Game Theory was an illustration of what happened when we planted our feet again. The tour that followed was augmented with a miniature brass band, a reminder of the collaboration with the TBC Brass Band we had envisioned and a kind of memorial to the fact that it was no longer possible.

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

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

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)

An album like Donuts—thirty-one short snippets, manipulated samples, overlaid dialogue, no real songs except that everything there is so endlessly tuneful and rhythmic—made people rethink some of their basic assumptions about music, and not just hip-hop, but all recorded music—made them go back to the beginning, to the drum, to a unit of measuremen

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.

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

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.”

realize at the same time how you’ve been defined almost entirely by this tapestry you’ve been woven into for twenty years, and how grateful you should be for that tapestry. It’s a sentimental thing to say that I wouldn’t exist without the band, but sometimes sentimental things are true. I spent years looking for this commune or that one, the jam se