Philadelphia band the Roots has always made socially aware, stylistically varied music that’s kept it on the leading edge of left-of-center hip-hop.
But the collective led by drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson and rapper Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter has never been as politically pointed — or as provocative — as on its new album, “Rising Down.”
“The perception of us being political has been by default,” says Thompson, kicking back in camouflage pants and a hoodie decorated with boomboxes shortly before the band was to perform on “The Colbert Report” last month. “It’s like, ‘They don’t curse that much, and they’re not misogynistic, and they don’t do gunplay and drugs, so … they’re political.’ But really, that just makes us considerate.”
The Roots, formed in 1987 and originally called the Square Roots, have long been known as one of the few live bands — and easily the best — in hip-hop. And the band’s hard-hitting 10th CD, which takes its name from William T. Vollmann’s seven-volume, 3,000-page treatise on violence, “Rising Up and Rising Down,” addresses weighty subjects head-on.
“Rising Down” deals with the war in Iraq, the murder rate in Philadelphia and “black teenage nihilism,” says Thompson, not to mention “drugs as an escape, and indifference, as opposed to dialogue.”
On “Rising Down,” the provocation starts with the CD cover. It’s an 1896 Southern propaganda poster called “Negro Rule” that shows what Thompson calls a “black demon” flying above a group of white people, who are running for their lives.
The image resonated with Thompson.
“The drawing leads you to the impression that this savage will destroy all that’s around it,” says Thompson, 37.
The drawing struck Thompson as particularly germane during an election year when there is a debate about whether “the feeling of ‘no experience’ is really just the fear of a black person running the top office in the United States of America.”