Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

would play ten orgasmic records and then two cool-down records, then eight orgasmic records followed by three cool-down records, then seven orgasmic records and four cool-down records, and then repeat until the audience was satisfied. Bands do the same thing with their setlists. They pace themselves. And artists do the same thing when they build an

Game Theory, the album that grew out of that directive, out of the rubble of Katrina and the confusion of the band’s middle age, was also a pained love letter to Philadelphia, which had become a virtual war zone, with twelve to fourteen murders per week. We were sick to see our home city this way, and hopeful that we could bring attention to the si

Even if I think of this as my book, it’s never only my story. It’s the story of other musicians, of other hip-hop groups, of other minds.

I really didn’t think that George W. Bush was going to win a second term, and I thought that a John Kerry presidency was going to mark the beginning of a new era where we were more careful about foreign entanglements, less aggressive on the international stage, more sensitive to the cost of those engagements for domestic health. I really thought th

He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What’s black culture? What’s hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn’t bloodlessly academic, either; there’s something very consequential about his approach.

The rest was a mix of substance and style. I was questioning, I was on a quest, I was looking for approval, I was questioning my need for approval.

The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police

1993: A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders / Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) Classic hip-hop is a sentence. And if the beginning of the sentence is me purchasing Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full at Crazy Eddie’s in 1987, then these two records are the end of the sentence. A year before them, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic had changed every

Our goals at that time were pretty modest: we wanted to have enough cash to go down to Wawa and get a quarter pound of honey-roasted turkey, a quarter pound of pepper-jack cheese, iced tea or lemonade, and a roll.