MARINA CHAVEZ THE ROOTS: Honing jams into songs

Arts Nouveau
Heroic and antiheroic literature, undiscovered musical talent and the stage version of Bollywood

Posted Sunday, Sept. 21, 2003; 1.15p.m. BST
music
THE ROOTS REINVENT THE RAP-ROCK SOUND
One of the Roots' early albums was titled Do You Want More?!!!??!, and the band's answer to that question is still yes, with just as many exclamation points (and maybe not so many question marks). But despite a career that has lasted more than a decade, the band is looking to shake things up. Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, the Roots' drummer, says the group is considering calling its next album The Tipping Point, a reference to the Malcolm Gladwell book about the momentum of ideas, and to the fact that the band members are still seeking to take their career to that next level. "Our original fans are in their 30s," says Thompson. "Their little brothers or cousins are our new audience."

So the Roots are making some changes. The group plans to start recording a new album this month, for release next year. A guitarist, Kirk Douglas (nope, not that Kirk, and yes, he's heard the jokes), has been added to the core lineup — Thompson, vocalist Black Thought, keyboardist Kamal and bassist Hub. Another guitarist, Martin Luther (not that one either), will also play on some cuts.

The band, which has combined rock and rap on past releases, hopes to pioneer a more sophisticated blend of the genres. Says Thompson: "[The Rolling Stones'] Exile on Main St. is my blueprint." The plan is to invite other musicians — John Mayer, Macy Gray and Nas are on the wish list — to drop by for jam sessions out of which, they trust, songs will emerge. The Roots' Philadelphia studio has even been tricked out with a whole bunch of amenities so the band can play host to longer, later jam sessions. "We definitely want a darker, murkier texture," says Thompson. We'll know next year how well it works out. — By Christopher John Farley

THESE GUYS JUST MIGHT BE YOUR NEW FAVORITE BAND
Music being the most abstract of the popular arts, it is hard to know exactly why some bands succeed and others fail. This much we do know: Spoon was once a band teetering toward failure. It was the late '90s, and Spoon was playing competent post-punk in the tradition of Wire and the Pixies. And in the post-punk tradition, the group was widely ignored. After a two-month affiliation with a major label, Spoon had its contract revoked. The band was deemed not only hopelessly uncommercial but also hopelessly uninteresting.

Lead singer-songwriter Britt Daniel had a degree in radio, TV and film from the University of Texas to fall back on, but as he says now, "What was I gonna do with that?" Instead of sending out résumés, he wrote two hysterically cathartic songs about Ron Laffitte, the A.-and-R. guy who signed and then abandoned Spoon — The Agony of Laffitte and Laffitte Don't Fail Me Now. Daniel kept on writing and shuffled the lineup a bit, and in one of those moments that make up for all the Limp Bizkits in the world, Spoon stumbled onto a sound of its own. Girls Can Tell, the 2001 reanimation of Spoon, was a brilliantly minimalist rock album about love (or the lack of it). It was hardened but not ironic, tense but not jagged, smart but not so smart that Daniel couldn't shout "Aw-right!" to get his point across. The songs were about small things — girlfriends, dads, girlfriends — but they contained a multitude of emotions, and the music was so melodic that listeners were reminded just how great rock could be.

Word spread, and 2002's equally good Kill the Moonlight enlarged the cult. As with R.E.M. in the late '80s, one senses that Spoon could be not just a distinctive band but the rare distinctive band that is also popular. Daniel is sequestered at home in Austin, Texas, adhering to a strict writing regimen in order to get a new album, Captured to Be Cooked, out by spring 2004. "I try to get up early, have some cereal, have a run and then don't talk to anybody for eight hours," he says. "It's really hard." Daniel has written 40 songs, but thinks only four of them will make the album. "There's too much going on in a lot of them. My favorite songs are minimal — We Will Rock You, Back in Black, Kiss by Prince. Those songs take on the world, but they do it with just a few instruments. I can't explain why," he says, "but that's really all you need." — By Josh Tyrangiel

books
HER SISTER'S KEEPER
Olivia Hunt, 34, is a loser. She lost her job at Universal Studios after the movie she worked on — Lloyd, the Hamster — flopped at the box office. Her dream project, a film adaptation of Don Quixote, is going nowhere. Her boyfriend Michael recently bailed on her. And she just noticed a mustache hair on her upper lip. "Jimmy Stewart," she writes to a friend, "had a helluva lot more to live for when he tried to off himself in It's a Wonderful Life."

And that's before she gets the bad news: her younger sister Madeleine, who has everything to live for, has leukemia. That's the setup in Elisabeth Robinson's The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, a novel that's likely to be the first pleasant literary surprise of 2004. Robinson wisely chooses to tell Olivia's story through her letters and e-mail, allowing her to shift with unnerving speed from hilarious satire — in letters to Robin Williams and Danny DeVito begging them to look at scripts — to devastatingly painful accounts of Madeleine's decline. Robinson does both with the sad, sweet voice of experience, having been around the Hollywood track a few times — she has a producing credit on Braveheart — and having seen her sister through a terminal illness. "All your life you try to imagine what bad news sounds like," she writes, "but when you actually hear bad news, it simply makes no sense; it's like being told the definition of a black hole by a physicist, directions by a local, the evidence of God by a priest." Tough, tender and tearful, Hunt Sisters helps us make sense of it all. — By Lev Grossman

ISAAC NEWTON, ACTION HERO
Cult-classic science-fiction novel — check. Comic novel about environmentalists — check. Best-selling thriller — also check. What is there left for Neal Stephenson — author of Snow Crash, Zodiac and Cryptonomicon, among other novels — to write? The answer is The Baroque Cycle, a stunning 3,000-page trilogy about 17th century scientists that will defy any category, genre, precedent or label — except for genius. (That's right, I'm using the g-word.)

The Baroque Cycle is so huge that it's being released in six-month intervals, Matrix-style: Quicksilver drops in September, The Confusion in April 2004 and The System of the World in October 2004. But you'll wish it were longer. Its scope is galactically vast and encompasses the lives of noblemen, vagabonds and, above all, thinkers. Amid the still smoking aftermath of the Fire of London, the likes of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz (both major characters) are laying the foundations of modern science by hand, equation by equation. Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking and thrilling. In The Baroque Cycle, he proves on an epic scale that the key to knowing what's next is understanding what has come before. — L.G.

theater
CLASH OF THE TITANS
London in 2004 will witness a battle between musical-theater giants: Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has written his first new musical in four years, and producer Cameron Mackintosh, who is returning with his first since My Fair Lady, which opened in 2001. For Lloyd Webber, the real competition may be against himself—the Phantom of the Opera tunesmith is bouncing back from the commercial failure of The Beautiful Game, his 2000 musical about the rise of sectarian violence in Ireland that left critics impressed but his moneymen nonplussed. Returning to the gothic territory that inspired Phantom (which has taken in almost twice as much as the highest-grossing movie, Titanic), his next show, expected in autumn, is The Woman in White, based on Victorian author Wilkie Collins’ atmospheric chiller, a blend of ghost story and sleuthery.

Sounds good — but can it compete with the world’s favorite flying nanny? Mackintosh and Disney have joined forces on a stage version of Mary Poppins, set to open late next year. With the producers’ gifts for stage trickery (Mackintosh brought a helicopter to the stage in Miss Saigon while Disney created marvelous feats of puppetry in The Lion King), Mary is sure to go on one amazing flight.

A more original prospect is film-composer John Barry’s return to the stage with a musical based on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The gangster’s tale is shot through with Catholic fear of damnation, and Barry promises a suitably dark show. It’s scheduled for September, with Michael Attenborough — son of Richard, who starred in the classic 1947 film — slated to direct. — By James Inverne

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