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"FacebookPinterest\n\n One of the funniest, most revealing moments in the brief history of \"Late Night with Jimmy Fallon\" occurred during an ongoing spoof of MTV's \"The Hills.\" Fallon and two members of his house band, the Roots\u2014drummer Ahmir \"?uestlove\" Thompson and MC Tariq \"Black Thought\" Trotter\u2014stand in a hallway at NBC's 30 Rockefeller Center. ?uestlove, sporting his trademark blowout Afro, is feeding nickels, very slowly, into a vending machine. \"You just getting one soda, or...?\" Fallon asks, his voice trailing off as ?uestlove stares him down. Then ?uestlove drops the rest of his nickels; Fallon bends down and wordlessly picks them all up. \n\n The joke: It's Fallon's show, but the Roots are really in charge. By the time his \"Late Night\" debuted in March 2009, the novel presence of the Philly-based hip-hop collective was pretty much the only element that people were excited for. At that point, the Roots were two decades deep into one of hip-hop's most creatively vibrant careers. They had made excellent albums. They had built a rep for killer live shows. They had launched Okayplayer, which has become a one-stop shop\u2014blog, collective, record label\u2014for authentic urban cool.\n\n And now Jimmy goddamn Fallon\u2014the Bieber-cute doofus whose signature move at \"Saturday Night Live\" was giggling through other performers' sketches\u2014was going to ruin all that. Yet much like Conan O'Brien before him, Fallon has made fools of us all. The show's ratings are up 10 percent from 2010 (though as Fallon notes, \"We're on at 12:37 a.m.; we're competing against infomercials\"), and he's got an edge on his CBS rival, Craig Ferguson. More unexpectedly, the show has a madcap energy like nothing else on late-night TV.\n\n In retrospect, the hiring of the Roots should have been a hint that Fallon was up to something different: more of a musical variety hour than another late-night snark-a-thon. Without the presence of the Roots, it's hard to imagine Fallon could have talked, say, Bruce Springsteen into a cover duet of Willow Smith's \"Whip My Hair.\" With an ordinary house band ladling out ersatz soul sounds, his \"Slow Jam the News\" might have left a vaguely racialized aftertaste; with the Roots, it's become \"Late Night's\" signature creation. \"You can only be one-dimensional in hip-hop. You have to be a caricature,\" ?uestlove says. \"This show allows us to be three-dimensional people.\" Jimmy goddamn Fallon."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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