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Revolution Rap
-Gary Graff
For Roots drummer ?uestlove, the personal is political
What kind of creative goal or mission did you have with Rising Down? I know it sounds very simple, but I don’t take lightly the fact that not many groups get a chance to make a great th record—or a th record at all. So that was my main concern. Can you imagine someone opening a th CD and going, “Godd*mn, this is a f*cking amazing record!” at’s all I personally wanted to achieve.
How do you differentiate Rising Down from your last album (2006’s Game Theory)? You look at the last record and you do the polar opposite of what that record is, which essentially means that every other record feels the same. But it was easy to do the opposite of the last record because that was melancholy, very mellow, very somber, very sad. e politics of the last record more or less had to do with self-observation, sort of looking in the mirror or from a window and then saying, “What’s going on?” A lot of [Rising Down] is a first-person account, which makes for a very interesting narrative. This is the most incendiary political album of our career to date.
Was it impacted at all by this being an election year? It wasn’t first and foremost in our minds. Being in Philadelphia, which is pretty much the murder capital of the United States and where the dropout rate is percent in Philadelphia high schools and unemployment is at a staggering percent amongst blacks—that’s what really weighs a lot on your mind as you’re creating this music. Add up all that, plus being in your mid-s and working nights a year and this being an election year—yeah, all that’s what this album’s about.
You recorded a song with Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, “Birthday Girl,” that was supposed to be a single and then was left off the album. What happened? It was just sticking out like a sore thumb. Initially, it was going to kickstart the record... but then that didn’t work. en we were going to have a “halftime” thing where it was gonna come in the middle of the record as a break from the political thing, but that didn’t work either. en we tried to make it the last song on the record, and that wasn’t working. en we tried to make it the hidden track, and that wasn’t effective. Basically the album was complete; it starts with “Rising Down” and it ends with “Rising Up,” so that makes more sense to me.
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