My alarm was set for six one morning in 1999, and I woke to the radio, where the very identifiable voice of a young black woman was happily requesting a Roots song. Things Fall Apart was just about to come out, and she wanted to hear something from it. I didn't jump out of bed, but I thought about doing it. To me, that was a new world: black people loved the Roots? Black women? Maybe I could be Bleek and Shadow both.

I can't stress how strange it was to hear a black woman on the radio asking a DJ if he could find it in his heart to play the new Roots song. I had resigned myself to the fact that my life as a public figure would be confined to one kind of response: I'm at a movie theater or a mall, I walk by a young couple, and the guy just loses his s.h.i.t. "Did you see that?" he says to his girlfriend. "Do you know who that is?" The girlfriend shrugs. She has no idea. She couldn't care less. Even when she's prompted, it elicits a shrug, or at best an anemic nod. It had happened so many times that I had been through a cycle with it: amus.e.m.e.nt, then confusion, then a little disappointment, then frustration, then amus.e.m.e.nt again. What are you gonna do?16 But to be in 1999, to be on the brink of Things Fall Apart, to hear that girl on the radio requesting our song, I felt like maybe we were moving into a new s.p.a.ce.

It wasn't accidental. We had made a strong record, and the response to it suggested that the kind of music we liked, the kind of music that we were supporting in the artists around us, was coming to the fore in American culture. But there were also hard industry realities, and for once they were on our side.

Our life as major-label artists had continued to be a roller coaster as the record industry became stubbornly more corporate. We were in our third phase of life: DGC had defaulted into Geffen, which in turn had defaulted into MCA. This didn't seem like a bad thing from our perspective: MCA had absorbed Geffen's whole urban department, which had experience with the right radio stations and video channels and stores, and they had added a big positive in the form of Jay Boberg. Jay had founded IRS Records in 1979, and his main claim to fame was presiding over the growth of R.E.M. from college-rock stars to mainstream superstars, after which they decamped for Warner Bros. Jay believed in us. Maybe that's not fair-many label presidents believed in us. They all did, I'm sure. But Jay pledged to use his resources and his influence to get us to the level where he believed we should be. But it was a tradeoff: if he was going to the mat for us, he expected us to give him something to work with.

Back then, there was a fairly rigid system for releasing a new record. First you put out a street single that served as a kind of leak, the Paul Revere of the new record. For Things Fall Apart, that was "Don't See Us." Then you did a college single to get younger listeners and smaller radio stations interested: that was "Adrenaline!" Then when those two songs had prepared the market, you put out the so-called real first single, which was "You Got Me." For Things Fall Apart, for the first time, that three-part process worked like a charm. The first single attracted enough attention to create demand for the second single, and the second for the third, which meant that the product containing all those singles and more-the alb.u.m-was already highly desired before it even existed.

We also benefited, I think, from being positioned as counterprogramming to the dominant forces in hip-hop, which were perceived as moving toward the extremes of commercialism. By that time, the charts were filled with alb.u.ms by artists like DMX, Snoop Dogg, the Hot Boyz, and Juvenile. Puffy's label, Bad Boy, was the leader as a production and cultural force, and Jay-Z was probably the second-most influential artist. In the broader music world, Disney had just broken big, and the pop landscape was dominated by highly calculated acts like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and so forth. We were embraced because of what we weren't. Add to that the fact that there was a void in conscious hip-hop-A Tribe Called Quest had imploded the previous year-and our elevation made sense. Authenticity was in short supply. We were perceived as something real. We filled a niche. (Just for historical context, our record came out the same day as the debut record by another artist who spun questions of authenticity in a completely different direction: Eminem. It was also the same day as Lauryn Hill's coronation at the Grammy Awards.)

And so there we were, embraced by critics as usual, but also by an unusually receptive public. And even then there were lessons in the way that Things Fall Apart was received and processed. Some were trivial in the global sense, but they were important to me at the time. For example, we finally got the lead-review spot in Rolling Stone: Toure was the reviewer, and he gave us a glowing four-star review, which was only a half-star less than the magazine had given Prince's Dirty Mind in 1980. The band was thrilled, and I was, too, except for one little heartbreak: somehow I got left out of the ill.u.s.tration that accompanied the piece. As the lifelong Rolling Stone review geek, it seemed like a particularly cruel irony. After all, when I papered my bedroom wall with reviews, I saved a spot at the end of the line for my own band's review, whenever that happened. Well, it happened, and I wasn't even in the drawing: they were using a reference photo from our Illadelph Halflife press kit, and even though I was one of the more recognizable figures in the picture, somehow I wasn't drawn.

That was a local injury. The larger hit came from the fact that some critics were starting to knock us for being too thoughtful or calculated, too brainy. That's when my eyes were opened yet again to the fact that a certain portion of our critical base felt more comfortable in a limited field. They wanted their same old U2 and their familiar Ice Cube, and never the twain shall meet.17 And that wasn't the last time, by any means. It's part of a larger problem that springs from the way people-all people, but critics in particular-manage their ident.i.ty through the music they champion. What I learned in the months following the release of Things Fall Apart was this: if you're going to be left-of-center, then you're going to have to win. What I mean by that is that most critics don't have room for two or three intellectually provocative, musically omnivorous hip-hop groups on their list. They have room for one. And so when they fill that slot in their list, they're going to be as conservative with that pick as is humanly possible. If the year's left-of-center release is Lauryn Hill, then the momentum builds for Lauryn Hill. If it's OutKast, then the momentum builds for OutKast. Years before, I had watched these issues play out at the Source Awards, seen the opposition between haves and have-nots, money rap and art rap, critical favorites and commercial powers. I saw it again with Things Fall Apart, and I've seen it with every alb.u.m since.

But the problem goes even a little deeper than that, in the sense that it stops around skin deep. It's clear to me that there are certain critics who feel that they can't champion the Roots because it somehow exposes them-and here I'm talking mainly about middle-cla.s.s black writers. It makes me sad to write this, but it also makes me sad to see it: some of them, I have noticed, will purposely bash us for what they perceive as a lack of street credibility-not our street credibility, mind you, but the street credibility that they get (or do not get) from endorsing us. It's too obvious, in a way, for them to come out firmly behind the Roots. To praise us would be redundant given the circ.u.mstances of their own life, the ideas they're interacting with, the pressures they're under. As I've gotten older, I have noticed this at record labels, in the TV business, and elsewhere: black people who are the only black people at their jobs will feel a need to overcompensate and show their blackness explicitly.18

I'm not immune to this. In fact, I'm so susceptible to it that I know where to look for it. I was at breakfast recently with a friend at a soul-food restaurant, and she was offered either grits or home fries as a side dish. She chose home fries. Instantly I got defensive. "Why didn't you get grits?" I said.

"I don't want them," she said. "I'd rather have the home fries."

"Right," I said. "But it's grits."

I felt like it was rude for her to reject the grits because it struck me as a way of rejecting her blackness. Then it hit me. Holy s.h.i.t. Was that my version of being a middle-cla.s.s black music writer? Maybe the grits were Mystikal or DMX and the home fries were the Roots, and the pressure was on to be blacker. Forget about the calories. Forget about what she might have actually liked or wanted. I became a grits peddler for all the wrong reasons. If we as a band make subpar material, then I can handle the lack of attention or the critical brush-off. But I don't want to be sold down the river because a writer wants to feel blacker.

Things Fall Apart was the first time that we heard whisperings of what we've heard more explicitly as our career has progressed-that we weren't black enough. What does that mean to say we're not black enough? I ask that straightforwardly more than rhetorically. What does it mean? This puts yet another wrinkle in the argument, by the way: in addition to middle-cla.s.s black critics rejecting us, or at least embracing us reluctantly because we somehow signify "brainy" or "intellectual," we have had to rethink our own intellectual stance.

It's strange for me to admit this, not least because if you saw me you would find it absurd. I have a giant afro. I weigh over three hundred pounds. No one, upon first seeing me, thinks I'm not black enough. And yet, in interviews, I'm still going through that whole speaks-so-well syndrome. It happened with journalists early on, especially, both white journalists and black journalists. Rich taught me how to embrace it. You know that scene in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon shows off his intellect to the guys in the bah? That's what it's like with Rich. Nothing pleases him more than for people to think that he's some kind of dreadlocked, dirty homeless man and then to hit them with that supernova intellect. He lives for that underestimation, baiting someone to think that he's less than he is. I have done it, too. I have used my own intellect to my advantage, as a kind of shock tactic. But there's still the same kind of cla.s.sification. Where do you fall on the axis? How black are you? Whose cultural masters are you serving?

This problem spreads in all directions at once. These days, I'm frequently called upon to be a tastemaker. Say I'm asked to make my own year-end list of best records, and say I know that Grizzly Bear will be my top record, with PJ Harvey after that. Maybe Kanye West is on there, too. Filling in the rest is difficult, or gets increasingly difficult, because I'm both trying to list all the alb.u.ms that mattered to me and trying to nuance my brand. If I want to impress people with my range, does that mean that I should put an alternative rock alb.u.m on the list? It used to be that people would balk a little bit when I did that. They didn't know that I loved Brian Wilson, say, and that came as a shock somehow-hip-hop artist loves Beach Boys. Now that my love for cla.s.sic rock is well known, now that the Roots have been a little clearer about our influences and our presence on Jimmy Fallon's show has demonstrated our connection to so many different kinds of music, the problem has almost reversed. Now if I embrace Big Sean or something obviously black, people find it strange. Recently, I did a DJ set that was chock-full of the most ignorant, retrograde rap I could find. Why? I don't know. To prove I'm still black? But isn't that just joining the long tradition of black guys wearing blackface? There's always the danger of minstrelsy.

In all of this, there are two currents: the personal and the cultural. And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you. The first time I ever heard the phrase "selling out," I heard it as Black Panther jargon-their idea that you shouldn't sell out to the man, to the system. But these days I hear it far more from white kids than from militant black kids. And when you hear that tossed around, particularly when it comes to cultural preferences, you can start to wonder if maybe there's something inauthentic about your own tastes. Am I embracing Radiohead based on a genuine love of it, or is it a survival tactic because the band carries a certain amount of critical cachet? This question has been on the table since Things Fall Apart, and it's not coming off the table. There are new rock records I love so much these days, but I'm gun-shy about saying so. Does that make sense? Is it all in my head? You'd think that at this point there'd be an understanding that I'm not faking, that I love music of all kinds. But there are so many signifiers whizzing around.19 For all the critical angst that it touched off, Things Fall Apart was also more or less an unqualified success. It put us significantly down the road to our goals. We were touring as headliners. We were on the radio more than ever before. We were selling more records. The alb.u.m also made good on the promise of those Philly house-party jam sessions, and justified my sense that we had built a community of like-minded artists around us. Beanie Siegel, who was a presence at the house, made his recording debut as a guest artist on "Adrenaline!" Eve made her debut on "You Got Me" and was nearly joined by Jill Scott on the same song. This was one of the cases of label intervention that we accepted, not always in the best spirits, but with the understanding that there were other factors at play. Jill had written the song with us, helped to develop it in those extended house-party sessions. But the label wanted a bigger name, so they asked that the part be re-recorded by Erykah Badu. Even so, when we took the song out on the road we took Jill with us, and she was able to reclaim the song somewhat. In either form, the song turned out to be a big part of the alb.u.m's success. It caught on among mainstream radio stations and got us in rotation at video channels, and eventually it even won a Grammy.

Right around the same time as the Grammy Awards, Voodoo finally came out. I had lived with it, or lived within it, for years, but suddenly it was available to everyone else, and everyone else could hear what I heard, see what I saw, and draw their own conclusions about it. And yet, I had a privileged relationship with the record. D'Angelo liked to call me the "copilot" of the record, and now it was landing. Back then, and since, whenever people asked me about the nuts and bolts of the record, I was happy to oblige. I could spend hours talking about the way we arranged "Devil's Pie," or the way that the alb.u.m took something from an early Eric B. and Rakim alb.u.m and made it into something new, or the way that it out-Princed Prince in other stretches. Sometimes I did talk about it, and what I felt then is what I feel now: every single song is worthy of a chapter in a book. Maybe one day I'll write that book, a biography of those songs from the moment of their birth. But this is a different book, and where Voodoo is concerned, we only have the alb.u.m-well, the alb.u.m and the hundreds and thousands of words written about it. The release of Voodoo was, in some ways, stranger for me than the release of any Roots record: I was invented but not invested, central but not central, a partic.i.p.ant and observer both. And so, when critics started to weigh in on the record, I took a special interest in what they said and how they said it. Most of them saw (or rather, heard) what was special about it immediately. They noticed that Voodoo was a different kind of proposition, creatively speaking. Prior to it, hip-hop had used the past in a certain way, stacking new sounds on top of old sounds and generating energy through that stacking, reveling in juxtapositions, unexpected collisions, and a treatment of existing cla.s.sics that wasn't quite reverential but at once more a.n.a.lytical and more standoffish. It was brilliant bricklaying. Voodoo did something different; it connected to the past in a more organic way. D'Angelo may not have been Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye, but he also wasn't a hip-hop producer intent on recontextualizing Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye. But the individual reactions to it were only part of the story. Soon reviews were stacking up, one on top of the other, and it was a question not only of critical a.s.sessment but of a myth beginning to take root. When a few people believe something, it's science; when thousands believe it all at once, without conducting individual investigations, it's something more like religion. In this case, it was a kind of Protestantism: people believed, like I did, that D'Angelo was reacting against a kind of soul music that had grown too bloated and static for its own good, that had invested too much in production techniques (and singing technique) and not enough in the real grit and grain of the art. That's how the iconic status of the alb.u.m began to grow. Was D a messenger who came bearing this Scripture? Was he himself a kind of savior? Or was it more like a Life of Brian situation, where the crowd was out in the town square waiting for their messiah and the next guy to come along got tapped for the job? When people heard "Left and Right" or "Devil's Pie," were they hearing some canny update on old soul music or new music grown in the same soil? And when many different people heard (or thought they heard) the same thing at the same time, when they looked at each other and completed that circuit of recognition, that's when Voodoo really started to pick up momentum. The music on the tracks wasn't different, but the people crowding around the tracks were. And that tipped down into a second part of the process: when you believe that something is special, how many people do you want on your bandwagon? Too few and you martyr yourself. Too many and the axle snaps and the whole thing breaks down.

It's important to remember, too, that not everyone agreed with my a.s.sessment. Not everyone anointed D'Angelo as their new soul king, and not everyone saw Voodoo as a divine doc.u.ment. When we were making the record, some other artists weren't sure about what was happening: they thought it was too abstract, too far into jam-band territory, not focused enough on the kind of songcraft that had distinguished his earlier recordings. They heard us saying that it was a step up from Brown Sugar but they worried that we were wrong. And some critics held that view, too: James Hunter, in Rolling Stone, saw it as an exercise in style over substance, and wrote that "long stretches of it are unfocused and unabsorbing." He was in the minority, and the degree to which he was in the minority only made the sense of the growing majority more impressive (and, in its own way, more worrisome).

In the wake of the alb.u.m's release, there would be a tour. Of course there would be. How could there not be a Voodoo tour??? And I would be the drummer. How could I not be the drummer? This didn't sit well with the Roots, for obvious reasons. We had finally arrived. We were headliners. We had won a Grammy. Why was I interfering with our momentum? I wish I could say that I spent hours agonizing over the choice, but that would be a lie. Even though it wasn't an easy choice for me, it was a clear choice. As a drummer, as a musician, as a lover of music, I had experienced some of the most transformative days of my life working on Voodoo, and I couldn't imagine handing over the reins to someone else. We handpicked the backing group, which included James Poyser on keyboards, Pino Palladino on ba.s.s, and a number of other musicians who had played with us at Electric Lady as we made the record.

The tour kicked off at the House of Blues in Los Angeles on March 1, 2000. I could say it was exhilarating and exhausting, but that would be an understatement. It kept us out for eight months, and while we were out, the alb.u.m just grew and grew. About midway through, the video for "Unt.i.tled (How Does It Feel)" was released. That was maybe the most traditional song on the record, the one that was closest to people's idea of neo soul. D'Angelo had cowritten it with Raphael Saadiq, and it felt like a perfect encapsulation of everything that modern soul music could do: it was smooth, like the best crooners, but also multilayered and complex in its arrangement, like Prince. It was abstract enough to be universal. But that was just how it functioned as a record. When the "How Does It Feel" video came out-call it famous or call it infamous, but everyone knows why you have to call it one or the other-the conversation shifted to D'Angelo and his body, to from the sensuality of the music to the straightforward s.e.x-symbol pose of the video. That changed the complexion of everything: of the alb.u.m, of his celebrity, of the tour. There were more and more girls screaming at him, trying to get backstage. It was a distraction-not an unpleasant one, really, but one that subtly, and then not so subtly, shifted attention away from the music we were making.

Back in 1994, when I saw the South African DJ Aba Shanti in London, I was transformed and transported by the way he used the turntable as something that was spiritual in addition to being musical. I wondered if I would ever have that chance. In Miami in March of 2001, at the Winter Music Conference, I did. I conceived of and executed the perfect DJ set.

Thanks to the success of Things Fall Apart, and then to the even larger success of Voodoo, neo soul and the hip-hop acts connected to it were at the absolute height of popularity, which meant that my star was in ascendance. That in turn meant that when I signed up for a DJ set, that the place was packed with like-minded artists. Dilla was in the house. Erykah, too. When I looked around the room, I felt a swell of pride. Our movement really was a movement. There was proof in every corner of the room. And it was like a personal history lesson for me as well: there figures from my Philadelphia past and people from London who had taken an interest in our career. Gilles Peterson was there, and Jazzy Jeff, and Louie Vega.

That night, I was able to shock them all. Part of it, I'm sure, was the result of lowered expectations. Most of the people there knew me primarily as a drummer, though maybe thanks to Voodoo they also had a sense that I was a bandleader or music director or coproducer. But most of them hadn't seen me DJ, even though I had been doing it since I was eleven.

My strength as a DJ lies in masterful segues. Even before I saw Aba Shanti, I knew that a DJ was a kind of crowd psychologist, an expert at observing the way the audience's minds work and how they respond. But developing a philosophy requires lots of trial and error. As a younger man, I had practice at Philadelphia clubs like Silk City and Fluid, where I learned that sometimes bad records are just as important as good records. In other words, if I want to get an o.r.g.a.s.mic response out of playing the horn intro to Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "They Reminisce Over You," then maybe it's wiser if the two records just before it aren't as familiar or iconic. The mind adjusts to those other records. It relaxes. There's a refractory period. I've tried things the other way, with nothing but peaks, but it backfires. By the nineteenth record people are worn out. They're numb. When I figured out how to avoid the numbness and started to get a sense of how to thrust the best records into relief, I designed a kind of blueprint for the perfect set. By the time I got to the Winter Music Conference, I had it working like a well-oiled machine. I would play ten o.r.g.a.s.mic records and then two cool-down records, then eight o.r.g.a.s.mic records followed by three cool-down records, then seven o.r.g.a.s.mic records and four cool-down records, and then repeat until the audience was satisfied. Bands do the same thing with their setlists. They pace themselves. And artists do the same thing when they build an alb.u.m, which is something I know how to do well.

That night, in Miami, I worked the crowd like an instrument. Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on I was like a baptism. I have read about legendary DJ moments, like the way Larry Levan wove the snippets from The Wizard of Oz into his set at Paradise Garage in New York, or the night he got fired from the World after playing the Jackson 5's "ABC" over and over again. It wasn't a Roots show. It wasn't a D'Angelo show. It was my show, and it wasn't even exactly that. It was music's show, with turntables as a conduit. Music can be a set of spiritual instructions; that was the level of control I felt like I had over the crowd.

With every high, though, comes a low. And sometimes, with every high comes another high that reveals itself over time to be a low. During the period where I was hard at work on Voodoo and Like Water for Chocolate and Things Fall Apart, Vibe wanted to do a story on me. I was uncomfortable with it at the time. It wasn't that I didn't have an ego, but I didn't want to be separated from the rest of the Roots. From the beginning, as in any band, there was always tension when one of us seemed to be taking on too much importance or hogging the spotlight. We dealt with it by enforcing an explicit all-for-one-and-one-for-all mentality. But by this point I was becoming more ubiquitous than the rest of the band. I was a.s.sociated with more outside artists, starting to get a reputation as a producer. That's when Vibe called.

I didn't say no to the article, though, because I thought I might be able to use it for my own purposes, which was to highlight the community around me. I explained my idea to the magazine. "Down at Electric Lady," I said, "there's a group of us-me, D'Angelo, Jay Dee, James Poyser-and between the four of us we're creating some great music for a number of artists. It's like a kind of artist's colony and a factory and an independent record label all rolled into one. You should come and experience that."

One day, as most days, we all happened to be in the studio, and I discovered that Dilla was born in February, which was the same month that D'Angelo was born. James Poyser was born in late January, as was I. That put us all under the sign of Aquarius, and in the course of joking around someone invented the idea of the Soulquarians. Erykah missed the sign by about three days on the Pisces side, but we grandfathered her in, and we also made special dispensation for Common and Bilal and Mos and Talib Kweli. And Q-Tip: how could we leave him out? He was our hero. So in my head it was this utopian paradise I had always envisioned, the Native Tongues movement recreated. It was an extension of the Foreign Objects collective that we had created on South Street and the house jams on St. Albans. And while we didn't take the name so seriously, Vibe started coming around with reporters and photographers as their feature came together, and somehow the name got attached to us.

Now flash forward to when the feature came out, which was in September of 2000. I was in Chicago for a D'Angelo show, and we were in the middle of sound check. Someone came up and tapped me on the shoulder. "Ahmir, it's Mos. He wants to talk to you."

"Hey," I said. "What's up?"

"Yeah, man," he said. "I'm not an Aquarian."

"A what?"

"An Aquarian. Does that mean I'm not a real Soulquarian?"

"Well, I didn't name it."

"Yeah," he said. "But it looks like I work for you."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Later, Q-Tip called. "Yo," he said. "This article makes it look like I work for you." Then Erykah called, and she had a problem with the piece, too. By that point, I felt like I had to go see the story. When I did, I could see their point. I was the centerpiece of the photos, and I was prominently featured in the article. Mos and Q-Tip and the rest of them were artists, just like me, and they wanted to control the perception of their brand, just like I did. Not everyone in the group was mad. Common was fine with it. Dilla was fine with it. D'Angelo didn't care about that kind of thing. But it was at that moment that I realized that the paradise I had imagined wasn't headed in a good direction.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]

To: Ben Greenberg [editor]

Re: Choice of Voice

I'm not sure that's the problem. I mean, sure, it's part of it, but I don't know that it could have been avoided. A memoir is a pretty strange thing-a highly synthetic narrative masquerading as something organic. For proof, you don't have to look any further than the fact that sometimes Ahmir will tell me the same story in two slightly different ways. Maybe the first time it's set in spring and the second time it's set in summer. When did it actually happen? It's hard to say: since it happened for him in those seasons, does it matter when it happened to him? He has earned the authority to relate events of his own life.

Ahmir has, for the most part, always been surrounded by other voices. You know how he said, in some conversation with Rich, that the Roots were the last of a dying breed, not just because they're older artists, but because they are an actual group? These days, hip-hop is almost all solo acts, and what's lost is the interaction of personalities and the richer artwork that produces. He's reiterated that several times: how Tariq represents the red-state const.i.tuency (street cred, the barbershop crowd) and he represents the blue-state const.i.tuency (art rock, record nerds, and the avant-garde). But he doesn't say it to privilege one over the other, at least explicitly. He says it to privilege the synthesis. I remember someone, maybe Junot Diaz, talking about footnotes in fiction, and how they're a flashpoint for questions of authority and history. But they can be playful in fiction in ways they can't be in fact, where they started as a kind of escape hatch for cla.s.sical historians hamstrung by rhetorical convention in the body of their text. They couldn't acknowledge sources, integrate other viewpoints, or question their own conclusions in any efficient way, and that led to the rise of the modern footnote in the seventeenth century. It helped historians devise ways of dramatizing their own process.

Wait, I had a point: The other day Ahmir made a joke. "If Rich is shadowing me," he said, "can I shadow him? Or you?" I didn't know exactly what he meant, so I laughed. Today I think I know what he meant. He was wondering if he could, in theory, footnote Rich's footnotes, and maybe even our memos. He can't, of course. We don't want the book to go off the rails. Are there rails?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

How do you measure your own small life next to monumental historical events?