Someone Has to Care: The Roots and Hip-Hop’s Prophetic Calling

By Christian Scharen

Welcome to this exploration of the Roots of hip-hop. The roots of hip-hop, as in: the Roots--a story of one of the most enduring, multi-talented, and successful groups of the past thirty years in any genre--and the story of the roots of hip-hop, that is, the story of hip-hop, a musical culture born in New York's South Bronx during the 1970s. Alongside the two hip-hop stories I tell here, I also tell the story about what God has to do with the Roots of hip-hop--a theological story, if you will. I describe how, in the process of becoming one of the most creative faith-rooted voices in music today, the Roots' developed a calling as artists. And I do this, in part, to say that you, too, can discover and live your prophetic calling. You can't help but be inspired by the Roots. Yet the best result of that is that you become inspired to be your most playful, passionate, purposeful, prophetic self in the world around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781532612183

Book preview

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The Roots of Hip-Hop: Introduction

Welcome, welcome. I’m delighted to have you join me in this exploration of the Roots of hip-hop. The roots of hip-hop, as in: the Roots—a story of one of the most enduring, multi-talented, and successful groups of the past thirty years in any genre. Yet in order to properly tell their story, I need to also engage the roots of hip-hop, that is, the story of hip-hop, a musical culture born in New York’s South Bronx during the 1970 s. While many different kinds of readers might enjoy taking this journey of exploration, I have in mind first of all people who don’t really know either of these stories. If that’s you, come along.

I do, however, have something to offer hip-hop fans who already know these first two stories well (that of hip-hop and of the Roots). Alongside the two hip-hop stories I tell here, I also tell the story about what God has to do with the Roots of hip-hop—a theological story, if you will. I describe how, in the process of becoming one of the most creative faith-rooted voices in music today, the Roots’ developed a calling as artists. And I do this, in part, to say that you, too, can discover and live your prophetic calling. You can’t help but be inspired by the Roots. Yet the best result of that is that you become inspired to be your most playful, passionate, purposeful, prophetic self in the world around you.

While I’ll unpack more about my use of the term prophetic later, I use the term here intentionally as a way to speak of a core characteristic of hip-hop, and of the Roots, and also, potentially, of ordinary lives like yours and mine. I don’t mean to say hip-hop artists, whether the Roots or otherwise, are prophets, somehow mirroring the ancient biblical prophets like Moses and Miriam, Deborah or Isaiah. Rather, I mean to say they (and we) might inhabit a prophetic mode, a way of speaking and living that is in line with the witness of the biblical prophets. Howard University Divinity School professor, Kenyatta Gilbert, outlines the characteristics of this mode within the Black Church tradition. The common thread through prophetic speech leads from recognition and naming of systemic injustice to casting a hopeful vision for what just living should be.

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Much of the music that has emerged from the African American experience in the United States draws on this prophetic impulse. Both the spirituals and the blues, for instance, have at their core a cry at the injustice of oppression. Yet explicitly because the prophetic also envisions how life should be, it also entails visions of beauty and joy. Hip-hop, like the spirituals and blues, has this same cry at its root, which is at the same time a longing for freedom.

The Roots embody this prophetic mode, common within hip-hop, and yet they are also a distinctive group within hip-hop, too. Thompson calls them the last hip-hop band, absolutely the last of a dying breed.

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Given their distinctive place in hip-hop, and in American music generally, the time is ripe for a deeper analysis of their life and work. They are distinctive in hip-hop for longevity, to be sure. Begun by band leaders Ahmir Questlove Thompson and Tariq Black Thought Trotter in 1987, they have released 13 studio albums along with award-winning collaborations, including the Grammy Award-winning producing credits on Hamilton: The Original Broadway Cast Recording. In a fascinating practice meant to show the continuity of their work over time, they have numbered tracks sequentially from 1–17 on their debut album, Organix (1993), all the way to 171–181 on their most recent album, . . . And Then You Shoot Your Cousin (2014). If this numbering scheme is not hilarious enough, their two compilation albums, Home Grown! The Beginners Guide to Understanding The Roots, Vol. 1 and 2, use a negative numberings system, going from track -29 to 0, presuming that these songs prepare listeners to start at the beginning, with track 1 of Organix.

Their distinctiveness also comes from their musical virtuosity. In a genre most known for sample-driven songs, the Roots have depended on live musical performance since beginning at Philadelphia’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. In his pitch for the Roots to be his house band on Late Night, Jimmy Fallon said: You’ll be the best band in the history of late night, ever. Because you can play with Tony Bennett, AND you can play with Jay-Z.

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The band’s close association to such neo-soul artists as Michael Eugene D’Angelo Archer and Jill Scott, as well as hip-hop artists James Dewitt J Dilla Yancy and

Lonnie Rashid Common Lynn, signal a musical center of gravity, but they display a remarkable stylistic range both on their albums and in the music required as the house band for Jimmy Fallon, now on The Tonight Show.

Finally, a deeper analysis of the Roots is called for exactly because of the social credibility of their platform. The house band for The Tonight Show, one of the longest-running and most popular shows on television, plays a leading cultural role in American life. To have an African American hip-hop group step into this role signals a cultural coming of age for the genre, and a reckoning for a historically white-dominant nation fast moving towards a day when people labeled white will be the minority. I’ll return to these themes in the last chapter. In part, this match between The Tonight Show and the Roots emerged from Fallon’s love of hip-hop. His many variety show bits involve numerous hip-hop sketches, including the now multiple-episode History of Rap series with Fallon and Justin Timberlake rapping and the Roots performing the music. Playing night after night to an audience of millions along with their extensive social media presence has given them perhaps the most powerful platform any hip-hop group has had to date.

At this point, a savvy reader might ask: Who is leading this journey to better understand the Roots of hip-hop? Bear with me here: if I tell you a bit of my own story, I can make clear where I’m coming from, what some of my commitments are as a music fan, and also as an academic who writes about music. As I share about the Roots, and about my own life, I hope it helps you think about your own life and experience, as well.

In the summer of 2016, as I was beginning the research for this book, I heard the Roots live for the first time. I try to follow this principle: don’t write a book about a living artist without seeing them play live. I suppose it is partly about connecting with the real performers, even though they’re on stage and I’m out in the audience. I can still feel the connection, sharing a moment together in real time as the band does its show. It is also partly about the communal experience, being in a crowd responding to their music, getting a sense in my body of the kind of people who are drawn to the artists or group.

Admittedly, the Twin Cities summer hip-hop festival, Soundset, highlights many artists so the crowd around me wasn’t only there to hear the Roots. Common, a Chicago-based rapper of the Roots’ generation, performed just before, and A$AP Rocky, a chart-topping young New York rapper, was closing the evening afterwards. Still, given that four stages were hosting artists simultaneously, and the beer stands were way in the rear, most people standing around me near the main stage were clearly there to hear the Roots. I was definitely on the older end of the crowd, but I fit right in racially: the audience was largely white. I was curious if this would be the case. As in hip-hop generally, the vast majority of the performers at Soundset were black, but the majority of the audience for hip-hop is white.

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Many aspects of the Roots’ live performances are noteworthy, most of which I will save for later discussion. Here, I want to say a bit more about the race question.

Directly addressing the issue of race and hip-hop matters in particular ways when white people—like me, of course—engage hip-hop. Engaging hip-hop means inevitably facing the race question because as Thompson once put it, hip-hop is a form of upstart black-folk music.

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Hip-hop was born in struggling neighborhoods in New York City, and many of its leading artists have engaged with the history and current realities of African Americans. This is the case from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 song The Message, one of hip hop’s earliest records, up to a more recent track, Kendrick Lamar’s Alright, an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement protesting police brutality. Despite the global dispersion of hip-hop, and the long-standing presence of successful white rappers from The Beastie Boys to Eminem to Macklemore, race in relation to hip-hop remains a fraught question. It is crucial, then, to introduce myself by telling a white story, my story, as a way to explain where I’m coming from as I engage this music. The care I take with the history and culture of hip-hop is especially important for readers who—like me—are learning a history and culture we’ve not lived, which we are learning from the outside. The music deserves engagement for its own sake, and not simply for my entertainment. Modeling this kind of respectful engagement is a theological issue, and becomes one way for me to be an ally in the fight against racial injustice, so often the subject matter of hip-hop.

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Yet, for those readers who have lived this history and culture, I hope my work is worthy of your reading, too, with credibility shown by my listening and learning carefully, deeply, and with more than a little self-awareness about what I don’t—and can’t—know.

Over the past few years, feeling despair and anger over the continuing police murders of unarmed Black citizens, I wanted a constructive response