A delightful completely idiosyncratic document of not just Questlove's journey but of soul and hip-hop from the 1970's through the aughts. Q is a great tour guide: He is vulnerable, arrogant, brilliant, weird, loving, opinionated, and most importantly for these purposes unfailingly interesting. Also, that man just grew my liked songs on Spotify like kudzu (but good kudzu.) His taste is as broad as can be and his knowledge base is awe-inspiring and so I happily follow. ( )

A very interesting memoir, including structurally, but my knowledge of hip-hop just wasn't adequate for me to appreciate it. I would definitely recommend to hip-hop fans though. ( )

Questlove’s memoir of his life in music and the role of hip-hop in pop culture. He describes the roots (pardon the pun) of hip hop in jazz and blues. Along the way, he provides a history of hip-hop, and his reactions to many of the seminal acts. Toward the end, he discusses his band’s role in the Jimmy Fallon show. All this is done in the manner of an “anti-memoir.” He definitely did not want to create a straight-forward chronology or anything dry, and he succeeded.

The Roots are self-described nerds and intellectuals. They go against the grain of mainstream commercialism and gangster posing of some of the well-known artists. Questlove is candid about the fine line between producing hits and being true to an artistic vision. The Roots tend to err on the side of the latter. He speaks of the tensions introduced by corporate labels trying to impose a direction.

In case you are wondering, the book’s title is a take-off on Spike Lee’s 1990 film Mo’ Better Blues. I consider myself a fan of The Roots and own some of their songs. I enjoyed reading Questlove’s opinions. I found it creative and enlightening.

Memorable quotes:

“I worry that it’ll be harder for the present generation to process memory, because they have so many options to choose from, and most aren’t shared in a physical space.”

“When you believe that something is special, how many people do you want on your bandwagon? Too few and you martyr yourself. Too many and the axle snaps and the whole thing breaks down.”

“How do you measure your own small life next to monumental historical events?”

“I feel like my cultural value comes from my role as a bridge. My job is to connect brilliant have-nots to the land of haves.” ( )

How can a man in his early forties hope to really talk about his life as a whole? It’s like reviewing the first half of a song.

While this faux-memoir by Questlove, part founder, drummer, songwriter and tastemaker in The Roots, one of the most influential bands to come out of the USA in the R&B/hip-hop movements, is loose, conjoined and at its worst rushed and unhinged, that is also its main strength; early in the book, Questlove questions (pun not intended) the absence of comments from others in autobiographies, so his manager and his editor comment throughout, in the form of footnotes; for instance:

SEVEN
From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]
To: Ben Greenberg [editor]
Re: Refining the approach
No. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the book is coming into better focus, though I would say that my excitement over the nature of the blurriness is increasing.

The book is stacked with interesting anecdotes from throughout his 40-ish-old life:

I was in the bathtub and didn’t want to stay there. What kid does? I came running out of the bathroom into the living room and I fell toward the radiator, which branded me. For the next sixteen years of my life, there was a train-track-like burn from the radiator right up the outside of my leg. Anyway, at that very moment, Curtis Mayfield was doing “Freddie’s Dead” on the TV. And not just “Freddie’s Dead,” but one specific part of the song, the modulated bridge where the horns come in. Even now, when I hear it, it traumatizes me. There’s nothing technically scary about it, but it’s forever welded to the memory of falling into the radiator. I’m not the only one with that kind of association. D’Angelo told me that to this day, he cannot listen to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” without feeling terror. That’s strange to me, because when I hear that song I think of yuppies singing it in The Big Chill, reliving their youthful optimism. It’s a light song for me, a party song, frothy. But for him, it’s a dark place, and I’m not sure he even knows why. It’s related to something in his childhood, something buried deep. I even tested him during the Voodoo tour. We were backstage, with people milling around, and I put it on the radio. He immediately stiffened, turned around, and said “Take that thing off.”

It might’ve been ’79, but the seventies were like the aberrant child of the sixties. And 1979 was the year that the seventies left home, not just literally, but also in a spiritual sense. Gone was the existential longing that you could find at the core of songs like “Dock of the Bay,” “What’s Going On,” or “Higher Ground.” I figure it this way: when Sam Cooke sang “a change is gonna come,” I didn’t foresee that change being one that would allow for niggas to be rapping about “busting bitches out wit dey super sperm.”

Questlove's honesty plays well into the book:

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 a fake byline. It’s the only way I really know how to imagine what I think the record is. And as it turns out, most of the time the record ends up pretty close to what I say it is in the review.

He's questioning things in an interesting way at times:

He told me that I was a man out of time. He wondered if I was trying to be white. Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I’ve never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren’t white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else’s arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there’s some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn’t properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What’s authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren’t clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are? My mother told me that you had to go to thrift shops to find your own style, which made more sense than going to stores, but weren’t both forms of borrowing where you were always aspiring to have something that was truly your own? The question marks were piling up and I wasn’t even ?uestlove yet.

Yeah, very honest about his growing up:

I knew that my dad kept at least $4,000 hidden in the library. I figured, I’m just going to take a twenty. A perfect crime. I took twenty-five instead. I supposed I would get The Jacksons Live! and then Voices by Hall and Oates and a Rick Springfield record, because there was a girl I knew who liked him. My plan failed. My dad was a meticulous counter. He even knew how many inches high the orange juice was in the jug, so he could tell when someone had drunk some. I had been disciplined with whippings throughout my life, but when he found out I had taken the money it was that and then some, a Kunta Kinte/Django Unchained–like whipping. That incident set the course for our relationship and how it remains today. My father and I are not particularly close. It’s strained at best.

And stuff from the start of The Roots:

But underneath the sense of adventure, it was kind of a dark time. For starters, Tariq and I had our very first real fight. It was a fistfight over a production faux pas. As it turned out, he was not credited for producing the title cut, “Do You Want More?!!!??!” It was neglect on my part and Rich’s part, just an oversight, nothing intentional, but he took it personally. He felt like maybe he was being squeezed out of the group. He confronted me and we went at it in the hallway, shoulder to shoulder. No one got hurt, really. It devolved into wrestling pretty fast. He got up and marched off in what looked like triumph. “I’m not hurt,” he said. I didn’t know until later that he went off down the hall and then snuck around a door so he could sit down on a chair and recover. I’d like to say that the wounds from that fight healed up right away, but the fact is that that was a fight so dark and so deep that I believe it affects us to this day. There’s still an invisible wedge. That fight made me more insular and introverted, more careful around everyone.

There were a hundred people on the floor, dancing, having fun, but the second “Distortion to Static” came on over the speakers, the whole place just cleared. There was only one girl left, out there on her own, trying, unsuccessfully, to dance to it. Tariq looked at Rich, panic in his eyes. “We’re going to fucking fail!” he said. I only heard about it later, on the telephone (a dreadful conversation that I recorded and would, fourteen years later, use as the opening of our Rising Dawn album), but to this day I can’t play the Roots in one of my own DJ sets. The memory of that empty floor is too traumatic.

After I got my advance for Do You Want More?!!!??!, my father came to me and told me that I owed him. I was confused. “You owe me,” he said, “for all those years in private school, all those lessons. I sacrificed for you. I want a cut.” I gave him the money, but it broke my mom’s heart to see me handing it over. She thought that a father was just supposed to do those things for a child without asking for something in return.

The manager, on The Roots playing with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion:

Remember that? Dude had a motorcycle jacket and a fucking theremin.

And yeah, what is blackness, by the way?

Somehow, I got word that D’Angelo was in the audience that night, and I realized that it was one of those make-or-break moments. I wanted him to know that he and I spoke the same musical language, that we could communicate telepathically via some African tribal shit.

And easily, on what differs old-skool hip-hop from the newer stuff:

Before that, hip-hop had a sense of belonging. When Run DMC did “My Adidas,” you could go out and get a pair of Adidas. You could put on jeans and a Kangol hat. You could be part of that club. When motherfuckers are talking about buying a jet or a speedboat, well, that’s not inclusive. And think of where the videos are set. Early on there was lots of on-your-block shit, videos with regular locations: street corners, houses, empty lots. People could identify with that in ways they couldn’t identify with mansions.

On meeting his main hero, Prince, the second time around:

When I got back, Prince had the briefcase out on the floor. He clicked the lock and opened it, and took out the strangest, most singular pair of roller skates I had ever seen. They were clear skates that lit up, and the wheels sent a multicolored spark trail into your path. He took them out and did a big lap around the rink. Man. He could skate like he could sing. I watched him go, so transfixed that I didn’t even notice Eddie Murphy appearing at my arm. “I’m going to go get your phone for you,” he said. Roller-skating at Prince’s party was cool. Watching Prince roller-skate was cooler.

On the whole: readable, but not a massive thing. On the other hand, it's not pretentious, which I think may be translatable to The Roots as a whole. ( )

This was well written and interesting. There were times when my mind wandered while reading it. I think I would have appreciated it more if I was more familiar with hip-hop artists and other aspects of the history of music from the last few decades. It is obvious that Questlove loves his art and really knows his stuff. ( )