#23, “You Got Me,” The Roots (feat. Erykah Badu) (1999)

150 Favorite Songs: #23, “You Got Me,” The Roots (feat. Erykah Badu) (1999)

One thing I’ve learned about myself from this project is that there are things that matter to me more than I think they do. I first started to learn about hip hop when I was seventeen or eighteen, working at an “urban” record store in Lansing, Illinois—a time that coincided with artists who were previously on the fringes of the genre finding a space in the mainstream. I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of that late-nineties branch of hip hop, rap, and neo-soul music as embedded deeply within my tastes, but going through the songs that mean the most to me, I kept coming back to them.

“You Got Me” is probably the biggest hit from the alternative/conscious/progressive rap era. Before “You Got Me,” The Roots were on the forefront of the parts of the genre that needed a qualifier before you got to “rap”; afterwards, they were a platinum-selling act. It was a good time to have open and hungry ears.

It makes sense that “You Got Me” was such a hit, because it’s an example of the very best of what the looseness and experimentation of the era had to offer. It’s a love song, which is often hard to do in rap without being at least a little corny. (I quoted from “The Light” by Common in my wedding vows and even I can’t get through the whole song without cringing a little.) There’s only so much first-person earnestness you can take before it gets embarrassing. But “You Got Me” takes a sideways approach to it. It’s a story-song. There’s not a “you” in it, at least from Black Thought’s perspective; instead, he’s telling us about this young lady he’s just met and describing his infatuation to us, a third party, rather than professing it to her, and that makes a big difference. I think the fact that you can listen to this song without feeling beaten down by the intensity of some dude declaring his love over the exhausting course of 48 rhyming bars is a part of what propelled “You Got Me” into the mainstream.

It’s also the sound of the song, which doesn’t sound dated despite being twenty-five years old. That’s mostly a result of The Roots being a unique act in rap history, and one that few artists really tried to emulate. There’s a precision to “You Got Me” that’s incredibly compelling—the way the song opens with the solitary snare drum before the bass, keys, and acoustic guitar all come in at the same time; the patience with which the song unfolds, opening with that undeniable hook; the way that Black Thought is always right on time as a rapper; and the interplay between his voice and Eve’s when she gets her chance to tell her side of the song. It sounds like nothing else, but it doesn’t have a try-hard element to it. There’s an old Hollywood joke about an executive yelling after he sees a hit movie from a rival studio that he wants to do that kind of movie, and also he wants to blow everyone away with something totally fresh, and he just ends up screaming at his assistant “I want the same thing, but different!” And that’s kind of how “You Got Me” sounds—we’ve heard this sort of low-key jazz before, and Erykah Badu’s voice is familiar. We’ve heard love songs, and story-songs. But we haven’t really heard them put together like this before.

(Incidentally, Erykah Badu—who is one of the truly great American artists of the past fifty years—ended up with a lot of undue credit for this song! She was tapped to re-record the hook because the label insisted that Jill Scott, who wrote and originally sang it, wasn’t famous enough; then the second verse, which is mostly rapped by Eve, was frequently misattributed to Badu. It sucked for Eve, who was under contract with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath, but who wasn’t getting a push from the label—she was on a hit song just as she was trying to get out of her contract, and most people didn’t even know it was her. Fortunately, DMX swooped in shortly thereafter and Eve went on to have a wildly impressive career. It all worked out! Someone let me out of these parentheses.)

I think a lot about some parts of this song. The first lines, where Black Thought raps about the wild coincidence of meeting someone from his neighborhood while on tour in Europe, are such a clever way to open a song, just immediately hooking us with an anecdote that makes us want to know more. Then there’s the verse with Eve, where she drops a playful, but meaningful, warning about how relationships take commitment and work. She raps directly to him, letting him know that she’s got other options, but she’s devoted, expressing something that would sound very much like a lecture in less deft hands, but instead comes off as very much in the moment. It’s really a masterpiece of scene-setting and storytelling, executed with a high degree of difficulty just because of how many songs like it come off as corny.

The Roots were always good at walking a tightrope in their music; technically, I suppose, they still are, even though it’s been a decade since they put out a record. I got really lucky that they were so relevant when I was at an age where I was ready to hear them.