Maybe Beyonce? Though I feel like she's not having as much fun.
Anyway, "The Seed (2.0)" is so named because it's a cover, sort of, of Cody ChesnuTT's "The Seed," which serves as the chorus of this song. That makes it not unlike Mark Ronson's sort of cover of Kasabian's "L.S.F."
Only, shit, dude. This song rocks. It's just sort of grafted onto the back of the original, which grooves, but is kind of quiet and slow. The original is like a cat. It's nice, and it's fuzzy, but kind of sleepy. Adding The Roots to "The Seed" is like surgically implanting a jet engine inside the cat.
Adding The Roots makes the whole enterprise fast and slick and gets you ?uestlove playing the absolute shit out of those drums, and while I'm vastly unqualified to comment on the style or quality of anyone's rapping, there is absolutely nothing I'd change about the lyrics to the verses or the way Black Thought delivers them. It's like how a cyclist on a time trial can get into a rhythm and is completely hauling ass while looking entirely unbothered by the kind of physical effort that would cause a normal person to have a heart attack and die.
It's just little reminders of The Roots' collective virtuosity that add up to make this song one of the ultimate 21st-Century bangers, despite it being (my earlier jet engine metaphor notwithstanding) not really all that loud or all that fast. It's Hub's dancing bass line or the way they all really lean into the Bb in the chorus. (Which is something I love, when you get an unexpected chord change in a song and the band is like, "Yeah, we're going here and we're taking you with us whether you like it or not.")
And that's not even getting into how on Phrenology they inserted a busted take of the intro to "The Seed (2.0)" at the end of "Thought @ Work" before just rolling straight into the real thing. This is a fuckin' jam, friends, and I adore it completely.
