The Roots and Floetry. Live at The Roxy, Boston. Wednesday May 18 2005

* Intro * The Scene * The Vibe Y'All * Outro *

Intro

I Shall... Proceed... And Continue... To Rock The Mic
Everybody Is A Star
"Go All Stars, Get Down For Y'all"
The 'Notic, The Hypnotic = Floetry, Floacism
All You Gotta Do Is Say Yes
Illadelph Halflife Meets Ill London Flow
Bring Some Money To Spend And Somebody To Lend And Some Worthwhile Money Not Some 20s And 10s
Adrenaline
Boom!
They're Coming To Break You Off
Duck Down
Don't Say Nuthin'
All Roads Lead To Apache
With Thought At Work, It's The Next Movement
I Don't Care As Long As The Bass Line's Thumping And The Drum Line's Banging Away
Kool Herc Ain't Never Seen A Royalty Check
Hip Hop You're The Love Of My Life
The Legendary Roots Crew Stay Cool In The Melting Pot
We Are The Ultimate (Rock-Rocking It)
That's What's Happening In The Parking Lot. That's What's Happening On Stage.
Din Da Da (Dun Do Do)
Do You Want More?
Somebody's Gotta Do It When The Guns Are Drawn
The Roots Come Alive
The Tipping Point Is Here And That's The Bottom Line
Give The Drummer Some
Keep the Beat Going
Bring The Beat Back. Bring The Beat Back.

The Scene

You might sense a little exuberance, a little elation, a little plain joy in these parts and you'd be right. Wednesday night with The Roots and Floetry was even more reason to sport that wide smile that I've been bearing of late. It was a cheer that started in the long lines that stretched out for 2 blocks outside The Roxy. In downtown Boston, the Theatre District is very close to what is lovingly called the Combat Zone. Indeed during my first visit to Chinatown in 1991, there were gunshots and people scrambling as we walked out of the Boylston T Stop (200 metres from The Roxy) to try to get some Dim Sum. Most Harvard students tend to stay in Cambridge which has pretty much everyting they need thus each excursion to Boston and its environs is an event. With guns drawn, that outing certainly fitted the bill;it was a great Sunday brunch by the way, baptism by fire as it were.

Now of course the city has cleaned things up since then. There was a concerted effort in this liberal bastion to husband the commons in a kinder, gentler mode than Rudy MussoGiuliani in New York. In the black community at least, the churches got everyone together and knocked heads around. There was one incident that was the last straw the community could bear in 1992 when teenage gang members came guns drawn chasing people into Morning Star Baptist Church and stabbed a kid during a funeral service for a teenager who himself had been killed in a drive-by shooting days earlier. Pastors and Samaritans everwhere started hitting the streets and patiently mentoring youths and forming a Ten Point Coalition that hasn't let ever since. With the Big Dig Irish/Italian/Federal/Mafia money to spread around for the past 15 years, a little dotcom boom and bust, the current biotech splurging, and a set of savvy universities around Boston with their 300,000 students in mind, it appeared that lots of things could go well for the community and economy. The notion was that it would pay for government and even Big Government to actually to manage the cultural and economic zeitgest so that social ties were woven together and one wouldn't end up like the anomic New Haven, to take an example of what social neglect can do.