Review: The Roots, How I Got Over
The Roots, How I Got Over
AKA, a story of reviewer fail
I really wanted to love this album. The reviews are good! And there’s such praise of the lyrics for being something different, not the standard “money-cash-hos” that gets such disdain in the mainstream music press.
But here’s how three separate listens to “How I Got Over” went:
Try the first: however many minutes later, half-way through “Hustla” I looked up and went, “I have absolutely no memory of what I just listened to.” Seriously. Complete aural wallpaper except that something about wanting “my baby girl to be a hustla” jarred me out of not listening.
Well, I said. I was busy working. And many albums haven’t worked for me on the first listen that I later fell in love with. Case in point: Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid took me a while to fall for, though I did like “Faster” and “Locked Inside” from first listen.
So I decided to give it another chance.
Second try: Pretty similar. I paid more attention but I still didn’t have recognition of a single song on the album except for “Hustla.” I had a general impression of the album being easy to listen to, but I could have listened to an hour of Moby with more reaction and recognition.
I was so frustrated. This is ?uestlove’s band! It’s the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and one of the reasons they book good music on that show! The lyrics are meaningful! The Roots are a good band, damn it. And I listened to the damn Kanye West album everyone’s been all over and was predictably totally in love with it. I liked The ArchAndroid. I am a target audience for The Roots.
So I give the album a third spin.
Third Try: you know what they say about the definition of insanity, right?
Petit sigh. The album just didn’t reach me. It sort of slid over my ears without making an impression, good or bad. So I know it’s NOT a bad album, but it’s one of those things that I’m just not feeling, but not in a way that says anything about the album or the band. It says more about my mindset and what I’m in the mood to listen to right now (and both My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and The ArchAndroid are in heavy rotation) than the album. I hope that at some point, I’ll relisten to How I Got Over and be all, “OMG, what was WRONG with me in February?” (which is kind of what happened with Janelle Monae) but for now, this is a lot of words to explain why I have such a half-assed album review.
PS, because of this weird fail and my current pop-tastic bent, I am shifting my album review of next month from Waylon Jennings to Robyn’s Body Talk, which has a far better chance of workin’ for me at this point.
