The Roots Rising Down

• The Pow Wow
• Rising Down featuring Mos Def & Styles P
• Get Busy featuring Dice Raw & Peedi Peedi
• @ 15
• 75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)
• Becoming Unwritten
• Criminal featuring Truck North & Saigon
• I Will Not Apologize featuring Porn & Dice Raw
• I Can't Help It featuring Malik B., Porn, Mercedes Martinez & Dice Raw
• Singing Man featuring Porn, Truck North & Dice Raw
• Unwritten featuring Mercedes Martinez
• Lost Desire featuring Malik B. & Talib Kweli
• The Show featuring Common & Dice Raw
• Rising Up featuring Wale & Chrisette Michele

The Roots just continue to rock on, even if folks haven't come around to the band's hip-hop-with-live-instrumentation concept in as large of numbers as might be expected for a group that's this damn talented. Never a band to shy away from the topical, ?uestlove, Black Thought, and company take up issues of race, crime, and drug addiction on the group's tenth full-length. Rising Down is even getting released on the sixteenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Rodney King riots. Guests on the album include long-time Roots collaborators Dice Raw and Common as well as Mos Def, Wale, and Chrisette Michele. One guest who you won't find here is Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump; the track Stump helped out on, "Birthday Girl," was conspicuously cut from the album's track list at the last minute.

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Band: http://www.theroots.com

Label: http://www.defjam.com

Audio: http://www.myspace.com/theroots

Abstract by John Zeiss