The 1990s File Feature
What They Do
What They Do: The Roots and the Most Elegant Critique in 1990s Hip-Hop The Live Band in a Beat-Machine World In 1997, most hip-hop was built on sampled loops…
01 The Story
What They Do: The Roots and the Most Elegant Critique in 1990s Hip-Hop
The Live Band in a Beat-Machine World
In 1997, most hip-hop was built on sampled loops and drum machines. The Roots were doing something different and had been from the beginning: playing their music live, with actual instruments, in a genre that had largely moved away from live performance as a compositional method. Questlove's drumming, the rhythmic backbone of everything the group created, had a human feel that no drum machine could fully replicate, a slight variation in dynamics and timing that gave the music a breathing quality absent from programmed beats. That decision to remain a live band was a philosophical one as much as a practical one. It said something about where The Roots believed hip-hop came from and where they thought it needed to go to stay honest to its own origins.
Illadelph Halflife and the Chart Run
What They Do was the lead single from Illadelph Halflife, the group's third studio album and the record that brought them their first significant mainstream attention. The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 11, 1997, entering at number 85. Its climb was steady: through the seventies and sixties and fifties, reaching its peak of number 34 on March 1, 1997 and spending 15 weeks on the chart. For a group that had been operating largely in the hip-hop underground and through live performance circuits, that mainstream chart presence represented a meaningful expansion of their audience and a validation of years of careful groundwork.
The album had been highly anticipated in hip-hop circles. The Roots had cultivated a devoted following through their relentless live schedule and their first two albums, and Illadelph Halflife delivered on the creative promise those early records had shown. The production reflected the group's core philosophy: treating hip-hop as a live music proposition, not merely a studio craft.
The Music Video as Satire
The music video for What They Do deserves particular mention because it became one of the most talked-about clips of 1997 in hip-hop circles. The Roots filmed themselves performing all the visual clichés of contemporary rap videos, the champagne popping, the luxury cars, the conspicuous display of material wealth, while on-screen text pointed out exactly what each cliché was and what it was supposed to signify. A label naming a visual element and explaining its function would appear just as the group executed that very visual element on screen. It was formal satire executed with precision, and it made explicit what the song was doing musically and lyrically: interrogating the conventions of a genre that the group loved and wanted to push past.
The video was a brave piece of work for a group on a commercial label trying to break through to a mainstream audience. It risked alienating exactly the listeners it needed to attract. The fact that it worked, that people found it funny and sharp rather than self-righteous, says something about the intelligence with which the Roots had calibrated their public identity.
Philadelphia's Finest and the Long Game
The Roots' trajectory from Illadelph Halflife forward was one of the most distinguished career arcs in hip-hop. The critical respect they earned through records like Things Fall Apart and Phrenology eventually translated into the cultural institution they became as the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. That path from underground rap heroes to mainstream institution was neither smooth nor inevitable, but it was consistent: the group never abandoned the musical values established on records like this one. The commercial breakthrough that made all of that possible began here, with What They Do, reaching number 34 on the Hot 100 and proving that an intellectually serious, musically uncompromising hip-hop act could find a genuine mainstream audience. With over 26 million YouTube views, the track endures as a document of a group that played the long game and won.
"What They Do" — The Roots' singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "What They Do": Authenticity, Critique, and Hip-Hop's Mirror Moment
A Love Letter That Is Also an Indictment
The most interesting critical texts are written from inside the thing being criticized, and What They Do operates exactly this way. The Roots were not outsiders to hip-hop throwing rocks at a genre they looked down on. They were deeply invested practitioners calling out patterns they found limiting within a form they genuinely loved. That dual position, insider and critic simultaneously, gives the song an unusual emotional charge. The frustration comes from caring, not from contempt.
The Cliché as Critique
The lyrical approach involves cataloging the conventions of late-1990s hip-hop presentation with a specificity that makes the critique land precisely. Black Thought's verses enumerate the markers of success that had become obligatory in the genre: the brand name references, the conspicuous consumption, the performance of status through material objects. The point is not that these things are inherently dishonest but that their reflexive, unexamined adoption had begun to replace actual creative thought. The genre was in danger of mistaking its conventions for its content.
The song argues implicitly for a different standard of authenticity, one rooted in creative originality and genuine experience rather than adherence to a set of visual and lyrical codes that had calcified into clichés. This was a brave argument to make in 1997, when the commercial success of hip-hop was generating enormous cultural pressure to conform to proven formulas.
The Live Instrument Question
The Roots' decision to build their music from live performance rather than sampling carried its own implicit argument about authenticity. A hip-hop record built on live drums, live bass, and live guitar made a claim about connection to musical tradition that was audible in every bar. The question of whether sampling was "real" musicianship was a live debate in 1990s hip-hop criticism, and The Roots positioned themselves on one side of it without being polemical about it. The music made the argument; the polemics were left to critics and fans.
What Gets Preserved
The deeper point of What They Do is about what endures. The material markers of hip-hop success in any given era have a shelf life determined by fashion and commerce. What lasts is the craft, the wordplay, the rhythmic invention, the emotional authenticity of the best work. The Roots were positioning themselves for longevity by investing in exactly those qualities while the genre's commercial mainstream chased shorter-term returns. The decision to make this argument publicly, in a major-label single from a well-received album, was a creative act of some courage. The audience that responded to it has stayed loyal across several decades.
"What They Do" — The Roots' singular moment on the 1990s charts.
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