edit....I JUMPED THE GUN FOLKS
there was a printing miscommunication
and itunes will fix the effup
so that anyone who got the album on itunes
should get the liner notes.

all apologies




ladies and gentleman

the roots 10th album rising down is in stores now.

because of politics that i won't go into...alot of you asked "why have you stopped the liner notes.

i never did.

and believe it or not....


there are here......


here is song number 1.

i need comments and kudos in the high numbers please so i can get a top 10 placement .


127. THE POW WOW

once upon a time in 1994....

most artists like to do the self congratulatory thing once they reach a milestone (10 albums--and yes The Roots Come Alive and Homegrown Vol 1 and Vol 2 are unique enough to count as new albums thankyouveddymuch) but to let this opportunity pass us by without giving you a peek into the near hell that was the group about to get dropped some 7 months before our national debut Do You Want More?!!???! got released would be criminal if we didn't show you all aspects of what it took to get "here".

for all you liner note junkies out there, brian coleman's Rakim Told Me and its followup Check The Technique are HEAVILY recommended for their thorough insight on the process of many a rap classic that never contained liner notes. DYWM?!!???! was the focus of the latter book. In separate interviews both Tariq and I contradicted each other on what we like to refer to as the "North Carolina Incident". Not that i was there--(label wouldn't spring for a 15 passenger van, so in our leased land cruiser jeep the "bare essential roots" (this was before all press was left up to me) went to do some promo in a few southern cities.

with drab results.

record stores didn't have any promos or customers waiting to meet us (let alone any knowledge of who The Roots were--surprise surprise), and nightclub dancefloors cleared like the red sea when our avant guard sounding "Distortion To Static" came on. The optimism and excitement that we had from the time we got signed until the time we turned the masters into the label were starting to wane. For the first time ever we were hearing words like "marketing" and "angle" and "radio friendly" and "too arty"--yeah it was an eye opener. i guess in our heads we really thought "if it was new and good and quality, then people would embrace us"---i mean they did before right?--(naive thinking on our behalf) sure PE's Nation Of Millions was "good"--but there was an undeniable marketing angle behind that record--not just "oh the beats are dope". De La Soul's 3 Feet High And Rising was "good". But there was an undeniable marketing angle that made that album work when it came out. Their success had absolutely nothing to do with how incredible their wordplay was. So The results of this 7 day near middle passage promo tour trek down south for Tariq and Malik proved to be THE straw that broke the camel's back.

So reading Tariq's interview dismissing the whole "NC incident" as an overexaggeration on my end made me take matters in my own hands.

i was gonna find "that damn conversation" if it was the last thing i was gonna do.

It took me 8 months but i scoured through about 200 cassettes to search for this very conversation you are hearing between Tariq, our manager Richard Nichols his former partner Joe "AJ Shine" Simmons (crucial college radio figure and philly's version of Stretch and Bobbito or Sway and Teck) and Me.

This argument was pretty much the four frustrated heads of this undefinable beast

Joe was the buffer for the label and the good cop. Rich was the Bullhorned smart cop. Tariq was all kinds of angered (which resulted in a curse out so vicious to the label that we nearly got dropped) and me the historian getting this all on tape for i knew in my head that one day we would sit in our millllllion dollar penthouse apartment lighting cigars with our $500 dollar bills and scoff "about the time in which that poor record label truly didn't understand (or care to understand) us."

ahhhh the more things change...................

so Riq is mad
Joe is really mad
and Rich is losing his cotdamn mind
and i'm getting all of this...

checkmate.


i need yall right now.


for the rest?


go to itunes.


and help a friend.


-?uesto