Recently talked a bit with Chicago artist ShowYouSuck about live rap and The Roots, while at the same time I had just been reading ?uestlove's Mo Meta Blues. There's an anecdote Quest gives about how when he showed the original beat for "Double Trouble" to D'Angelo, DJ Premier, and Dilla during the Voodoo sessions, he realized by their reaction that they were thoroughly unimpressed. They were being nice about it. But, as Quest puts it: "I took a long look at myself after debuting 'Double Trouble' for the room and realized that if I wanted to be in their fraternity, I had to pull it up a notch."This is interesting to me because "Double Trouble" has long been my favorite track on Things Fall Apart. The back-and-forth between Black Thought and Mos Def is superb. There is so much momentum built by the frequency with which they trade bars and the variety of the rhythms they use for each new round is astounding. It's one of those songs so stuffed with intricate rhyming that it has almost limitless replay value for me.
I had found this live recording of a performance about a year ago. At first I thought it was from their tour in support of Game Theory (2007?), but you can see Mos is already using his now-ubiquitous red microphone, which I think he introduced well after '07. Anyway, the thing I love most about this performance is the communication you can see between most of the band members, most especially led by Quest as a bandleader. There are a few key moments when Quest speaks into a microphone, which I assume leads to monitors that allow him to communicate with the rest of the band. These short instructions get the band together for accents, stops, and changes in feel. I love watching Quest play music for this reason, because it's clear he is considering the entirety of the song's direction at any given moment. It's the same reason why Mo Meta Blues is such an insightful read.
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