Things Fall Apart [Music on Vinyl Edition]

THINGS FALL APART was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Rap Album."You Got Me" was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance By A Duo Or Group. Hip-hop is about presence. Whether party- or street-oriented, it tends to keeps its listeners firmly centered in their own skin: hands in the air, guard your grill, watch your back. In spite of the blunted ethos of the late '90s and the emergence of trip-hop, it's a rare hip-hop record that causes your eyes to go out of focus and your brain to operate freely in that space that makes us describe music as "deep."THINGS FALL APART achieves that distinct sort of transcendence perhaps because it is not trying to save, reinvigorate, or resurrect the artform. As the title (taken from Chinua Achebe's novel on the loss of traditional African culture during colonization) suggests, the record takes the death of hip-hop as its starting point. Where earlier Roots albums captured the live feeling of the open mic/jam sessions for