Sunday Music: What They Do Vs. What You Do (Questlove, The Roots, And Frustrating Missteps)

In 1996, Philly scenesters The Roots, put out a video for “What They Do,” to help promote their less live-band feeling third (official) record, Illadelph Halflife. The sheer contradictions in 1996 are hard to remember, let alone explain if you weren’t living it, but the song - it’s like being early on a market-timing call or something.

They wanted to declare, “Hey, we do it differently and that’s cooler than you realize” with a parody type video. Given how different the group was, it wasn’t a punch down in any way, I thought it was a great joke whenever I first saw it too, but - the rest of the world didn’t quite see it that way.

You should probably watch the video before we get too far into this. You have to see it because of the sarcastic subtitles especially, calling out every mid-90s rap video cliché, by putting "Rented for the day" over mansion shots, "It's really ginger ale" over champagne pours, etc. Like I said before, to suburban punk rock me, this was AWESOME.

However, as The Roots would soon find out, sometimes, when you draw a line in the sand, it can create a situation for something else to blow up in your face.

Like any movement a decade plus in the mainstream, after an initial decade plus in the making, rap music was going through a divide. There were the major label haves, and the rest of the industry (including the can’t-get-a-deal-let-alone-a-break) have nots. The Roots were in the extra awkward spot of being a major label have-not which… talk about a lonely island.

“What They Do” is a “This is what THEY do” vs. “This is what WE do” statement.

What I really want to call your attention to though - is that island they were on. The major label deal meant they weren’t on team underground anymore. The lack of “champagne excess” in their style, that meant they were also not on team major label either. All they wanted to do was make an artistic statement, and instead what they did was distanced themselves from everyone.

Dale Carnegie has the famous “how to win friends and influence people” line. This is basically a “how to lose friends and influence people to join against you” lesson. I think it has a happy ending, ultimately, but the status crisis it created in the moment is real.

First, the group asked the director to be like other videos but not too much like them. If you look at the video above and then play Biggie’s “One More Chance” you realize they might have walked a little too close to the line.

Biggie was reportedly “devastated” by the video because he was a huge Roots fan. Questlove wanted to apologize, but Biggie was murdered just months later in March 1997, and it never happened.

Five years later, the air that wasn’t cleared caught another spark when The Roots backed Jay-Z on his 2001 MTV Unplugged appearance. Now, it’s a really cool gig, but back to underground fans (like me) and the whole - The Roots exist on this island where they aren’t mainstream cool AND are struggling to be underground cool so people are struggling with what they are - did this mean they made it? Did this mean they sold out?

Well, Nas had thoughts. He called them hypocrites on Hot 97. Wasn’t Jay-Z the epitome of the stance they were criticizing on “What They Do”? Nas was right. Clearly. But champagne culture - performative, celebrating celebrity for celebrity’s sake status signaling - it’s almost all about who takes your picture and not who you are even if you get your picture taken at an odd moment.

It’s probably the use of “champagne”, but this totally reminds me of Hugh Hendry during the European debt crisis, calling Danish politician Poul Rasmussen a “champagne socialist traveling business class on the back of money created by risk takers like me.”

Same punk energy, same on an island energy (re: not a state-blessed actor, but also a successful enough independently minded entity/hedge fund operator) - refusing to participate in performative positions when the stated values contradict the actual behavior. Hendry allegedly put up serious performance numbers during the 2008 crisis by being early on the contrarian shift, not all that unlike The Roots being early on calling out hip-hop's cultural shift.

There's redemption in The Roots story, not unlike Hendry getting his moment of proof via his results too.

"What They Do" became The Roots' first Top 40 hit - their critique of mainstream formulas actually worked because it was true. Just like Hendry's contrarian stance during the debt crisis - being right early often looks wrong until it doesn't. And now, with all of Questlove's success across mediums, it seems obvious. But isn't that also because the refusal to compromise is still there? Yeah, there were missteps, but the group never lost their values even when they were at the top.

This is the tension every creative faces: the urge to call out inauthentic BS versus the reality that you still exist in the same ecosystem. Sometimes standing for something means standing alone. Sometimes your principles put you in contradictory positions. And it's going to S-U-C-K.

But careers that last decades require getting comfortable with occasionally standing alone with your values. The Roots could have played it safe and made conventional videos. Instead, they made a statement that cost them relationships short-term but defined their legacy long-term.

You can do it too. It’ll have moments that suck. But figuring out who you are and sticking to it - it’s worth it.

Keep doing you.

ps. Jump to 3 minutes in, Hendry may literally be on an island now, but he was so entertaining when he was in the public fray like this: