The Roots cover Fishbone in “honor” of Michelle Bachmann

Posted by aubin on Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 1:00 PM (EST)

A bit of controversy going on after The Roots performed Fishbone's 1985 song, "Lyin'Ass Bitch" to usher in Republican presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann. NBC has pulled the clip, but mirrors of the clip have surfaced. Jimmy Fallon commented on the controversy via his Twitter noting:

I'm honored that Michele Bachmann was on our show yesterday and I'm so sorry about the intro mess. I really hope she comes back. [The Roots]' Questlove is grounded.

Bands in this story

Fishbone

Television (59 comments)

Please login or register to post comments.What are the benefits of having a Punknews.org account?

Share your opinion by posting comments on the stories that interest you
Rate music and bands and help shape the weekly top ten
Let Punknews.org use your ratings to help you find bands and albums you might like
Customize features on the site to get the news the way you want.

Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not respon sible for them in any way. Seriously.

Dante3000 (rich) (November 23, 2011)

La-la-lala-la-la-lalala!

Anyone seen the Fishbone documentary? I've heard good things.

LinoleumMagazine (November 23, 2011)

Yes, I saw a screening recently (with Angelo and Norwood doing a Q & A afterwards!). Good stuff. If you like Fishbone, you'll love it.

Powderdaze (November 23, 2011)

good for The Roots

jeffrocentric (November 27, 2011)

fallon is doing pretty amusing things on his show. and having the roots as your house band makes it that much more fun. anyone done any research on bachman? she's a wacko.

www.shinyglasshouses.com

SloaneDaley (November 23, 2011)

Roots biting the hand that feeds!

I wonder if it was staged to get attention for Jimmy Fallon's boring ass.

baldsteve (November 23, 2011)

Staged or not, that's pretty ballsy.

Dante3000 (rich) (November 23, 2011)

Jimmy Fallon is someone I like in principle more than I like his show. He seems to have done a number of cool things (from having the roots be his backing band to how he addressed the Tonight show situation) but I really do not enjoy his show at all.

Dante3000 (rich) (November 23, 2011)

Also, it makes me feel better about The Roots. I mean, I love their music (I have most if not all of their albums) and they've always been a pretty socially conscious act. I know they're older and more settled and times have changed but it's nice to know that they can still ruffle some feathers.

MN_DrNick (November 23, 2011)

Not the first time the Roots did this. When those two idiots from "The Hills" were on (Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag), they played Beck's "Loser". They also played "Illegal Alien" by Genesis when Lou Dobbs was on.

Heathbar (November 23, 2011)

And Lou is still hopping mad about it. You can almost feel his jowls wobbling.

willowrain (November 24, 2011)

Oh my god this is amazing!

This Roots rule. I love how they can stir things up just by playing a few bars of an old song.

Deadpan (November 23, 2011)

Well, I laughed.

MN_DrNick (November 23, 2011)

Yesterday's news, Org. But this is still great.

skolarx (November 23, 2011)

On one hand, one of my favorite bands got a huge push (probably their biggest mainstream exposure since Back To The Beach) but on the other hand, now the right has something new to bitch about and drive into the ground. I noticed their talking point on this is calling it "classless"

skolarx (November 23, 2011)

Should also say that I thought it was hilarious and very fitting. If ?uestlove had kept quiet about it (him tweeting something refering to it is what brought the media attention to the song,) it probably would have been funnier.

lostcausegiveup (November 23, 2011)

haha, wow, canadian politics is pretty damn boring most of the time compared to the states. funny stuff.

Heathbar (November 23, 2011)

Boring in politics is good. When C-SPAN makes a pacifist want to jump through their television and throttle a seventy-year-old man, it is time for reform.

Mystereohasmono (November 23, 2011)

I'd like to throttle a seventy-year-old man. Where's baldsteve?

Heathbar (November 23, 2011)

Where else? Watching Full House re-runs. Duuuuuuhhhh.

lostcausegiveup (November 23, 2011)

Maaaaaaatttttllllllooocccckkkk!!

Mystereohasmono (November 23, 2011)

Looking at that tired old freak has made me realize I'm no spring chicken myself.

baldsteve (November 23, 2011)

lostcausegiveup (November 23, 2011)

no argument. for the most part, the attacks are on policy and the issues here, not the candidates personal life, or how many babies they've eaten.

Misanthropee (November 23, 2011)

I don't think it's a bad thing your country is much lighter on Evangelicals, apathy and general ignorance. Being bored is better than being suicidally exasperated all the time.

lostcausegiveup (November 23, 2011)

yeah, i don't think it's a bad thing either. sometimes i watch what's going on down in the states politcal wise, and feel like i should have paid for admission and have a bucket of popcorn.

Heathbar (November 23, 2011)

Please do. Make all checks payable to the United States Government. Don't bother suggesting where to put the money. They're really good with budgets and the appropriation of funds to worthy causes.

laserguidedbygod (November 23, 2011)

Usually I'm pretty annoyed by your commenting output, but this sums it up so, so nicely. Bravo.

Misanthropee (November 23, 2011)

Nobody's more entertaining than the British parliament, though. One of the only things I miss about having TV is the House of Commons on CSPAN-2.

hashbrowns (November 23, 2011)

the Welsh Guard already did it!

T-Buzz (November 23, 2011)

The singer of Fishbone charged my friend $5 to have his picture taken with him.

loki13 (November 23, 2011)

$5 to steal his soul...sounds like a good deal, just ask Milhouse.

MikeApathy (November 24, 2011)

That's not surprising at all. Angelo is notoriously bad with money and business, he probably needed it. There's a few popular theories on why they never really "broke through"; one being the "Living Colour" theory, that the white album-buying public wasn't ready for a black rock/funk/ska/punk yada yada band. Two, Angelo's bad business acumen sandbagged every real opportunity they were ever poised to take advantage of.

fox82 (November 24, 2011)

Three, they never were that great a band in the first place.

Skibz777 (November 24, 2011)

I wouldn't rank them as one of the defining bands of the decade, but I don't see how anyone can say that 'Truth & Soul', 'The Reality of My Surroundings' and 'Give A Monkey a Brain' aren't works of excellent craft and quality.

fox82 (November 25, 2011)

Not that many people gave a shit about a band mixing up every single kind of music the band members were interested in. Ten, fifteen years after their time and their music really hasn't aged that well, but somehow everyone remembers them as being great. Meh to the maxx.

Skibz777 (November 25, 2011)

You're speaking to someone who's a big fan of groups like Mr. Bungle, so naturally I disagree (on principle...it really depends on how a band executes such eclecticism). I never really saw those albums as being *that* eclectic...Fishbone at least had a specific stylistic focus (funk/metal, reggae/ska) and familiar musical approach with each song, as opposed to just blindly throwing out whatever they could (country, polka, speed metal, etc.). 'Give A Monkey A Brain...' in particular is by far their most straightforward attempt at rock music as it was meant to be their mainstream breakthrough, but was ironically dismissed by fans and critics exactly because it lacked the diversity of its predecessors. Make up your mind, people.

As far as aging, yeah, they're pretty much a product of their time, but no more embarrassingly so than the Red Hot Chili Pepper's earliest albums, for instance, or any other band from that scene.

fox82 (November 25, 2011)

I like a ton of obscure and weird bands myself, but that doesn't mean they are 'pop' enough to make it "big" or whatever.

What I am trying to say is that Fishbone's weirdness (a selling point for you, from what I gather) worked against that goal (if it even was a goal) when they were around 'back in the day', so I can't see them getting any bigger these days when everyone has had the time to play 'catch up'.

Skibz777 (November 25, 2011)

I don't see their "weirdness" as a selling point at all, and think you're quite overselling that aspect. I don't think they're anymore weirder than P-Funk were. Some of my most favorite songs of theirs are the most straightforward: "Fight the Youth", "When Problems Arise", the majority of 'Give A Monkey...', etc.. During that peak of their career (about '86-'93), they were pumping out some of the most creative and intelligent music out of the whole LA funk-rock/alt-metal scene. In later years, as Angelo took more control over the band, the music got progressively weirder/"artsier", and the band as a whole suffered. But still, those four early albums are solid pieces of work.

As far as what denied them their success, I don't really know or care. Great bands sometimes get ignored, bad bands sometimes get huge; who's to tell what works for who?

NotSteven (November 24, 2011)

I think what nobody actually seems to acknowledge is how weird Fishbone is. The few people I showed them too back in highschool always thought they were way too weird. Sure, they would really like one song that played to their liking of a specific genre (Sunless Saturday, Servitude, Party at Ground Zero), but hated everything else they did and who they were. My older brother hated Fishbone right away when I showed him the SNL Sunless Saturday video 'cause he thought Angelo was too weird. It's not even that they're black and they play metal, or they play too many styles and stuff. It's that they had songs like Slow Bus Movin' and Pressure and VTLOTFDGF and Ugly and Warmth of Your Breath and Babyhead and Drunk Skitzo that displayed all these eccentricities which turn off most people, and l'm including genuine music fans when I say that. Of course, I'm weird enough to have Fishbone be my favorite band and openly include Chim Chim's Badass Revenge among the classic albums (though to me it is their last great one).

johnnyz77 (November 23, 2011)

Questlove is the man!

The Roots are great. they even have a punk song on one of their cd's.

bearerofevilfancy (November 23, 2011)

You know I'm aware that this is a punk site and all but does anybody else thing that this sort of stunt lowers the level of discourse at all? If anybody looks at the republican contenders for president, it's no secret that they are, for the most part, cartoon characters but I do not believe that should entitle EVERYONE to be as silly as them. We're facing some serious problems in this country that require serious answers and the implications of such a cast of characters who may potentially be our president is truly frightening. I understand that this is in good fun and Michelle Bachman tends to make up her own history, make unfounded factless assertions about anything she's talking about, and claim that God speaks directly to her but rather than make her even more a joke than she already is, perhaps it would be more effective to beat her on an intellectual front.

loki13 (November 23, 2011)

I'd beat her intellectual front!

Misanthropee (November 23, 2011)

You have a point, but I'm a great believer in the power of ridicule. Successfully take the piss out of somebody and you get the upper hand while also making it harder for others to take them seriously. Plus, sometimes battling on a level playing field gives credibility to those who don't deserve it. For someone like Bachmann who doesn't "believe" in evolution, for example, the intellectual fight is already won. Ridicule and scorn may be more useful, especially since she IS a cartoon character and blind public perception is all she has.

skolarx (November 23, 2011)

Agreed. The real downside to this is now they will focus on this "stunt" and ignore real issues for a while

Heathbar (November 23, 2011)

Don't forget portray ?uestlove as a racist, and The Roots as a radical leftist consortium that has descended upon television to compromise our well-founded values.

skolarx (November 23, 2011)

I like that if you read comments on mainstream news sites, they go really quick from calling ?uestlove a racist and sexist to calling all black people racists an sexists. There are some seriously frightening people out there

flood (November 23, 2011)

fallon's a total weasel for apologizing and trying to claim he didn't know about it... he's a comedian who made his living lampooning on SNL... he knew full well they were going to drop a bomb like this.. the band even tweeted about it before it happened... don't you think his handlers monitor that kinda thing? grow some balls jimmy.

singthblues (November 23, 2011)

weasel? you don't think he was forced to make some sort of statement like that by higher-ups at NBC? i though the part of it where he said Questlove was grounded was pretty funny.

thismikeisapipebomb (November 23, 2011)

The tweet came after the show was filmed, but before it aired...it's possible he didn't know it was going to happen. Also saying ?uestlove is 'grounded' is hardly a sincere apology.

domotime3 (November 23, 2011)

that is the funniest thing i've seen in 30 years

NotSteven (November 23, 2011)

As a Fishbone fan, I loved this so much. But although what first struck me as funny as that nobody in the audience, nor Bachmann herself, had any idea they were playing a song called "Lyin' Ass Bitch", I then realized that it's actually musically strange and offensive enough to have made everyone weirded out without being in on the joke. Afterall, you got some guy shouting "SHE'S JUST A!" over and over again while the drums just pound away.

Urkman (November 23, 2011)

What happened 31 years ago that topped this?

Skibz777 (November 23, 2011)

Well, that would have been 1980, so I assume he's talking about the time he saw 'Herbie Goes Bananas' in theaters.

MikeApathy (November 24, 2011)

Well 32 years ago, Mrs. Apathy gave birth to 'lil baby Mike and the doctors all found it pretty funny that the last name was Apathy. A doctor even told mom that Mike Apathy sounds like a made up name a blogger would use. Funny considering there wasn't even an internet back then. How did he even know what an internet was, let alone get my future hobby right? WEIRD.

So, we do music recommendations from time to time, so here's one. Pollution People. Good stuff. The article directly below this one, on the home page, is a tour story from them about Florida meth-heads if you're into they sorta thing, fyi.

http://theoctopushamstring.com/2011/11/22/follow-up-to-tu esdays-hamstring-music-recommendation-the-music-one/

Urkman (November 23, 2011)

I don't give two shits about Bachmann, but there is a total double standard here. Michelle Obama gets booed at a Nascar race and people are outraged, but I would bet 95% of those people upset about that incident would say they found this funny and no big deal. It's lowest common denominator bullshit. Way to feed assholes like Rush Limbaugh ammunition Roots.

mattramone (November 23, 2011)

NASCAR is for mouthbreathing morons and, like all scary lunatic fundies, Michele Bachmann is stoked on the end of the world. Fuck her. No double stardard here.

MikeApathy (November 24, 2011)

I don't know, Matty. Urkel kinda has a point. There are a shitload of double-standards in regards to race in this country, in 2011. Actually the fact that we're even discussing it in racial terms is completely backwards of you really think about it. Well, I assume we're talking about race here...it wasn't directly said.

Also, on an un-related note, I just saw a Kia commercial on the TV Land network (midnight on the West Coast) where they referred to their new model as, "badass." Not quite sure what I think about that.

MikeApathy (November 24, 2011)

Actually...yes we were talking about race specifically. NASCAR. Heyooooooo!!!

baronvonfuckyoustien (November 24, 2011)

I love that word Fundy. We need to used to more often