Back to the Roots

When I first came across the album Undun, by The Roots, I had not ever listened to them before. The only reason I decided to listen to the album at all was that I heard it had been enormously well received, and I wanted to see what all of the fuss about. I instantly realized when I started listening that it was of value musically, but it took me to the end of the album before I realized that the album merited discussion in the context of African American literature. Technically, it is a hip-hop album, not a book or print work, but it still dealt with many of the themes I had noticed reading Native Son.

The album needs some context to be understood as a full story. It chronicles (backwards) the life of Redford Stevens, a fiction hustler who rises from the streets to become rich, famous, and eventually die. Of this last fact, the listener is made instantly clear: the album opens with the sound of a heartbeat monitor, as the narrator looks back on his life and wonders if he will be remembered. The inevitability of death presented here resonates with the strong element of naturalism in Native Son, in that no matter what happens to the characters inside, the outcome is always death. 

As the album continues from this dark start, the narrator is presented as living large, with money and drugs, reminiscent of the idealized gangsta lifestyle, but Redford is anything except at peace. Instead, he is portrayed as always anxious and unsure of his lifestyle: "I'd give it all for peace of mind, for Heaven's sake/ My heart's so heavy that the ropes that hold my casket break." Redford is a man that cannot live freely, and feels burdened by the choices he has made. This is a much harsher, more incisive view of the gang lifestyle than is presented as the mainstream ideal, and this perspective is not only more interesting as it is different, but makes for a much more engaging story. Redford not a "thug," he is a person that is constantly evaluating his own life choices, and this is a character that is much more complex and realistic. 

Where do all of these decisions that Redford has made come from? Farther in the album, as we back deeper and deeper through his life on the street, we come to his experiences as a lowly street-level drug dealer, and here we can see the motivation to live the life that he led. in "Tip the Scales," Redford asserts that he believes crime and eventually prison or death are the only options that he has: "The scales of justice ain't equally weighed out/ only two ways out, digging tunnels or digging graves out." The implication is that the system of justice is skewed, and that the only way for him to make anything out of himself is crime. This is a message that feels at home in Native Son, as Bigger Thomas felt somewhat similarly in that he planned on robbing a white man's store and then killed a white woman because it is the only thing he could do. This goes beyond naturalism, however. The story also works on an almost Greek tragedy level: Redford has an inevitability to his death that fate has determined, and he constantly struggles in his life with the decision to commit crime that he has made. This album presents this story fantastically, and I recommend it to anyone looking for music to listen to.