STAND FOR SOMETHING is a carefully crafted musical and lyrical exploration into the mind and soul of a Black poet and an Afro-Chicano doctor and professor. Our unique experiences as men and artists create an engaging dynamic on the album. What started out as conversations turned into lessons that turned into knowledge that turned into passion that soon manifested as music. This project is purely motivated, wholly organic, and totally bulletproof. We've taken our time to ensure that the music is well worth your time and financial support. We gathered the best production to compliment our ideas. We were also diligent in rounding up the best featured artists who speak and understand the language of the communitites we're standing for and the overall vision of the project. STAND FOR SOMETHING addresses the Pre-Columbus presence of Africans in Mexico and South America. It details the fact that the indigenous roots of ancient America and the Pre-Columbus explorations of Africans throughout the ancient Americas, are the true beauty of our history that essentially connects us. It also confronts the current issue of black and brown community relations through intelligent and progressive Rhythm.And.Poetry. One of our goals with the Third Root project is to shed light on these topics and spark a dialogue that will inspire action. There are songs on this album that will make you smile, make you dance, make you think, make you curious, and hopefully make you grow. Either way, the music will definitely make you feel ... and that's what we believe has been missing from our communities and mainstream radio. We've put in countless days and nights of work and sacrificed to see this vision through. Third Root is not a singles- or radio-driven group. Our focus is to get the music to the communities that need to hear the message the most. We are committed to composing and performing the music at a level that will inspire other artists to do the same and to take it even further. Stand with us. Album Review: From the lilting sampled opening riffs of “Brother, Brother,” the first tune on Third Root’s sterling debut disc, the listener is immersed in a timeless sonic space, pulsing forward in an old school deep R&B groove, cascades of keys swirling all about, the mix held together with cannonades of propulsive righteous wordplay that connect rap to re-telling the history of brown and black peoples, “from Africa, to Mexico, to San Antonio and back.” Third Root, a San Anto hip-hop supergroup, brings together Easy Lee of Mojoe with Mexican Stepgrandfather (aka Marco Cervantes, my colleague on the UTSA faculty), along with a large cohort of other impressive local collaborators from Bombasta, Mingo Fishtrap, Mojoe, and some of the city’s most adept producers. It’s “the story of Saytown, connected by the culture of hip-hop … Eastside Black, Westside Brown.” Stand for Something is an exemplar of consciousness-raising hip-hop as popular pedagogy. When the duo isn’t engaged in funky theorizing (“division is the root of all confusion … criminalize the black and brown face”) they’re likely to be running through a vast archive of name-checking their mentors and precursors (“streetwise-intelligent, Satchmo-elegant, Chuck D-militant”) eventually including Robert Johnson, Carlos Santana, Randy Garibay, Steve Jordan, and Flaco Jiménez, among many other luminaries. Luxuriantly produced, Third Root’s disc runs from R&B and blues grooves, to mestizo mixes of accordion and brass in hip hop settings. There’s even room for bicephalic experiments that evoke Portishead and Radiohead. As they announce at one point, “so many d**e styles it’s like lyrical graffiti.” Stand for Something is a San Anto original, a mind-clearing antidote to the nonsense politics of our presidential campaign season. - John Phillip Santos, SA Current