on The Roots, Philly, and Black Boho Identity

In 1991, my cousin Ben lived in South Philadelphia at Fourth and Monroe, in a little townhouse shell that my aunt has long since abandoned. I still lived in the neighborhood I was born in, Germantown, but to get to my cousin’s house I had to walk from Market East Station at the Gallery II, heading straight down 10th to South Street, and then cutting up the alley of East Passyunk, right past Fifth Street. I spent years hanging out at the former Spike's Skates on that block before it closed, so knew the landscape pretty well. Right there on the corner there used to be a florist, and after 3pm they would dump the day-old flowers right in the back, and I’d long made it a habit to go through the pile to see what was salvageable. So one day, I was heading right past this exact spot and I saw that instead of the day’s trash on the curb there was this gang of dudes, about 20 of them, hovering around nervously, pacing in circles around this white boy tuning an upright bass and chubby dude who was piecing together a drum set. I paused, sat down on a curb across the street and waited as well, just curious. And then they started jamming. And I started listening. And I’ve been listening ever since.

Everybody else around the way heard The Roots too, or The Square Roots as they were calling themselves at the time. They were raw and crude, but in the sense of raw materials and crude oil. Even then, they were that good. Even in those first moments, in those first days, they sounded like the stars they were for the moment pretending to be. Even more, they sounded like Philly. They sounded like the world I knew, a surprisingly sophisticated, urbane, neo-soul black bohemian culture. That Philly could contain such a vibe may not seem like a stretch now, but this was before The Roots changed everything. Jill Scott wasn’t a diva; she was just that cool (and slender) sister who always read the sex poems Friday nights at October Gallery. King Britt was just the DJ who spun at Silk City on Monday nights and worked at Tower Records on the weekdays. I didn’t know Kindred, Bilal, or Musiq Soulchild even existed.

Back on that street corner on, their backpacks still on and actually filled with books they needed for high school, it was clear they were articulating something that hadn’t been heard before. I couldn’t count how many of them were rapping, but I did notice that there was this one little dark-skin cat that consistently rocked it, whom the others returned the mic to like he owned it. I came back a couple of times in the weeks that followed, and they were out there fairly often, rocking that corner like they were paying rent. Their crowds were clearly growing, too. One day not long after the first, there was a rumor in the crowd that someone had hired them to perform at a wedding for three hundred bucks. At the moment, that seemed to me to be such a high level of accomplishment.

Not long after this, I left Philly to go to college out in the Midwest, and when I tried to contact Cricket, their early manager, I found out that the band had left for Germany to record a cd. When I heard that, that seemed like it: if it were possible for any of us from Philly to make it on a national level, it would be The Square Roots. With all of their skills and originality, if they couldn’t make it then none of us could. Their talent was undeniable, so if they were denied we all would be. I included myself in that estimation. The album came back from Europe with them, Organix, with a low budget black cd cover that got passed around thoroughly long before it hit the stores. “On the actual, I swings like I'm Satchel/And brings groovy things to my peoples on the natural,” Tariq wrapped with Amir’s drum snapping behind the words and that was exactly the sound that I heard the first time on Passyunk. They captured it.

But it looked like nobody outside of the black boho scene in Philly really cared. The album got barely any play on Power 99, or the only other black station at the time, WDAS. I heard more cars drive by in Germantown rocking it on their cd players than I did on the radio. So for a while, I thought that was it. Judgment from the universe. Then their deal from DGC Records came through and it looked as if they would get a reprieve from obscurity. This new album actually had a budget behind it. There was this butter Philly jawn I was trying to talk to, and one of our first dates was cancelled because she ended up working till 3am designing the cover for one of first Roots singles, “Proceed.” I was salty, but I was also eager to hear the LP, so I got over it.

In 1994 though, I found myself in London, stuck in a disastrous relationship with a different woman, a relationship that I desperately wanted to work despite all evidence it was rightfully doomed. Emotionally exhausted, disconnected from my own roots and hometown, I managed to get tickets to see The Roots perform in the U.K.’s Camden (very different from Camden, NJ) for a concert put together by Straight No Chaser magazine. As much as I loved London, I had no family in that world, no friends that knew me from back in the day, no real connections, and at this hard time I was feeling the effects of that. I entered that theater a damaged and wounded man, disconnected and reeling. Waiting through the other acts, I stared down at the stage from the balcony until finally they appeared—it was only three years later, and there were those same dudes from the corner, now on the world stage. And for the length of their performance, I was home again. Not just in Philly, but also in a world where I existed and mattered. They actually did the song that my past crush had worked on the LP design for, “Proceed,” and for a moment I felt the strength to do just that. The nightmare relationship I was in took another four months to truly hit the wall, but that breather, that moment to collect myself, helped me gather the strength to make it through that period and get beyond.

Last weekend, I finally watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and saw the guys from The Roots, and Jill, and thought about this. I read a review of Block Party that criticized Chappelle for having such minor acts such as The Roots, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu instead of Jay-Z, Beyonce, and other A-list black musical guests. I knew immediately that this writer was not a part of our community, nor had any real understanding of it. That is what that movie was about, community. Black artists who do sophisticated work invariably find the majority of their audience to be, as Amir eloquently put it in the film, “People who don’t look like us.” The result of this is that we rarely get to be in environments where we are the majority, where we control the reality, where we are completely at home.

Writing prose is probably the most solitary of artistic endeavors. I create my art alone, and in silence, and my audience receives my art in much the same way. And though I have been successful in my field, mine is a small small audience as well. Writing, unlike comedy or popular music, is not greatly appreciated by this society, regardless of ethnicity. I go on tour every couple of years, meet those few people who come out to say hi, but besides that I have no connections to my audience, and rarely any with most of my literary peers. I have almost no connection with other artists of my caste and age in other mediums either. Along with Vic LaValle, I hung out with Mos Def once—a huge Victor LaValle fan—but that’s about it. Mos is an avid reader, and as such a rarity. I have never hung out with dancers, musicians, visual artists, or comedians of the larger black bohemian world. As a result, the artistic community I belong to is largely in my head, on my laptop, and in my iPod. Both of my novels have been in part about that: creating a community on the page, asserting the boundaries of my internal world. In the creation of my voice, I owe as much to The Roots in their articulation of that Philadelphia reality as I do to many of the literary giants I tried to emulate. That’s true regardless of the fact that no literary critic has ever identified my work as being a part of that Philly neo-soul aesthetic, nor that most of the people who were and are in that world have never read me. Still, “I shall proceed to continue to” write my books. In the hope that someday I too will find my audience out there waiting for me.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com


PS- When Vic asked Mos Def whom his favorite MC was, Mos answered in an instant: “Tariq from The Roots.” In particular, “I'm like Aquaman and Brown Hornet/I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it,” is what he quoted, nodding his head in awe.

PS-PS- that "butter Philly jawn" that stood me up to work on The Roots LP and I hooked back up five years later. She said yes when I asked her to marry me. As I write this, our three kids rock to Phrenology.