Captain Morgan invited the Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots to record an anthem for the rum company’s ‘To Life, Love & Loot’ campaign. The band step aside from its hip-hop traditional approach and added some rock sound to the song. 

Photo: a napshot from Captain Morgan’s Facebook page

The anthem features rapper Black Thought as a rock star. Though the Roots is not a fan of  such corporate partnerships, the band’s leader and drummer Questlove felt that Captain Morgan was a good fit for them.

“There’s no offer that we don’t heavily scrutinize [before accepting],” he told in an interview to HipHopDX. “We are artists; we are skeptical by nature. Captain Morgan is a very high-class product. Our main concern was presenting something that was just as high class, if you will, and to do it in such a short amount of time. We didn’t have any reservations other than that.”

The ‘To Life, Love & Loot’ campaign launched last spring with a ‘pirate’ TV spot dubbed ‘Dive’.

As the soundtrack of a 6-sec spot featured bass-guitar and paid tribute to rock, the new anthem was thought to continue the trend. The Roots band added some bass guitar to the anthem to correspond the Captain Morgan’s image and to surprise their fans.

“The challenge is really to make it concise in under a minute, and have some sort of adrenaline energy to it. It was a challenge but we rose to it,” said Quest.

The song can be downloaded from Captain Morgan’s Facebook page where also the behind-the-scenes footage of the recording process is available.