense creative pressure The Roots put on themselves and their genre, they also added a guitarist, said farewell to Malik B., and welcomed more guest spots than ever before. There's something to be said for the fact that Phrenology housed both The Roots' most difficult songs and two extremely successful radio singles, "The Seed (2.0)" and "Break You Off".
On The Tipping Point, though, The Roots forgo experimentation altogether, focusing their energy on a new direction: adult-oriented rap. For an album borne from jam sessions-- a technique the band employed to guide them toward a looser feel-- this is easily the flattest and most Grammy-conscious album The Roots have made. Its majority carelessly regurgitates the painful cliches of "enlightened" hip-hop's critical and commercial darlings, while the band falls back on their organic hip-hop sound as a gimmick and piles on guest appearances to disguise their lack of creativity. In other words, if you thought ?uestlove's cameo on Joss Stone's putrid "Fell in Love with a Boy" was a regrettable misstep, pull up a trashcan and get ready to wretch.
Opening track "Star" reveals that The Roots have become more chimerical than ever: Here, the band drums up a faux-Timbaland beat that fights with a sample of Sly & The Family Stone's "Everyone Is a Star", while Black Thought assures us, "This ain't pop like Kylie Minogue." Unfortunately, that may be the track's lyrical peak. By the outro, The Roots have slumped into a neo-soul take on The Spinners' "It's a Shame"-- just the first of many in The Tipping Point's soulless neo-soul fluff-track cadre.
Sadly, The Roots seem to be following the Black Eyed Peas' lead on The Tipping Point-- and not just musically. Among the album's giant lyrical flops are: "Yeah, it ain't nothin' like the rush I get in front of the band/ On stage with the planet in the palm of my hand" (from the album's atrocious first single "Don't Say Nothin'"), "This rap game is like selling coke legally" (off "Somebody's Gotta Do It"), and finally, "Why"'s caricatured insight, "Some people's chasing their dream/ Some people's chasing their high." The record doesn't fare much better elsewhere: "Guns Are Drawn" is a Reflection Eternal C-side; "Boom!", on which Thought impersonates Big Daddy Kane and Kool G. Rap, wants to be Beastie but barely puts up a fight to party; and "Duck Down" brings us back to Timbo-esque beats, this time with a kickdrum sound that drowns out the hornlines that may otherwise have served as the track's only saving grace.
The Tipping Point does have two bright spots: ?uestlove beats the hell out of his cymbal while managing a slew of stop/starts and a sick minimal stomp on "The Web", and the Kranz beat and river of great guest rhymes on hidden track "The Mic" is ironically the album's most fun cut. Both songs are straightforward raps, and stick out on The Tipping Point precisely for this unadorned simplicity; by and large, the album is much too concerned with playing it safe, and generally fails for its lack of casual insouciance.
Illadelph Halflife and Things Fall Apart opened with the following warning: "Inevitably, hip-hop albums are treated as though they are disposable. They're not maximized as product even, you know, not to mention as art." The sample is appropriately absent from The Tipping Point. There's no doubt that The Roots have maximized their product with this record; unfortunately, it's resulted in their first disposable release.
