Best live act in hiphop!
Geneve and I went to Boston on Friday to see The Roots. It was the best concert I've seen, topping last month's Talib Kweli and Common gig.
The Roots are unique for a hiphop act because there is no DJ in the band. The band is composed of a drummer, a guy on bongos, a keyboardist, two guitarists, a bass guitarist, and two lyricists, one of whom is a crazy good beatboxer.
They opened with an awesome co-opted version of 50 Cent's In Da Club. The pace of the whole show was frenetic, the club was packed, and the crowd was awesome. They played fantastic live versions of many of their hits, as well as taking other artists' songs and playing them as their own. Truly innovative and entertaining to watch. They played to the crowd fantastically and put on a generally great show.
There were points during the show when each artist in the band was given the stage to riff and improvise, kind of like at a jazz show. The most interesting bandmember to watch in this context was the beatboxer, who emulated both the beat, scratches, and vocals of two records being scratched, while changing tempos and mimicking the hand motions of the DJ on the records and cross-fader. Just awesome.
If you have a chance to see them, music fan or not, don't miss it. They definitely transcend hiphop and will appeal to anybody who loves music.
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