Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

Let’s say there’s an event and people around me get invited and I’m not invited. Some part of me will feel like a failure. How can you not? The real me knows that it’s just an event, but doubt enters my mind about why I’m not there. Is it because I’m not good enough?

I remember once, when I was a kid, hearing Johnny Winter singing “Tired of Tryin’ ” with Muddy Waters on guitar, on the Nothin’ but the Blues album, and hearing him sing and liking what I heard and then looking at a picture of him on the album and double-taking, maybe triple-taking, and then wondering what it meant to be black (or white, or albino)

It was a calculated decision but also an arbitrary one, something that seemed fully invented but also something that was the result of a long evolution. I think that’s the case with many hip-hop names: they’re a combination of nicknames, self-mythologizing self-portraits, and cool artifacts. You need something that looks good in the liner notes.

I loaded up on music. I can’t remember all the records I got, but one of them was The Blueprint by Jay-Z, which became the soundtrack of that event, of that period, for me. To say that I had mixed feelings about Jay-Z at that point in my career was an understatement. To me he represented much of what was wrong with hip-hop, although I couldn’t have

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 production was dense and menacing, louder and harsher than any record we had made, and so were the lyrics. The album took on prescription drug addiction, the way the media distorts the news, the risks of technology, and the financial crisis. And that’s just on the title track. There’s another song, “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” where Tari

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.”

“When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.”™

I was and am so devoted to the review process that I write the reviews for my own records. Almost no one knows this, but when I am making a Roots record, I write the review I think the album will receive and lay out the page just like it’s a Rolling Stone page from when I was ten or eleven. I draw the cover image in miniature and chicken-scratch in