Those of you old enough to remember the process of actually acquiring music by means of a tangible medium like compact discs may remember The Roots' idiosyncratic numbering scheme for their album tracks.
To wit, the band got the idea to make their tracks number consecutively, so their second album wouldn't start over again at track #1 but rather continue with track #18 (the first album having seventeen tracks), their third starting at track #34, and so on.
Well, it seems obvious now, but if you weren't already a hip hop head, probably all you saw at first was Things Fall Apart and its numbering from #54, which could have meant any number of things. Perhaps if the first album and the second could be laid out side by side I would have grasped the trick immediately.
But Organix was the album that was hardest to track down. Things Fall Apart blew everything up for them, obviously, and you could find Do You Want More? with a trip to just a couple of record stores. But The Roots' inaugural album somehow just wasn't ever in the CD bins, not at the stores uptown or the superstore in Union Square, not at Kim's on Broadway or even the stores in Harlem. I don't know, maybe it was a NY-Philly thing? Like, Giants and Met fans didn't want to stock Philadelphia bands?
Oh, was I wandering? I'm sorry, I think I was wandering. Anyway. This is a better hip hop act that's about a mile better than your favorite hip hop act, no matter who that is (with, like, two possible exceptions). You didn't pay attention to them when they started, and neither did I or anyone we knew, but... yeah. Twenty-one years now.
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