Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

All these thoughts, all these ideas, coalesced into what may have been our most consistent record since Things Fall Apart. It was so unified in its message, in fact, that one of the songs we thought would be the lead single, a track called “Birthday Girl” with Patrick Stump as a guest vocalist, had to be taken off the record. It was a topical song,

Justin Timberlake and Robert De Niro were the guests on our first real show. Once again, this was a stroke of brilliance from Lorne: he booked De Niro because he wanted a very difficult guest interview for Jimmy. He knew that the press would be relentless regardless, so he figured that he might as well give them a reason.

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.

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.

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

Common was showing such an appetite for experimentation that I wondered if he was hearing those work tapes and feeling like he needed to catch up. It was either that or the fact that he was falling under Erykah’s spell. Raphael Saadiq and I had an affectionate joke about her: never look her in the eye for more than five seconds, because then your b

Do I think there’s time? What is this book except proof that there’s always time, and that we’re always moving through it? There’s this show on HBO called “Witness,” a documentary series about photojournalists in the world’s trouble spots. We just ran a short review of it in the New Yorker, and in her piece, Emily Nussbaum made a point of how deepl

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.

But at the same time, the bridge is spanning two different landmasses: one of them is called “Oh, it’s so amazing to meet you—what an honor” and the other one is “You ain’t shit.” I never know for sure which one is my home and which one I am just visiting.