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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:48.0pt">THE ROOTS<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><i><span style="font-size:26.0pt">…and then you shoot your cousin<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt">MAY 19 on DEF JAM RECORDINGS</span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">OFFICIAL LYRIC VIDEO FOR THE ROOTS "WHEN THE PEOPLE CHEER":<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQGgnzIYHYA">HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=CQGGNZIYHYA</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">THE ROOTS “TOMORROW” FEAT. RAHEEM DEVAUGHN:
<a href="https://soundcloud.com/defjam/the-roots-tomorrow">HTTPS://SOUNDCLOUD.COM/DEFJAM/THE-ROOTS-TOMORROW</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">THE ROOTS PERFORM AS MUSICAL GUEST ON NBC’S “THE TONIGHT SHOW” MAY 20<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt">6-PART NEW YORK MAGAZINE ESSAY SERIES “HOW HIP-HOP FAILED BLACK AMERICA” BY ?UESTLOVE:<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/04/questlove-on-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america.html">HTTP://WWW.VULTURE.COM/2014/04/QUESTLOVE-ON-HOW-HIP-HOP-FAILED-BLACK-AMERICA.HTML</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/04/questlove-on-money-jay-z-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america-part-2.html" title="http://www.vulture.com/2014/04/questlove-on-money-jay-z-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america-part-2.html">HTTP://WWW.VULTURE.COM/2014/04/QUESTLOVE-ON-MONEY-JAY-Z-HOW-HIP-HOP-FAILED-BLACK-AMERICA-PART-2.HTML</a></span></b><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">ITUNES PREORDER : <a href="http://smarturl.it/iATYSYC">HTTP://SMARTURL.IT/IATYSYC</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center">
<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt">#CRWN XI WITH ELLIOTT WILSON AND THE ROOTS' ?UESTLOVE & BLACK THOUGHT TUESDAY MAY 20. NYC.
<a href="http://nue.ag/1sbTpQ6">HTTP://NUE.AG/1SBTPQ6</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;text-align:center">
<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">…AND THEN YOU SHOOT YOUR COUSIN AT THE PUBLIC THEATER :
<a href="http://publictheater.org/theroots" target="_blank">HTTP://PUBLICTHEATER.ORG/THEROOTS</a>/</span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><img border="0" width="386" height="319" id="_x0000_i1026" src="cid:image001.jpg@01CF6A0C.1CDBC370"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">"Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop music genre of its time," Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson recently wrote. "So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">This question was raised as a starting point for "How Hip-Hop Failed Black America," the six-part series that the drummer penned for New York magazine. "Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible,"
he continued. "Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture is now an integral part of the sullen dominant."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">These same issues lie at the heart of the new album by the Roots,
<i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i>. Over eleven tracks in a concise thirty-three minutes, the band raises a series of challenges to its listeners: What is hip-hop, anyway? What does it sound like, and why? What is it supposed to accomplish? None of this
is ever addressed explicitly, of course—but it informs every choice, whether structural, sonic, or thematic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">The album's title is taken from a 1997 lyric by the Blastmaster KRS-One ("MCs more worried about their financial backin'/Steady packin' a gat as if something's gonna happen/But it doesn't, they wind up shootin'
they cousin, they bugging"), an early harbinger of the unintended consequences of Thug Life styling. Produced by the Roots brain trust of Questlove, Tarik “Black Thought” Trotter, and Richard Nichols, along with contributions from a range of young talent (Mike
Jerz, Trapzillas, The Wurxs, D.D. Jackson, Joseph Simmons, Damion Ward, Ray Angry),
<i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i> examines familiar figures in hip-hop storytelling—hustlers and outlaws—but told from a perspective that the genre has largely pushed aside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">"It’s not just about just one kind of character," Black Thought has said. "We create quite a few different characters in this record. It’s satire, but in that satire it’s an analysis of some of the stereotypes
perpetuated in not only the hip-hop community, but in the community." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">In contrast to the endless parade of Bugattis and bling that have come to define current hip-hop, these songs are populated by dudes who are struggling, both financially and morally, with the ways of the street.
"On my existential grind doing consequential dirt/Searching for physical pleasure if I don’t go mental first," as Black Thought rhymes on "When the People Cheer," the album's first single, while on "The Dark (Trinity)," he laments "The law of gravity meets
the law of averages/Ain’t no sense in attempting to civilize savages." It recalls the view depicted in "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?," the groundbreaking study in the 2005 best-seller
<i>Freakonomics</i>, which showed that crack dealing offered the same pay structure as McDonald's or Wal-Mart—aside from the bonus of a one-in-four chance that you get killed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">But those aren't the stories we hear from 21st Century MCs, who have embraced income inequality as enthusiastically as the Forbes 500. "Hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly
isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage," wrote Questlove. "It’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection,
challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">For the narrators of <i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i>, the biggest fight is the fight for their souls. In "Understand," the chorus describes how "God sees the face of a man/Shaking his head, say he never
understand," while in the verse by Greg Porn, he envisions the day when "the fire truck wash my soul down the sewer/Or to a new hell with a wi-fi connection/So I can pay for my sins on PayPal." These are voices filled with doubt, aware of their situations
but paralyzed by their circumstances.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">The music on the album raises the same sorts of questions. Does hip-hop only mean beats and rhymes? How much are samples required to be sliced and diced? Or are some things intrinsically "hip-hop," whether
they fit the form's conventions or not? We don't even hear anyone rapping until three full minutes into the record—after a segment of Nina Simone's 1959 "Theme from
<i>The Middle of the Night</i>" sets the tone of nocturnal solitude, and then Patty Crash sings the lengthy, melancholy intro to "Never."<i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i> is full of singing—from jazz legend Mary Lou Williams to soul new-schooler Raheem
DeVaughn to Mercedes Martinez from the Jazzyfatnastees—and also strings, with the Metropolis Ensemble contributing to about half the album's tracks, plus a dramatic interlude of "Dies Irae," the fourth movement of “Requiem” by Michel Chion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">At a time when the very notion of a long-playing album is in doubt, the Roots have created a work that is intentionally short and meant to be absorbed in full. Rather than emphasizing singles, the impact of
<i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i>, the group's eleventh album, is more theatrical, accruing as it goes on, with situations and narrators that bounce off of each other to reveal a larger story. Things start with Black Though "spiraling down/Destined to
Drown" on "Never," and pass through Dice Raw agonizing "How did I end up where I'm at, it's kinda hard to explain yo/I remember all I wanted was a gold chain and Kangol" on "The Dark (Trinity)." By the end, though, there is hope, as we look to "Tomorrow,"
and Raheem DeVaughn sings "We all fall short sometimes/It costs nothing to help sometimes."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">"As the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular," Questlove wrote in one of the New York essays. "We expect that. But
those things don’t necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today." This is the challenge they have set for themselves, and as the brave, innovative, profound
<i>…and then you shoot your cousin</i> demonstrates, they remain determined to Occupy Hip-Hop, and to speak truth or die tryin'.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif";color:black">Carleen Donovan</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif";color:#C00000">PRESS HERE </span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif";color:black">(New York)</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif"">138 W. 25<sup>th</sup> St., 9<sup>th</sup> Floor, New York, NY 10001</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif"">P: (212) 246-2640<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif""><a href="mailto:carleen@pressherepublicity.com"><span style="color:blue">carleen@pressherepublicity.com</span></a>
</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif""><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif";color:#C00000">PRESS HERE </span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif"">(Los Angeles)</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif"">8105 West Third St.,<b><span style="color:#C00000"> </span></b>Los Angeles, CA 90048<b><span style="color:#C00000"> </span></b></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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