The Roots - Things Fall Apart

The Roots made four albums before this one and have made plenty since, but Things Fall Apart is the one that got them a Grammy, a gold record and a permanent place in the canon. Released in February 1999, it came out of the Electric Lady sessions that also produced D'Angelo's Voodoo and Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun — the Soulquarian moment, with all the players circulating between rooms.

"You Got Me" is the hit, written with Jill Scott and sung by Badu, and it still does the thing where a drum-and-bass breakdown arrives in the last minute and nobody objects. But the album's spine is elsewhere: "The Next Movement" and "Adrenaline!" for the pure kinetic pleasure, "Act Too (The Love Of My Life)" with Common, "Double Trouble" with Mos Def trading bars with Black Thought at a speed that still sounds like showing off.

It opens with dialogue from Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues about black audiences abandoning jazz, which tells you exactly what the record is worried about. Twenty-five years later that anxiety reads as prophecy, and the album as the best case anyone made against it.

Double LP on 180 gram vinyl, from Geffen and Okayplayer.