John Legend & The Roots: Wake Up

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Re-imaging works of art is always a complicated process.  Being loyal to the source material while at the same time incorporating one’s individual style and vision is always a tricky proposition.  In music, cover songs tend to be of the hit-or-miss variety.  For every “All Along the Watchtower” moments of perfection, the flip side, such as Zac Brown covering “Oh My Sweet Carolina” leaves you looking for the nearest pair of earplugs and questioning why more stringent copyright laws don’t exist.  Fortunately for listeners, John Legend and The Roots have hooked up and fall into the former category by collaborating on a series of 12 funk-soul covers that pack a punch and take you back to 1972, both musically and thematically. 

Legend, a multiple-Grammy winning soul crooner teamed with The Roots, in the fall of 2008, looking to record songs that would echo the historic and sweeping political climate being shaped by the campaign of Barack Obama.  Being Philly natives, the musicians used Philly-soul legends Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” as a jumping off point for exploration into the vast 1970’s catalog of urban protest music.  However, rather than damning the collective aura of the nation, as was often the case in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, Legend and The Roots looked for songs that resonated with Obama’s themes of hope, engagement, and social consciousness.  As the year progressed, more songs were added until the final product reflected more than just a snapshot of a historic time period and instead used past musical genres to reflect the unceasing positivity ushered in by the 2008 election.  The selection material does, however, prove to be timeless, as Legend and The Roots work their way through the well-known: Marvin Gaye’s “Wholly Holy”, and Donny Hathaway’s “Little Ghetto Boy” (which comes with an added prologue); to lesser known gems like Mike James Kirkland’s “Hang on in There”. 

Shining through on each song is the suave crooning of Legend’s voice, which possesses a enduring quality of its own.  His register hits the upper and the lower levels when necessary but mostly gives off a cool and collected vibe that keeps the songs from suffering under too much heavy-handedness.  And as anyone who has seen them in their new gig as Jimmy Fallon’s late night house band can attest, The Roots can play any style any time, a valuable skill in re-interpreting these songs.  Their dynamic works best in the opening triple play of “Hard Times”, “Compared to What”, and “Wake Up Everybody” as the upbeat tempos and straight-ahead surging tempos scream at the listener with utmost urgency to heed the album’s title and “Wake Up!”  The pace then slows a bit in the middle before remerging back to send the album off on a high note.  Of particular note is track ten, Bill Withers’ anti-war screed “I Can’t Write Left Handed”, in which Legend uses a spoken-word intro about America’s “two wars” to inject the album with one of its only specific references to the current time.   The horrors of war are unfortunately a commonality shared by both Withers’ time and Legend’s and this song illustrates this ugly fact. 

In the end, Legend and The Roots succeed by paying tribute and shedding light on a long-lost era of influential and important American music.  They take this homage one step further, however, by tying themes of American life together and making soul, funk, and R&B music in 2009 undeniably theirs.
 

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