Play “The Next Movement,” the 1999 single from the Roots’ fourth album Things Fall Apart, and from the first sliding hand clap, listeners at any party, cookout or kickback will stop mid-conversation, nod their heads in quiet appreciation, and allow the music to take them to a place where hip-hop returns to its roots.
“The Next Movement” calls upon us to pay attention to the lyrics and the sound. By the late 1990s, hip-hop albums were selling in the millions, and hits such as Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” dominated charts. But while hip-hop entered the mainstream and made promises of unprecdented success for recording artists, aficionados lamented the loss of true hip-hop — music about much more than reducing Black artists to sexual stereotypes. What hip-hop needed was an alternative… a new movement.
This movement was called neo-soul: Things Fall Apart was its introduction, and “The Next Movement” was its thesis. Neo-soul was jazz. It was funk. It was soul and it was R&B, but with the boom bap of hip-hop. It was groovy and finger-snapping — slow-down-and-listen music, calling back to the foundations of Black music and foretelling what was to come. “Neo-soul describes artists — like song-stylist Erykah Badu — who combine a palpable respect for and understanding of the classic soul of the ’60s and ’70s with a healthy appetite for ’90s sonic experimentation and boundary crossing,” Christopher John Farley wrote for Time.
The Roots were at their own crossroads ahead of “The Next Movement.” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter founded the Roots 12 years earlier while attending the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts: Questlove was the drummer, Black Thought was the MC, and in the early days, they were an analog hip-hop group with no DJ. In time they recruited others, notably bassist Leonard Hubbard and MC Malik B. The street was their stage, and the live sound they developed would carry the band throughout its career.
The Roots gained popularity in Philadelphia by playing local shows, and ahead of a European tour they independently recorded, released and distributed 1993’s Organix before landing a deal with DGC Records to release 1995’s Do You Want More?!!!??! By the release of their third album, 1996’s Illadelph Halflife, the Roots had a loyal niche fanbase, but still lacked a crossover hit that spoke to a mass audience — a subject they tackled with the single “What They Do,” a parody of rap cliches. The “What They Do” video featured scenes of Black Thought rapping with lingerie-clad women in a large waterbed, while the other members of the band waved champagne glasses in a club and gathered around a pool alongside dancing models.
“What They Do” was a blatant satire of the video for “One More Chance,” the 1994 single from the wildly acclaimed album Ready to Die by fellow East Coast rapper Notorious B.I.G. But while the Roots satirized rap and rap music videos as gestalt, Biggie took it as a personal affront. “I had mad love for those guys,” he told The Source. “My feelings were really hurt, man, because they were one of my favorite groups. I love Thought. He’s one of my favorite MCs. Why’d he go and shit on me?”
Whether the Roots wanted to make a serious statement about the state of music or playfully poke fun at others in their industry, “What They Do” only further solidified the group’s standing as a niche act — a nebulously anti-materialism, anti-commercial rap group on the fringes of the hip-hop zeitgeist. After Biggie’s response to “What They Do,” the Roots realized the antidote was not championing their established brand of alternative rap versus over-sampled and oversimplified rap music: the antidote was ensuring rap embraced the full sound of Black music.
As hip-hop increased in popularity, many artists turned to their soul predecessors, surmising they could embrace sampling to hastily produce a familiar-sounding record mixed with elements of hip-hop — turntables, drum machines or synthesizers — with the MC’s voice as the final component. The Roots’ musical ambition expanded beyond that: they wanted to make a record incorporating not just jazz and foundational hip-hop, but also soul, R&B and funk. Hip-hop would no longer be simply pieces of Black music in a pastiche (like the sample of DeBarge’s “Stay with Me” in “One More Chance”); the Roots would instead weave it all together to create a new sound from the old.
Questlove began to solidify the Roots’ new identity and sound by befriending contemporary R&B innovator D’Angelo. They first met in Los Angeles in 1996 (a year after the release of D’Angelo’s breakthrough debut album Brown Sugar) while the Roots were on tour with the Fugees. In his 2013 memoir Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, the drummer recalls that to get D’Angelo’s attention, he played a “Prince lick,” and it worked: D’Angelo emerged backstage, where he and Questlove connected over “every Prince arrangement, every Stevie Wonder outro, every twist and turn in every Curtis Mayfield and Bill Withers song.”
D’Angelo soon brought Questlove to New York City’s Electric Lady Studios, built by Jimi Hendrix between 1968 and 1970 and later the launching pad for Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book and Music of My Mind. Wonder himself described Electric Lady as a “self-contained universe” allowing him to depart from the “baby love” sound of his 1960s Motown recordings and “get as weird as possible.” D’Angelo wanted to record at Electric Lady, telling Questlove “Yo, man. It has the blessings of the spirits. We have to go there. It’s only right.”
And it did feel ordained. Some of the instruments Wonder used at Electric Lady were still there and operational, in particular the Fender Rhodes piano and clavinet he played on Talking Book (and which would later give D’Angelo’s Voodoo its classic funk sound). It was a perfect spiritual conjuring for the Roots to record Things Fall Apart, a place where like-minded artists created a fluid sound not simply by stirring the ingredients of funk, jazz, hip-hop and soul, but by applying their personal touch to create something new, using the full sound of Black music as a base.
“The Next Movement” reminds listeners that hip-hop’s roots have not died. The song is a revival — a return to tradition. Elements of “The Next Movement” recall hip-hop fundamentals: Questlove claps his hand to the beat, much like an audience would do at a rap battle, and Black Thought declares himself the best MC. While the music is original, guest DJ Jazzy Jeff (another Philadelphia hip-hop icon) even scratches the sound like a DJ mixing old records together.
This was neo-soul in a nutshell. Questlove and D’Angelo even gave their rotating collective of neo-soul trailblazers a name: Soulquarians. Following the release of Things Fall Apart, the Soulquarians combined to produce a series of landmark records including Voodoo and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun in 2000, as well as Bilal’s First Born Second in 2001. All featured a similarly scratchy sound incorporating old-school funk, smooth R&B, jazz riffs and hip-hop freestyles.
“The Next Movement” also rocket-launched the Roots to mainstream ubiquity. Things Fall Apart won a Grammy in 2000, setting the stage for a series of innovative, genre-redefining records including Phrenology and How I Got Over. In 2009, the Roots were named the house band for NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and later followed Fallon to the network’s venerable Tonight Show. They also teamed with Elvis Costello for the album Wise Up Ghost, appeared on Sesame Street, collaborated with Lin Manuel Miranda for The Hamilton Mixtape, and continue to host the annual Roots Picnic in Philadelphia.
Questlove has since become a hip-hop elder statesman, representing in politics (campaigning for President Barack Obama), comedy, cooking (an ongoing chef salon hosted in his New York City apartment) and even television commercials. The man is everywhere.
In 2022, Questlove won an Oscar for Summer of Soul, a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a forgotten musical celebration featuring Black artists such as Stevie Wonder, the Fifth Dimension, Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson. The project is indicative of Questlove’s musical life: after studying soul and funk artists to create albums like Things Fall Apart, he continues to dig to see what our musical ancestors have to say about how their own signs of the times inform the direction of music today.
Summer of Soul showcases not only Black musical history, but also highlights the political and social sentiments of Black people in the 1960s. Interview subjects were recorded talking about Black communities’ lack of resources while white Americans explored space; they also lamented fallen heroes such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Period footage additionally showed the effects of governmental neglect on Black communities, directly connecting Summer of Soul to the present day, where Black Americans sit with similar challenges while simultaneously finding joy and freedom in Black music.
Most of all, “The Next Movement” heralded what was to come. Black music continues to look back, while always looking forward. After neo-soul first flourished, India Arie, Jill Scott and Angie Stone released their own odes to Black soul, funk music and Black womanhood, and the movement continued with independent artists such as Little Brother, Dwele, Eric Roberson, and Anthony Hamilton. You can also hear the Soulquarians’ influence on subsequent generations of artists, including Ari Lennox, H.E.R, Kendrick Lamar, Lucky Daye, Anderson .Paak and Salaam Remi, just to name a few.
“I think [neo-soul] really is a movement,” Russell Elevado, who earned a Grammy Award for his work recording and mixing Voodoo, told The New York Times in 2018. “All these people had a vision, and they’re finding people of the same vision, at the same time. I think where it stems from is these hip-hop grooves — and it’s coming out of the old ’70s funk records, and R&B. But I think hip-hop was the one element to fuse these people together.”
