Fight the Power

The final track on the Roots' latest full-length, Rising Down, is conspicuously cheerful. "Rising Up" features the '70s-funk synth pads and super-solid Tropicalia rhythm section you might expect from the first track on a Kanye West record. In the album's only nod to jazziness, it also includes a raspy hook sung by newcomer Chrisette Michele that tells a familiar story: "Yesterday I saw a b-girl crying/I walked up and asked 'What's wrong?'/She told me the radio's been playing the same song all day long." On past Roots records, this kind of lyric might have read as a typical don't-call-me-a-backpacker plaint about homogenized airwaves. Here, though, it comes across as something more. "Rising Up" is a sucker punch of sweetness and light that punctuates the most urgently malevolent modern funk record the band has assembled to date. And after 40 minutes of unrelenting doom, a lyric about repetition on the radio doesn't have to stretch too far to conjure the specter of Radio Raheem.

Who is Radio Raheem? Only Slant knows.