Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

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

Paul Humphrey was a session drummer who worked with everyone from Jimmy Smith and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and Marvin Gaye. He was also the drummer for Lawrence Welk’s TV show in the late seventies, and his children would sometimes appear with him on the show. Sound familiar?

The album opened up with a tribute to Dilla, “Dilltastic Vol Won(derful),” which sampled Slum Village.

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.

As far as he was concerned, he had spent years busting his ass so that I could go to a private music school and then a private Christian academy. He was getting me the best education that he could so that I could go on to become Bernard Purdie, not so that I could stand on stage while my punk friend said, “Bitch, suck my dick.”

and while it did okay for us—it stalled near the lower end of the Top 100—it didn’t feel like a step forward or even an interesting step backward. It was a form of treading water, or responding to trends rather than doing anything new or interesting or even particularly real.

The first show was rocky, though less so than the practice one. The second show was less rocky than the first. But I still wasn’t convinced that we belonged on a late-night TV show. When you’re in a new situation, there’s always a flash of recognition. Sometimes it’s the flash that you can’t handle it. Sometimes it’s the flash that you can. And som

Twitter hadn’t arrived yet, so I went on the online community I had created, OkayPlayer, and asked, “Does anyone know about this guy? It’s one of the best demos I’ve heard since Jill Scott or Slum Village.”

Stephen Starr: Here’s to a good future.