By Alan Pyke (RapGenius editor Ock19)
The sound and feel of undun won’t surprise anyone who’s followed The Roots’ recent evolution, but it should delight believers in hip hop’s capacity to be beautiful and mind-expanding. The band’s 10th studio album is a natural extension of the sonic arc they’ve been tracing since before 2010’s How I Got Over, but in some ways it has more in common with the thematic darkness of records like Game Theory and Rising Down.
A concept album rather than a rack of bump-in-your-whip cuts (with the exception of “Stomp”), undun tells the story of a drug dealer named Redford Stephens, in reverse from his violent death to his decision to pursue the street game. The sounds of a soul shaking itself loose in the intro track “Dun” give way to the funeral shuffle of “Sleep,” and the mournful, edgy tone that will carry through the remainder of the record.
As Black Thought delivers Redford’s dying thoughts (“There I go from a man to a memory/Damn, I wonder if my fam will remember me”) over a clacking, spare beat fringed with falling horns, you can’t help wondering how this cat came to this point. By the end of “Tip the Scale,” the last lyrical track, you understand more about the experience of slingin’ your way to wealth and death than you could from any Pusha T or Raekwon banger.
The structure of the album, with themes and events unfurling backwards through the story, makes the songs feel like the journal entries of a young drug dealer trying to make his decisions understandable. Thanks to the hymnal tone of the whole record, the experience of listening to undun is almost like reading back through the man’s journal after watching him be buried.
Black Thought and guests like scene-stealing Little Brother and Foreign Exchange veteran Phonte and frequent Roots collaborator Dice Raw don’t let the weight of their material hem them in, though they do take it seriously. The album is full of excellent writing and the various emcees seamlessly revive and rework each other’s ideas.
On the standout track “One Time,” Phonte refers to “the street’s Hammurabi code,” both a play on a common slang for guns (“hammers”) and a literate linkage of the draconian code of the street back to one of the oldest written legal codes.
Phonte’s talking directly about the same unwritten code that Black Thought evoked two tracks earlier on “Sleep,” saying “illegal activity controls my black symphony.” The loneliness, danger and confinement of living up to that code’s challenges take a more threatening form when Dice Raw kicks off “Lighthouse” with “If you can’t swizzim then ya bound to driddown.”
Dozens of those kinds of oblique lyrical connections make undun highly rewarding, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome at 39 excellent minutes. It deserves to join that category of hip hop albums that are best on a road trip — it’s symphonic, coherent, and only properly understood as a contiguous, ordered whole. The band’s playing in uneasy waters at the dark edge of neo soul, and by the climax of the record the emcees step back.
With the help of some strings, Questlove unleashes the full force and ambition of the best band in the history of hip-hop in the final 5:21, a four-movement instrumental sequence whose track titles suggest is about Redford’s internal decision to follow the lonely, violent, lucrative path sketched out in the preceding 10 songs.
The album climaxes with the explosive fury of “Will to Power” before closing with the elegant violin of “Finality,” and you’ll be aching to start from the top before the last jarring piano chord fades completely.
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