Music Review | The Roots Regale The Teeming Prospect Park Masses
Village Voice - July 14, 2010 - Rob Harvilla
Fela!'s Sahr Ngaujah is our nominal host, while a pack of African hip-hop upstarts warms us up, featuring Brooklyn-via-Ghana MC Blitz the Ambassador and NYC-via-Sierra Leone posse Bajah + The Dry-Eyed Crew, both winsomely manic, a full horn section blasting away. And then, the legendary Roots crew, channeling their inner Axl Roses.
Yes, guitarist Captain Kirk is your MVP this evening -- one great thing about the Roots is he's one of several legitimate possibilities. They put out an actually quite excellent album, How I Got Over, just a few weeks ago, but it's too moody and contemplative for this celebratory scene, so after an opening gambit of Fela Kuti's "Sorrow, Tears and Blood" and a brief Talib Kweli interlude ("The Blast" and "Get By" and so forth), we head straight for "You Got Me," now more triumphant than melancholy, with Kirk first indulging in a bit of Peter Frampton chicanery before the song abruptly morphs into a fully committed "Sweet Child O' Mine" cover, Kirk handling the howling vox himself and bounding around the stage in full Hendrix/Funkadelic freakout mode. The crowd quite understandably freaks out as well, in an elbow-to-elbow/cheek-to-cheek sort of way.
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