updated 11h ago
Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
But our charter changed for a little while. We were trying to make sense of Jimmy’s theory of the five-second read: if a song doesn’t grab you within that short span, it’s not going to grab you at all.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
black people who are the only black people at their jobs will feel a need to overcompensate and show their blackness explicitly.18 I’m not immune to this. In fact, I’m so susceptible to it that I know where to look for it.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
And then there was Kanye West. After he released his first album, he grabbed Mos, Talib, and Common, and brought them into his orbit. Suddenly, they were satellites of Kanye’s planet rather than ours.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
We wanted to take the attention and goodwill we had generated with Things Fall Apart and present a catalog album of everything we were able to do. We wanted to shatter people’s myths, not only about what rap groups could do, but also about what black groups could do. And we wanted to show everyone that our main reason for being was to change.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
Do You Want More?!!!??! was acid jazz, Illadelph Halflife was a kind of Wu-Tang–influenced hard hip-hop production, and Things Fall Apart was definitive neo soul. We were going into the cocoon again. I wasn’t worried about our audience. They would follow us or they wouldn’t—I was used to losing about half our audience each time and picking up new f
... See morefrom Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
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
... See morefrom Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
And even though Robert Christgau gave the record an A, for the first time I didn’t feel like were earning good grades. I felt like we were teaching the class.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago
He’s a very childlike presence. And it worked like a charm.
from Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ben Greenman
julie added 3mo ago