From 2000 to 2002, Common, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo and The Roots recorded music at Jimi Hendrix’s fabled Electric Lady Studios that ran counter to Black music trends of the time (and more akin to the ’70s records they all loved). The Roots released Phrenology as the last of that batch of unbridled creativity, and it’s conceivably the group’s final classic album. “Something in the Way of Things (In Town)” poetically closes the album with the late, great Amiri Baraka. Black Thought fires off deadly bars on “Thought @ Work.” And at 10:24, “Water” stretches out over three movements, a rarely effective avant-garde hip-hop moment.