ROOTS

Hip-hop is about presence. Whether party- or street-oriented, it tends to keeps its listeners firmly centered in their own skin: hands in the air, guard your grill, watch your back. In spite of the blunted ethos of the late '90s and the emergence of trip-hop, it's a rare hip-hop record that causes your eyes to go out of focus and your brain to operate freely in that space that makes us describe music as "deep." THINGS FALL APART achieves that distinct sort of transcendence perhaps because it is not trying to save, reinvigorate, or resurrect the artform. As the title (taken from Chinua Achebe's novel on the loss of traditional African culture during colonization) suggests, the record takes the death of hip-hop as its starting point. Where earlier Roots albums captured the live feeling of the open mic/jam sessions for which they are now internationally famous, TFA adds a newer wrinkle of arrangement and studio mastery. The layers and echoes occasionally (as on "100% Dundee") give you the sensation that you're wandering through one of those jam sessions in a detached, even feverish state--a perfect snapshot of hip-hop on the eve of the millennium.

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.