The show now has the highest ratings in its time slot and was nominated for two Emmy Awards this year. “They were just saying ‘rapper’ because they didn’t want to say ‘Black Thought.’ It was not an easy sell for a white guy talking to a bunch of white guys.” “They were, like, ‘Do we need the rapper? What is the rapper going to do?’ ” Fallon told me. Executives at NBC, meanwhile, worried that the band-especially Tariq Trotter, the group’s m.c., who goes by the name Black Thought-would be too “urban” for the show’s audience. He didn’t return Fallon’s call for three months. “I thought, This is some bullshit,” the Roots’ manager, Richard Nichols, told me. When Jimmy Fallon first floated the idea of hiring them, four years ago, the reaction ranged from skepticism to disbelief. They’ve made music the main event of the show. And Then You Shoot Your Cousin,” will be out next fall.) They’ve been called the greatest hip-hop band in the world-“Aren’t we, like, the only one?” Questlove says-but on any given night they may play heavy metal or gut-bucket country, progressive jazz or psychedelia. (Their fifteenth album, tentatively titled “. They were a band long before Fallon, and continue to tour and record. But they’re called talk shows, after all.” The Roots have upended this tradition. “We do our best to pretend that it’s a music show. “It’s not a music show,” Paul Shaffer, the leader of the Letterman band, told me. What style they possess is mostly a matter of demographics: soul on David Letterman, jazz on Jay Leno, rock on Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien. Talk-show bands tend to be anonymous tribes, thrown together solely for the show. They’re a hip-hop band that plays instruments, social activists in an age of gangsta rap, outsider artists who occasionally appear on Nickelodeon. The Roots have one of the stranger careers in popular music. “It’s been a long week,” the guitarist, Captain Kirk Douglas, told me, peering bleary-eyed from behind his shades. (The video has been viewed more than eleven million times on YouTube.) Today, they would play in front of fifty thousand people at Bonnaroo, the mammoth Southern music festival. Yesterday, they’d recorded an arrangement of “Call Me Maybe” for kazoo and assorted kids’ instruments. They’d flown in the night before from New York after taping an episode of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” where they’re the house band, and would fly out again the next morning, after an eighteen-hour workday. But right now I’m stressed.”īeside him, under the carport, the other members of the Roots were strung out along the curb in various stages of bedragglement. “It was supposed to be this magical moment for everyone. “This was supposed to be so great,” he said. He looked less like a genie than the bottle it had escaped from. His body was slumped at the shoulders and baggy at the hips. His head, usually surmounted by a large Afro, like a champagne cork, was demurely capped with braids and a do-rag. But he was tired this morning and feeling deflated. Oversized and onion-bellied, with steeply raked eyebrows and a wild tangle of beard, he could look as sly and as fierce as the genie in an Arabian tale. He stood in front of the Loews Vanderbilt hotel in a rumpled black hoodie and black sweatpants, bobbing nervously from leg to leg. One critic says, “His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless.” Art by Kehinde Wileyĭowntown Nashville on an early June morning, nine o’clock, and Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson was waiting, as usual, for D’Angelo. Questlove grew up in a show-business family.
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