friend, the Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning writer Rachel Kaadzi
Ghansah, tells me, ‘‘Trotter is
a voice that knows social ills
and violence, but he chose art.’’
Trotter enrolled in Millers-
ville University, 75 miles away
from Philly, but the music called
him back to the city: He met fel-
low rapper, Malik B., who would
join the Roots crew; a year
later they were doing shows in
Europe, freestyling to sax and
trumpet solos. Back in Philly,
Trotter lived in an apartment
with books and musicians as
his companions. ‘‘I didn’t have
a phone, I didn’t have a TV,’’ he
has said. ‘‘I hardly had furniture
at my place at that time. There
was just books, lots of books and
CDs.’’ Trotter became an autodi-
dact, Ghansah told me. ‘‘He was
the reader,’’ she said. ‘‘He takes
everything in. Everything is a
reference, a possible citation.
And then it is all wrapped up
in his Philadelphia Negro uplift
thing — he loves his Blackness.’’
Around this time, Trotter
discovered the music of the
Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, whose example became
another lasting infl uence on his style. ‘‘Finding Fela was like fi nding my
spiritual animal,’’ he told me. He was in Tower Records with his childhood
friend, the singer Santigold, who was buying a Fela record for her father’s
birthday. Intrigued, Trotter listened along when Santigold’s father played
the music, which was a revelation. ‘‘I was blown away by how regal all the
music sounded, the political message, how free he was onstage,’’ he said.
Fela’s work ethic — he tended to perform regularly and intensely — and
big-band sensibility gave Trotter a sense of what it meant to be a performer.
‘‘Felt like James Brown meets Bob Marley with a Nigerian funk sensibili-
ty,’’ Trotter said. Trotter’s gift as a lyricist is his penchant for turning obser-
vation of the world around him into social commentary. When Trotter’s
verse turns to the streets, it adds complexity to the narratives of violence
that some rappers tend to glorify. Foretelling an argument that the legal
scholar James Forman Jr. would make in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book,
‘‘Locking Up Our Own,’’ Trotter, in the song ‘‘Panic!!!!!’’ from the Roots’s
1996 album (their second full-length release), ‘‘Illadelph Halfl ife,’’ rhymes
that while ‘‘police levels increase,’’ there’s ‘‘still crime on the street.’’ The
lyric points to Trotter’s awareness that in Black communities, the presence
of police does not guarantee protection. Another song from that album,
‘‘Section,’’ has Trotter rapping of his shared experience with those who
run the streets: ‘‘We congruent, lay on the corner with the traum’ unit.’’
While Trotter presents his familiarity with street life and its prevalence
in communities like his, he doesn’t lose sight of the violence that often
accompanies that life. In an era in which gangster rap dominated the
charts, Trotter could have woven tales of street woe and disaster. But,
he told me: ‘‘I came up in a family of gangsters and people who were in
the street life. Both my parents, that’s what they got off into, they were
involved in. My extended family, my brother. And it never ends well. It’s
always short-lived. I didn’t want the career version of that.’’ Trotter and
the Roots crew insisted that Black life include more than the narratives
of violence and street life.
In part, this vision of a socially engaged and intellectually curious hip-
hop was inspired by the Roots’ longtime manager, Richard Nichols. ‘‘That
was Rich, man,’’ Trotter told me. ‘‘Rich would put us on to a concept, like
the concept of nuclear half-life, nuclear fallout,’’ an idea that inspired the
title ‘‘Illadelph Halfl ife.’’ Nichols, who died in 2014 at 55 from complica-
tions of leukemia, was a Philadelphia native and student of Black culture
whose thinking became central to Trotter’s intellectual development and
the band’s identity. ‘‘He’d throw you a book — Chinua Achebe, check this
out. Check this Malcolm Gladwell out,’’ Trotter remembered. Nichols was
a student (literally) of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, architects of the
Black Arts Movement and literary inheritors of the Harlem Renaissance.
Nichols brought Trotter into that tradition. ‘‘Rich was the brains of this
operation in more ways than one,’’ Trotter told me. ‘‘He was a visionary.
He was an artist. He went above and beyond the role of management or
producer. He was our oracle. He was Obi-Wan Kenobi.’’
Put another way, Nichols envisioned the group as an example of hip-
hop’s relationship to a wider Black culture. Because of Nichols, the Roots
crew knew Black Arts Movement poets like Baraka and Ntozake Shange
personally. Sonia Sanchez, the Philadelphia poet who helped pioneer
Black-studies programs, was ‘‘Sister Sonia’’ to Trotter. Often, his lyrics
foregrounded his relationship to this lineage. ‘‘I’m just as dark as John
Henrik Clarke’s inner thoughts at the time of the Harlem Renaissance,’’
he once rapped, name checking the trailblazing historian of the Black
experience. Maybe it isn’t surprising, then, that Trotter found his way
to ‘‘Black No More.’’ Schuyler’s original novel is a classic of the Har-
lem Renaissance, even if it does diverge from the period’s complicated
love aff air with Blackness. Schuyler mocked his contemporaries as race-
obsessed fools, but ‘‘Black No More’’ is a book no less caught up in the
Renaissance’s incessant inquiry into the substance of this thing we call
‘‘Black experience.’’ And while Schuyler’s novel says that Black America
hungers to be white, Black Thought’s remix asserts the Black experience
can be interrogated independent of whiteness. Photograph from the estate of Mpozi Tolbert28 2.27.22
Trotttter aat aaa jamm seessioonn in Philladeeeelphiaa in 1 1199933 , durrring thhee earrly
days offf thee Roooottss.Thhe grroouppp lateer beeeecamme a fixttuureonnn latee-nnighhht TV.