The Roots are one of the most creative and socially conscious hip-hop bands today. Every album they release is a work of art, both musically and with lyrics that balance a social message with artistry.
With the release of their eleventh CD, they have outdone themselves by releasing a novel-in-music. Undun relates the story of the fictional character Redford Stevens. While I’m completely impressed with the endeavor, the music, and the lyrics, I will admit that the storyline is harder to follow than a novel-in-verse, simply because they are telling the entire life story of a drug dealer-gangster in only thirteen songs. Click here for the movie they released with the CD, available in full on youtube.
(Warning: This review does contain spoilers because I’m analyzing the lyrics of Undun to unravel the storyline as well as analyze the socially conscious message revealed through the story. It’s not a straightforward storyline. I think it’s safe to say that you can read this and then go listen to the CD and enjoy it just as much as if you didn’t know the storyline in advance.)
Told in reverse chronology, the title song “Undun” begins with the sound of a hospital machine flatlining. The irony of being “undun” in this moment of death becomes more significant as we look at the scope of Stevens’ life and work through the prism of his dying thoughts in the second song, “Sleep”:
I’ve lost a lot of sleep to dreams
And I do not miss them yet
I wouldn’t wish them on the worst of enemies
Let them burn, go from here
Like when autumn leaves…
Like his repentant thoughts in “Sleep,” in “Make My,” Stevens confesses that he was addicted to money and had withdrawal symptoms if he wasn’t making any. “Addicted to the green if I don’t ball I get the shakes.” But now, he’s regretting the choices he made:
I’d give it all for a peace of mind for heaven sakes
My heart so heavy that the ropes that hold my casket break
Cause everything that wasn’t for me I had to chase
I had to take…
As the song ends, Stevens admits, “If there’s a heaven I can’t find the stairway…”
In “One Time,” the song that chronicles the moment of Stevens’ death, Stevens declares he wishes he could be a different person. He wishes he could listen to his instinct that says a situation is no good and walk away before something bad happens. “But once you’ve had the best, better ain’t as good/ Weak-heartedness cannot be involved…” His identity is wrapped up as being one bad-ass gangster and as a result, he falls to his death trying to escape from the cops.
In “The Jump,” the album’s sixth song but occurring before Stevens meets his death at the bottom of a subway line, Stevens foreshadowed his own demise: “Yo, we obviously need to tone it down a bit/ Running round town spending time like it’s counterfeit…” In this song, he already regrets his lifetime of pursuing money and, though his death is still to come, he’s already thinking about what’s going to happen when he dies and has to face up to his ruthless materialism:
We’re all on a journey
Down the hall of memories
Don’t worry bout what you ain’t got
Leave with a little bit of dignity
Never loved what I had
Always felt like I deserved more
But when I
Make it to the other side
Make it to the other side
That’s when we’ll settle up the score
In “Stomp,” Stevens makes his fateful decision to be ruthless—nobody else is out there helping, they’re all out to screw you: “Blow the devil a kiss…./Don’t play chicken when I’m driving them crazy.” Yet this decision was preceded by his realization in “Lighthouse” that nobody’s going to help him make better choices. He’s in this on his own:
You’re face down in the ocean
And no one’s in the lighthouse
And it seems like you just screamed
It’s no one there to hear the sound
And it may feel like there’s no one there
That cares if you drown
Face down in the ocean
Perhaps this loneliness is a result of the decision he made to live life without regard to others. His fatalism emerges long before his decision to run from the cops in “The Jump” with his realization in “Tip the Scale (My Way)” that his decision to live the life “tryna tip the scales/my way, my way” isn’t going to go well:
Lotta n***** go to prison
How many come out Malcolm X?
….
I guess a n**** need to stay cunning
I guess when the cops coming need to start running.
This is precisely what happens to him down the road in life, of course–it is his fateful decision to run from the cops and jump down into the subway that ends his life.
“Tip the Scale” is the last song on the album with lyrics, and the first song if taken in chronological order. The remaining three songs are instrumental and take us back to Stevens’ death, which occurred in the album’s title song, all impending from the decisions he makes in this, the first song if understood in chronological order.
The instrumental songs take us through the chaos of death (or perhaps the chaos of Stevens’ early life as a gangster) into the peacefulness of a melody called “Finality” that suggests, at first, the sweetness of death and possibly being welcomed into the afterlife—but which clangs closed with an ominous sound invoking the idea that you will pay for your sins in the afterlife.
There’s no heavy moralism in “Undun,” just the musical art of revealing a man in a coma, reflecting on the violent choices he made that led to his early death.
For those who are considering introducing this to teenagers, the CD does contain explicit language, though it is not gratuitous. The voice is the voice of a gangster and he speaks with honesty and a certain eloquence even while using the language of the street.