Album Review: The Roots - ... And Then You Shoot Your Cousin

Although The Roots have released increasingly socially conscious albums since 2006's Game Theory, the bravado of their 11th album is striking. ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin is a satirical deconstruction that asks what hip hop means in 2014 and what it's worth.

The Roots tear up the rule book here. There's no rapping until three minutes in, whilst lengthy old school soul samples (Nina Simone, Mary Lou Williams) slug it out with dissonant musique concrete, so that the final product is mostly new album but also partly mixtape. The production is austere and in places downright chilly. There are some familiar hip hop characters – corner hustlers, etc – but mostly the frustrated, permanently impoverished type, prone to passive-aggressiveness, introspection and the kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to correlate ghetto dreams with ghetto reality. The overall sense of confusion and injustice echoes Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and while I don't want to make too many comparisons with that historical milestone, there are also similar distant rays of hope peeking through. It's almost as if The Roots are echoing Oscar Wilde's sentiment that “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” (citing Oscar Wilde in a rap review? I've got to get props for this).

...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin doesn't have all answers for hip hop's ills, but it's a fearless statement nonetheless.