It had been a very long time since I last listened to The Roots' ...and then you shoot your cousin and after it dwelled in thought for the last couple of days I played it. Longer than I expected to, really. I got lost in Never and for the next five songs I was essentially on a boat.
And I had to stop when I reached The Dark (Trinity), particularly Dice Raw's verse. On this listen I swear realized the inner genius of this album in a way I couldn't word in the years when I called it my favorite album by them: not just to emphasize that Black Thought's verse on that song is the payoff after all of his bite-sized verses on the songs before... ingenious... but I tell you that Raw's part has a gold lining to it. You peel it back and it turns out to be an entire filling. So he raps... in the very fast and echoed manner of trap music (that of which can be bothered to use more than ten words a song), but he speaks from the perspective of the conclusion of the lifestyle. The end of that road. The end of that swiveling, swerving, contorted road of disposability and excessive sex and drug use. Sometimes it's direct: he says, for instance '[I wanted] that b///h, then I got that b///h, now all I want from her's an abortion'. The end of the road for the always-dispossessed, or as Thought says in the song that follows, 'The final stop on the line for all passengers'. It's spiritual in instances, more than might be expected. Angels are mentioned all over the album and both Christianity and Islam are in the peripherals if not as blunt as (well this is my interpretation but:) God being portrayed in a welding mask holding a blowtorch in the music video for Understand. That's never left me.
Before you can even gather yourself The Unraveling shifts in and you're left to sit with all of that for what feels like so long. 'I'm somebody new today, free of my sins today, feels like they've washed away' and that's immediately counteracted— or dare I wager bolstered— by 'a man with no future' repeated twice. It becomes confusing, almost. “Which is it, then?” Hopefulness or hopelessness, the light or The Dark? Nothing. Something in between. Both need each other to exist, to be defined, even. And there's just something about that to me. To be someone new, to be freed from the weight of sin... but to still be futureless... dispossessed...
Now I've got to go listen to Rising Down. I will write full pieces on music someday here... but for now I'm trying to sidle back into the pangs of word! Give me a bit of time.
'Free at last, free at last, a different me, at last.'
Postscript: I also want to mention that the album has such a vastly different philosophy when held up to their previous work. They always had that sort of consciousness (I.E.: 'Panic !!!!!!!' on Illadelph Halflife or 'Water' on Phrenology), but compare 75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction) to The Dark (Trinity). The latter, it is more... temperate. Mature is the word I thought of.
Postscript two: had more thoughts since initially writing this. In addition to the conclusion, Raw's verse feels to me to be a walking warning parable. His verse is telling a story, but it's an aimless one full of cautionary advice, dead-ends, and the listener isn't clear. It is, I think, telling all of the events leading up to his death, but it's told out of order... Tomorrow I'll write about the debit/credit lines because those were something elseeeeeee.